Small Business SEO

Small Business SEO
Small Businesses may not have the resources that large corporations have to invest in SEO. Small Bussiness SEO is a broad topic but we will try to break it down into narrow sub-topics. We will discuss local businesses, small online stores and niche specific blogging.

Seo for Local Businesses

This may be the easiest SEO to be successful in.  Local businesses like Roofing Companies, Plumbers and Mechanics do not have to compete against Amazon and Ebay.  However they do have to compete against each other. There are a few areas to concentrate on to be successful in local Seo.

1.  The Site Title needs to have your brand name but can include the name of your city.
2. Schema.org markup is very important.  You can find a local schema generator here.  For more information on Local Business using Schema read this article.
3. Google Places provides the largest source of local traffic available on the web.  A properly optimized Google places listing should have photos, videos and proper category listing. Here is Google's guide to optimizing your listing.
4.  Local Citations give search engines the signals they need to establish your company.  To get local citations you need to have your business listed in local directories.  To see if your company is listed in any of these check GetListed.org.  For more local citations here is a spreadsheet.

There are many other good articles on local seo.  It is not very difficult at all.  I have seen a site that was doing well in Local SEO by their Google Places listing and when  they added schema markup their homepage dominated the area as well.

SEO For Small Online Stores

 

Seo for small online stores is very difficult.  These E commerce stores often have to compete with large corporations like Amazon, Ebay and Walmart. These companies are very trusted established businesses and can be hard to compete against. Stores who specialize in niche specific products seem to have more success than stores with 1000's of pages of general merchandise.

Marking your products up with Schema can help in many ways.  It lets the search engines know exactly what the page is about and the availability of the product.  You can generate rich snippets for your products by using this rich snippets generator.

Site Archetecture is very important for E commerce sites.  Unlike blogs, where people link to your individual pages, E commerce sites depend on PageRank to flow through the site from the homepage.

Niche Specific Blogging

 

If bloggers could get a hold of what I am about to say, bloggers would be more successful.  Unlike sites like Amazon and Walmart, bloggers can cite articles written by other bloggers. You would never find a link from Amazon to Walmart. Instead of competing for keywords, bloggers should join together on related subjects.
Utilizing social media to connect with other bloggers can provide many benifits for bloggers.  Google plus has many communities where people of like interest can join together and establish lasting friendships.

Small Business SEO

Be sure to Circle me and share this page!