By now, you’ve probably read a number of articles about how you, as a small business owner, can learn how to do SEO to benefit your own business. You may have read about how important it is to be on Twitter or Facebook; you probably saw studies claiming that a specific keyword density is key to ranking well; you may even have considered buying links to get more traffic.
It can all be confusing. It can be expensive. And honestly? It sometimes doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort, does it?
Well, we’re here to help you out. In this post, we’ll show you five easy ways you can get involved with your company’s marketing campaign just like a small business SEO company would do. With these tips, you’ll begin to see results that definitely pay off.
Unfortunately, this is all too common nowadays.
Image courtesy of: Olive Harvey College Library Guides
1. Make friends with Copyscape. Are you writing your own content? Have you tried optimizing your front page or started a blog? You’ll definitely want to look into using Copyscape. For no cost, you can enter your site’s address and Copyscape will scan the web looking for plagiarized text. If your blog or site content have indeed been plagiarized, it can hurt your rankings. Furthermore, if you’re using references in your writing, you might want to run your text through Copyscape. The last thing you need is to be blamed for plagiarism from your end. Make sure your content is 100% original all across the board, and you’ll be better off for it.
2. Make content easily shareable. When people read an article and enjoy it, they immediately look for the “share” button. They want to tell their family and friends about the great thing they’ve just read. It would follow, then, that if you don’t include sharable links at the end of your post, you’ve just potentially cost yourself thousands of views. Be sure to make it easy for your visitors to share your content to all the most popular social media platforms, and you’ll notice that your content will be shared more frequently. If you need help figuring out how to set this up, there are plenty of tutorials around the internet as well as easy-to-install plug-ins for blogging software such as WordPress.
3. Get your customers involved through reviews. We’ve written about this in the past, but it’s so important that we feel we should reiterate here: your customers need to be involved with your company through reviews. There’s a fine line between asking and encouraging your customers to participate willingly, and pushing your wishes in their faces aggressively. You can encourage customers to leave reviews by putting a sign up in your store, offering a coupon as compensation, or even provide a free service with proof of a positive review. Reviews not only help people searching for your services find your store, they also help you stand out in the crowd. Searchers nowadays rely on sites such as Yelp to help them make decisions about which business they want to give their money to. Don’t let this opportunity slip through the cracks—you’ll be surprised at how much good reviews can help.
You’ve probably heard of pay-per-click advertising. But will it work for a small business?
4. Consider PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. If you’re just getting your business off the ground, we’ll be honest: It can take some time for Google to start picking it up and ranking it. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t make the most of the time in between. You can purchase ads from Google for only a few dollars a day and they’ll appear alongside search results related to your keywords, helping guide visitors to your site. Google ads allow you to get the word out about your site in ways that organic ranking can’t; at least not in the beginning. Check out Google’s free keyword planner to take a look at keyword suggestions you can use in your ad campaigns.
5. Try your hand at video advertising. A big part of advertising nowadays is visual. Think about it: If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, you probably share images and videos all the time! That’s why it’s important that you get into the habit of creating media content for your company’s social media sites. People are much more likely to share media than they are to read through a “wall of text”. Furthermore, video advertising helps a lot with SEO and ranking. Google gets strong ranking signals from videos and the keywords used in them. Even if you don’t have a big media budget, you can still put together helpful “how-to” videos or showcase happy customers recommending your products and services.
You can do it like the SEO companies!
With these tips, you can easily dip your toes into the waters of advertising and marketing. It might sound cliché, but if you don’t start small, it’ll be too much for you to manage all at once and you’ll feel as if you’re drowning. You can do it like the small business SEO company professionals by trying these few simple tips! And as always, if you need help and advice, Internet Local Listings is here to help. We offer everything from business listings to custom content to personalized websites! Visit us here for more information.
Any other tips you can think of that we missed? Let us know!
