Generally, small businesses are having a hard time to break through. The owners often believe that their marketing opportunities are very limited due to its limited budget. Fortunately, the good news is that you can advertise your business with a small budget. Wondering how is that possible? Simple, small businesses can make amazing marketing impact using the SEO. SEO happens to be the most cost-effective type of marketing today, and you should definitely invest in it. Don’t know much about it? No worries. Let’s find out how to use SEO for small business grow.

Rule number 1- find your niche

Determining your niche is the crucial first step for implementing SEO. When what that is, you can emphasize what makes your brand or products unique. Consequently, you will improve your chances to rank well for them. And if you have a clear niche, you can compete locally with large brands and chains, despite their huge advertising budgets. That is the beauty of SEO. And what exactly would be your niche? A niche is a combination of two elements – who and what. Your who element is your target market and your WHAT is the solution you provide. This means that the more you focus on the specific market, the more you’ll be able to attract and target the really interested customers or just audience in general.

Try to think like a customer – what keywords would you use to find your product?

Be your customer

In order to attract more customers, you need to know who they are, what are they looking for, what they need and wish for. And you will figure that out by imagining you are the customer. For example, let’s say you are the owner of the yoga studio. Think about who are your customers and potential customers. What would be the keywords they would use to find a yoga studio? Use the psychology. If you learn to get to know your customers, you will be able to think like them. And if you can think like your customer, you will be able to attract them.

How to find keywords?

There are plenty of ways to do that. The easiest way for beginners is to simply type your guesses in your browser and see where they get you. Yoga classes, yoga for kids, yoga for older ones etc. Write down the words that brought you to the biggest number of websites and those are the words you can start with. Also, try to find your website when typing those keywords and check your website SEO. Is it easy to find? If not, you need to work on your tactics.

Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is very important. Additionally, it’s a good idea to pick mid-tail keywords, including the local area you are targeting. For example, yoga classes Manhattan are the keywords that customers will use if they live or work in Manhattan. Nobody wants to attend a yoga class across the city. Of course, you can always contact professionals, to do that for you. By doing that, you will spend more money but save more time. So basically, choose what are you willing to give, time or money?

Rule number 2- be competitive

Your competitors are probably already implementing effective SEO tactics to promote their companies. Therefore, if you are not, you are minimizing your chances to get new customers. How does it work? When your potential customer types some keywords that are relevant for the type of your business, they will find your competitor’s website, not yours. For example, using the yoga studio as an example, potential customers will type words like yoga classes or learn yoga and they will find websites that have built the content of their websites using those keywords. Furthermore, if you don’t work on your SEO, you’re practically allowing your competitors to take a large share of the market that is still up for grabs.

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Watch the URL syntax

This maybe seems like a minor detail, but the fact is that bad URL can affect your SEO dramatically. Basically, URL syntax has an impact on the SEO syntax of your website. It directly affects the ability of the website to be crawled and indexed as well. Making an effort to manage your URLs to ensure they display properly can provide multiple benefits of both SEO and usability.

Rule number 3- reach the right audience

When you use standard marketing tools such as TV commercial or a billboard, you never know who will and will not see it. This means that you are wasting your marketing budget on everyone, and not everyone is your potential customer. In fact, some of your potential customers could even dislike this type of massive marketing, depending on the type of business you are promoting. Luckily, there’s no guessing when it comes to SEO. The people that use the words that you are targeting while searching the browser are obviously interested in finding a business like yours. Someone who types “yoga classes in Manhattan” into a browser is clearly looking for a yoga instructor in that area. If you are a yoga instructor, you can make an SEO strategy around these keywords to reach users that are likely to become customers. This way, you will use SEO for small business growth and get the maximum results for minimal budget.

How to use SEO for small business growth

• Find your niche
• Make your brand on a low budget
• Fill your website with SEO optimized content
• Share your content on a social media
• Include local ranking factors

To start with SEO strategies, first get to know your customers.

Rule no 4 – make your brand

Unfortunately, even if you show up on the top of someone’s search results, there’s no guarantee that they will visit your website. That is when your brand comes on the scene. A potential customer who clicks at your link will associate your brand name and look with the search that he just made. No, you won’t be able to convert every website visitor to the customer, but you can still make them aware of who you are. Furthermore, if they’re not happy with one of your competitors, they may remember your name and give your business a chance. And it doesn’t require a big fat budget, but it requires a lot of imagination. Think of the name that is catchy but not similar to any of your competitor’s name. Make a logo that is attractive but not aggressive or cheesy. Logo, name and your business features should be in harmony.

Rule no 5 – content, content, content

Many small business owners make a common mistake, where they provide only basic information on their websites. The more quality content your website has, the more SEO elements will have and more people will visit it. And remember, use the keywords everywhere! Not just on your homepage, use it on all your pages, posts and blog. Implement them smoothly, you don’t want them to look like spam. Learn how to really use SEO for the small business growth, and the sky will be a limit.