SEO for Micro Businesses
Updated: Apr 30, 2022
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital for any small or micro business to get organic traffic to their website. Getting traffic to your website organically can be a great way to ensure you’re getting views on content, generating sales, and collecting data from your audience. With a proper SEO strategy, you can ensure that for any specific page or piece of content on your site, the bulk of your web traffic is coming from a specific audience that page or content is designed for.
How does it work?
Search engines are primarily based on keywords. These search engines rank pages based on their relevance to the keywords being searched. The pages and content the search engine thinks will be most useful for someone searching those keywords will be the first results.
The difficult part of this is that search engines also rank pages based on their traffic, making it hard for micro businesses to compete with large websites that get thousands of views on every page. This is why you need to be creative with your SEO strategy, specifically with your keywords and content, in order to generate traffic.
SEO tips for your micro business
1. Develop a Keyword Strategy
Every SEO effort should start with a keyword strategy. While we recommend you go to an expert to really get a comprehensive keyword strategy (like 10x Network), you can certainly do a lot by yourself. While you may not know the ins and outs of keyword strategy, you probably have a baseline understanding of your market, which is enough to get started.
As we discussed earlier, the really common keywords are probably not worth investing in since the big companies will dominate those. Anyone who uses google knows it’s probably not useful to show up on page 14 of the google search results. You really want to show up on the first page, there is a significant drop off in traffic as you go down in results. You want to shoot for the top 3 results on a given search.
One trick to narrow down a more specific search is to add geolocation to the keywords. If you’re on online cosmetics store, you may not get high results for a search of “best skin care products.” However, how about “best skin care products in Buffalo, NY.” Even if your business isn’t in Buffalo, as long as you can ship there then you’re good. Write a nice content page on how skin care practices for cold, dry weather (like they have in Buffalo) and how great your products are for people who live in places like Buffalo.
This is a very simple but effective strategy, and you can apply it to many things.
Another important strategy is using advertisements to drive search results you want. You can drive people to search for keywords that you want to show up on searches for by targeting people with ads that mention the keywords. When people see the ad, many of them may search google for something related. If you show up, you just made a nice little marketing funnel to drive organic traffic to your site. They see an ad talking about, say, how important skincare is for places like Buffalo, then they search google for more info, and voila, they find your business.
If you’d like to dive deeper into keyword strategy, check out this article by our friends at Semrush.
If you want 10x network to help immediately boost your keyword strategy, book a call with us here for a free consultation.
2. Update your site’s meta tags
Example HTML code
I can’t tell you how many amazing companies we’ve come across that were holding themselves back with some basic configuration on their website. From completely unlisting their site from the google search index (meaning they told google not to show their website in results), to their homepage being configured as their login page (meaning google thought their homepage was their login page, so they didn’t even know what type of content was on the website other than a login field), some basic configuration can go a long way.
When it comes to meta tags, you’ll need a bit of background on HTML, they markup language of the web. HTML is the “coding language” that the browser uses to render a page. The browser knows how to turn HTML into a nice looking page, but what the browser actually looks at is the HTML. Coincidentally, this is also what search engines look at when they’re ranking your web pages for their results. See below for a picture of what HTML looks like.
Why is this technical information important to you? It’s important because there is a lot of information about a web page in the HTML that users can’t see, but search engines can. These are called meta tags, or meta data.
The 2 most important ones are the Meta-Title and Meta-Description. These 2 fields are completely invisible to your users, but are present on every single web page in the world. This is where you can tell google exactly what your page is about (i.e with your keywords) without affecting the content of the page.
If you use Wix (we recommend every micro business host their site with Wix) you can go through the SEO wizard, if you have Wordpress you can use a plugin like Yoast or just manually add the tags to the HTML.
Make sure the meta description is loaded with your keywords and the name of your business, or at the very least the name of the most relevant product. This information will make google much more likely to rank you higher for your web pages since they know exactly the information you’re trying to convey on the page. Remember, SEO isn’t just about ranking your home page high, it’s important to rank all pages that people may find useful.
If you want to learn more about HTML meta tags and how search engines use them, check this article out.
If you’d like to have 10x Network handle this for you, book a call here and we’ll help you out (we do it cheaper than basically everyone else, and we plan to stay that way for everything, forever).
3. Make sure your urls are accurate
Often times when people use platforms like Wix or Wordpress, their urls can be hit or miss. It’s important to note that they are extremely important for SEO.
By urls, we mean the part at the end of your domain that changes based on the page. For example, many stores have a page, and a respective url, for each product. If a website “www.skincare4u.com” has a product called “vegan foot cream” you’d want the url for that product page to be “www.skincare4u.com/vegan-foot-cream” not “www.skincare4u.com/product-2.”
Often when you’re creating bulk items in your e-commerce store, the url’s will come out like the second one. Go through your product pages and make sure they’re all accurate descriptions of your products.
This is usually a quick fix, most of the time you just need to find out where the url is defined and change it to what you want. You’ll want all the pages that are supposed to generate traffic to have good urls.
4. Publish content to your site
The core of every SEO strategy is to have content relevant to your target audience. Without delving too deep into sales funnels and market research, the important thing for your content is to provide something useful and/or entertaining to people who are motivated to buy your products. You may need to take some time to really specify who that audience might be, or you may already know it. Either way, it is extremely important if you want content that not only drives engagement, but sales.
The more content you have on your website, the more traffic you’re going to get, and the more you have to work with when it comes to SEO. You can target different subsections of your audience with different pieces of content, and use different sets of keywords. If your content is useful and your keywords are good at targeting the right people, then a simple call to action on the piece of content should drive interest.
Another important thing to note, is that your target audience should be re-targeted. Often times it takes 3-4 “touches” (times someone comes in contact with your brand) before they actually decide to buy. This means you may need people to make 3-4 separate searches, find your website (probably 3-4 different pieces of content) before they decide to make a purchase.
As we discussed earlier, advertisements can help with this. If someone sees a couple of your ads and also a couple articles or products on your site, they’re much more likely to want to make a purchase. It’s good to develop your campaigns around this concept to ensure people see your brand multiple times on multiple platforms.
10x Network would love to help you develop your strategy, so feel free to book a completely free 1 hour consultation where we help you figure out what will be important for your business.