Rocket Your Website to the Top of the Search Results! Affordable SEO for Small Businesses

When creating a website, I put a lot of effort into ensuring that each site gets optimised for search. This is why many Sanders Design clients can hit the ground running when their site goes live. 

Sanders Design website services will help to get your business found online. However, as with any competitive platform, search engine optimisation needs refreshing regularly. To help achieve positive results for your website, I will share a few tips on affordable SEO for small businesses. 

While SEO may be complicated, I hope this article will make it easier than you may initially think. On this page, I am going to share a few ideas for affordable SEO for small businesses. 

Before I dive into some affordable SEO ideas, I want to point out that I encourage you to work with an SEO expert if you’re operating in a competitive sector. Even if you follow this guide, a lot of these SEO tasks will take a lot of time and expertise.

If you want to work with an experienced SEO consultant, get in touch with Sanders Design. We can help you to create a professional website and get your business found online.

Keyword research

I am not going to dwell too much on keyword research. Because if you follow our blog, you may have seen that this has already been covered in depth here (keyword research). However, it has to be brought up. This is because every SEO campaign will start with keyword research, and thankfully, there are affordable SEO tools to help every small business owner.

If you read my previous article on keyword research, then you will know that there are some tremendous sources that you can use:

Since proper keyword research is vital to any successful SEO campaign, any company that offers affordable SEO for small businesses will spend a lot of time focusing on the keyword analysis. I use keyword research to ensure that sites rank as quickly as possible.

This means that I try and balance keywords that are easy to rank for terms while ensuring that people are tapping these keywords into a search engine to find your services and products.

You cannot do anything else related to SEO until you have some keywords in mind. I like it when clients coming to me with some ideal keywords because it allows me to build their website around their selected terms. This makes it possible to deliver affordable SEO for small businesses while guaranteeing that their website will provide engaging and focused content.

On-Page Optimisation

There are a couple of routes that need to be talked about here. One involves web designers, like us here at Sanders Design.

On-page optimisation starts with the design of the website. A site needs to load quickly. It needs to be ready for mobile devices (known as responsive design); it also needs to be easy to navigate and provide focused content featuring searched keywords.

My job here is to ensure that you get a brilliantly-designed website that is SEO-friendly too. While I am not the only piece in the puzzle when it comes to affordable SEO for small businesses, Sanders Design plays a significant part. If your website isn’t SEO-ready, then everybody else’s job becomes a lot harder.

The second route is the creation of content. This is loading your website up with some awesomely relevant content that the search engines will love to rank. This content will often be based around your keywords, but it also has to be incredibly useful to draw visitors in and keep them there. You should always ensure that you only publish professionally written content.

Both of these pieces are something that needs to be continually worked on. You need to ensure that your website always meets the current Google standards and guidelines. At the same time, you also need to ensure that you are producing regular content for your website. The second you let up on creating quality content, you will notice a decline in your website search engine position.

Link building

As much as people like to dress up SEO as some complicated thing, having links to your website plays a pivotal role in getting ranked. Any small business SEO consultant will focus on building links as a significant part of delivering an affordable SEO campaign.

To understand why link building is so important, you have to know how the search engines work.

The goal of any search engine is to rank content based on relevancy. After all, if people can get relevant results from a search engine, they will keep coming back.

There are many ways to determine the relevancy of the website (the on-page optimisation I spoke about previously is a major factor here). However, there is no more significant determiner than the number of links a site has pointing towards it. After all, if a site has a ton of links, it means that the content has value and is informative. As a result, once you start to gain links for your website, you will start to see an increase in your search position.

A lot of people will buy their links to rank in the searches. It goes entirely against the rules, but it is probably the only way to rank quickly for competitive keywords. Sadly, this is not something that really fits the bill when it comes to affordable SEO for small businesses. You have to build up some cheaper, but still relevant, quality links.

Perhaps the best method, and one that any company worth their salt offering affordable SEO for small businesses will do, is to guest post on related blogs. This is where you will produce some content for another website in your niche (but not quite a competitor) in exchange for a link back. It is a fantastic way to get links and build authority.

Other methods may include:

Honestly, if you do not engage in link building, you do not have an effective SEO campaign. You will never gain any traction. It is that important!

Local SEO

Many small business owners I work with are not looking to take over the world with their website. Instead, they need to gain some traction in their local area. Thankfully, affordable SEO for small businesses becomes even more productive when you are targeting regional search.

Everything that I mentioned previously is still relevant. However, you have a few more resources to tap into; These resources allow you to tell the search engines “yes, I am located in this area!”

Google My Business 

This is a service that has gone by many names over the years. However, it has now come to be known as Google My Business. When it comes to affordable SEO for small businesses, you won’t get more affordable than this. It is free.

Have you ever Googled something in your local area? If you have, you will have noticed that individual companies appear top of the search engines. Typically with their address, phone number and a website link. This is because these companies have filled out a Google My Business profile page. If you do the same, you stand a decent chance of appearing in those local searches.

It is important that you work on other aspects of your SEO here. That will also impact the Google My Business ranking, e.g. making sure that your website is professional and looks trustworthy. The Google My Business search algorithm displays results based on proximity, company name, service category, and customer reviews.

Yelp

You probably will not need to spend that much time on Yelp outside of ensuring that your profile is up-to-date. However, this is another one of those methods for affordable SEO for small businesses that is free.

The one suggestion that I do have is to ensure that you respond to all reviews on your profile. It doesn’t help with the whole SEO side of things, but Yelp profiles will often appear quite high in the searches. You need to prove that you care about your customers, which means responding to comments to show that you reply to feedback.

Facebook Pages

Social media is a must when it comes to any digital marketing. It is essential on the local SEO level.

Creating a Facebook page is a great way to get your company found in the Facebook search engine. The link will also have a significant impact on where your site appears in Google searches.

I like Facebook pages because it goes well beyond just SEO. If you follow a social media strategy, you can cultivate a following on Facebook. This provides you with more eager people to market to, which will drive more traffic and sales to your business!

Trade directories

Remember what I said about relevant links earlier? Well, one of the most affordable SEO for small business options will be trade directories.

Trade directories are a collection of links dedicated to individual businesses e.g. CornishTraders.com or something similar.

If you put your link up on these trade directories, you will enjoy traffic from these sites, and you will also be able to enjoy relevant links.

Only put your link on relevant sites. If you don’t, then you could end up doing more harm than good to your business.

Google Reviews

Google reviews are natural and should be submitted by your customers. The better the reviews a company gets, the higher they will appear in search results.

Don’t forget to remind your customers to review your business if they enjoyed the service that you offer. Each and every one of those links is going to push your Google My Business listing further up the local search results.

Tracking your traffic

Now that you have a brief overview of how to do affordable SEO for your small business, I want to take a peek at how you can track your results and measure traffic.

Google Analytics

It doesn’t matter whether you are doing affordable SEO for small businesses or looking to take the internet by storm as an international company. It will help if you use Google Analytics.

Now, a lot is going on within Google Analytics. You are not expected to understand every feature. Instead, in the early days, you can look at Google Analytics and try to work out where your traffic has come from, and where it is heading once it is on your website. If you have Google Adwords (the PPC system run by Google), then you will get even more information about your website.

Getting Google Analytics up and running on your website can be tricky, so if I create your website, this is normally included.

Google Webmaster Tools

This is another Google product that you will use whether you are doing small business SEO or running multimillion-pound SEO campaigns.

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to track the exact keywords your site is ranking for, this is highly useful for keyword ideas and will enable you to get a better idea of how your SEO campaign is going.

HotJar

HotJar isn’t so much a tool for tracking your SEO, but it does allow you to see how visitors interact with your website, i.e. you can see whether things are easy to navigate, whether you have put images and offers in the right place, etc. 

It is a cool piece of software to maximise your conversions.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many factors to consider when undertaking affordable SEO for a small business. However, I do actively encourage you to go beyond this if you can. Invest in an SEO consultant. If done correctly, you will see healthy returns for your investment. Search engine optimisation will elevate your website and drive more sales to your business. 

Sanders Design supports many small business owners to increase online leads and sales. If you want to make sure that you get your website right straight off the bat, then you need an experienced partner to give your website a competitive edge. Sanders Design delivers affordable SEO for small businesses, helping to boost the amount of money your website makes.