This SEO checklist for small businesses covers all the essentials to get you started on the right track<\/strong>!\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The first item in our checklist might seem obvious, but it\u2019s absolutely critical:<\/p>\n Before you spend any money on SEO, make sure you know who you\u2019re optimising for and why<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Many small and new businesses simply think of SEO as a strategy that generates website traffic. This isn\u2019t entirely wrong, but it is overly simplistic, limiting the impact SEO can have, and it can lead you down the wrong path. Instead, think of SEO as a strategy that puts your business in front of the right kind of people, aiming to land them on your website to convert<\/strong>.<\/p>\n To generate the right type of traffic and get in front of the right type of people, you need to know who you\u2019re targeting and how they use Google to find businesses, products, or services like yours.<\/p>\n We recently published an article on the Vertical Leap website<\/a> explaining how to get found on Google Search in 2024. At this point, there are nine places on the main Google search engine where a link to your site might be displayed:<\/p>\n Many SEO beginners are focused on the \u201corganic blue links\u201d at first, which is a good place to start with, but it\u2019s important to consider that \u2013 depending on your business \u2013 the other placements can offer great opportunities as well. That\u2019s why it\u2019s so important to know where your target audience is discovering brands like yours, so you know what type of content you have to create.<\/p>\n For example, if you run a local business, many customers will probably discover you through the Local Pack \/ Google Maps results:<\/p>\n That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to prioritise your Google Business Profile, which is the most important ranking factor for this section of the SERPs<\/a>.<\/p>\n In a nutshell: Don\u2019t just go down the list and try to optimise everything. Think about what areas need to be your priorities.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re not sure which approach is right for your business, take a look at this previous article exploring SEO strategies for different types of small businesses<\/a>.<\/p>\n If SEO is about bringing the right kind of visitors to your website, you have to know who you\u2019re targeting. This starts with audience research: who they are, what they\u2019re looking for, and where they go to find it.<\/p>\n Imagine a B2B software company putting most of its SEO budget into blog posts and affiliate articles. This is great, but what if its biggest target audience is discovering most new products on LinkedIn and YouTube before they even turn to Google? By not knowing its target audiences, this company is missing out on a lot of leads, many of whom are probably discovering rival products on their favourite platforms.<\/p>\n To truly understand your target audience(s), combine data from all the relevant sources you can. This will likely include:<\/p>\n If you\u2019re also running PPC<\/a> and other forms of paid ads, take full advantage of the audience data available from platforms like Google Ads and Meta for Business.<\/p>\n Learn as much as you can about your audience so you can make more informed decisions at later stages of this checklist<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Small businesses can\u2019t afford to waste budget, time, or other resources on failed campaigns, especially early on when every part of the budget counts. You need to build momentum quickly by identifying the right SEO opportunities for early potential gains<\/strong>.<\/p>\n To identify these SEO opportunities, keyword research will be your best friend<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Aside from revealing the queries your target audience types into the search engines, keyword research also reveals your customer\u2019s broader intentions and how they change as they move from one stage of the customer journey<\/a> to the next.<\/p>\n Keyword research for small businesses can be broken down into three components:<\/p>\n While Seobility\u2019s keyword research guide<\/a> covers these steps in more detail, we have summarised the most important points here.<\/p>\n Seed keywords are the main terms your target audience is searching for.<\/p>\n While they differ for every business, brainstorming them for your own company begins with these three questions:<\/p>\n Asking yourself these questions will help you create a list of seed keywords and questions your customers ask, which will serve as a starting point for the next steps.<\/p>\n To identify relevant keywords, take your seed keyword list and start by putting one of them into Seobility\u2019s Keyword Research Tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n For example, if you were selling massage guns, one seed keyword could be \u201cbuy massage gun\u201d, so you would put that into the Keyword Research Tool.<\/p>\n From the Keyword Research Tool, select \u201cSimilar keywords\u201d for the Analysis and click on \u201cKeyword Research\u201d and you will get a list of relevant keywords to target.<\/p>\n Another option to find keyword opportunities is to analyse the keywords that your competitors are targeting. To do this, simply enter a competitor\u2019s domain in the tab \u201cURL \/ Domain\u201d of the Keyword Research Tool:<\/p>\n This will show you the keywords that drive traffic to your competitor\u2019s website.<\/p>\n Seobility\u2019s Keyword Research Tool gives you four metrics that will help you spot the right keyword opportunities:<\/p>\n To pick the right keywords, start by looking into the search intent.<\/p>\n Search marketers usually group search intent into four key types:<\/p>\n Identifying specific search intents is crucial for creating the right type of content for the entire customer journey. For example, you don\u2019t want to create overly promotional content for users who are still in the information stage of the research process and more interested in product comparisons than reviews and product pages.<\/p>\n Pick out and list keyword opportunities from all of the search intent groups<\/strong>. If you only focus on one search intent area, such as informational keywords, you don\u2019t cover the entire customer journey, and you miss out on essential keyword opportunities.<\/p>\n To discover commercial intent keywords, for instance, look for keywords with words like buy, cheap, deal, affordable, sale, and so on.<\/p>\n Once you have a list of keywords from all groups, you can prioritise them based on the other metrics, search volume, competition, CPC, and other factors, such as the relevancy to your audience.<\/p>\n And, if you need further help with keyword intents, Sa\u0161a Ebach wrote an excellent blog post on optimising content for searchers\u2019 needs<\/a>.<\/p>\n Your website is the hub of your online presence and SEO strategy. Before you invest any serious money in content production, make sure you\u2019ve got the website SEO essentials nailed down first<\/strong>. This will help each new content asset created work more effectively and contribute more towards your goals and objectives.<\/p>\n The most important tasks of website optimisation include<\/p>\n Technical SEO ensures search engines like Google can crawl<\/a> and index<\/a> your pages properly. It also helps to optimise technical performance to provide a smooth experience for visitors and search engines alike.<\/p>\n Here are some of the most important technical SEO factors you need to analyse and maintain:<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the most exciting aspect of SEO, but it is one of the most important to underpin success. If technical SEO falls behind, the rest of your SEO strategy isn\u2019t making the full impact it could \u2013 and that\u2019s a serious waste of budget.<\/strong><\/p>\n Thankfully, with the right tools, you can automate technical SEO analysis so you don\u2019t have to check all of these factors individually, and issues are flagged instantly. With Seobility\u2019s Website Audit Tool<\/a>, you can schedule automatic comprehensive technical SEO audits and flag any problems.<\/p>\n As long as you address these issues quickly, they\u2019re unlikely to cause too much damage to your search ranking. This can give you a big advantage over small business rivals who aren\u2019t keeping on top of technical SEO.<\/p>\n Once all technical issues are resolved, there are several on-page SEO factors that should be optimised on each page of your website:<\/p>\n As with the technical SEO factors, Seobility\u2019s Website Audit will automatically check many of these on-page SEO factors on your complete website, such as your title tags and meta descriptions:<\/p>\n You should also make sure that this on-page SEO checklist is complete before publishing any new pages to your website (blog posts, landing pages, etc).<\/p>\n As you update existing content, you\u2019ll also need to maintain on-page SEO factors. For example, make sure every post contains accurate, up-to-date information and links to recent external sources (no older than two years).<\/p>\n Content is usually the most expensive and time-consuming aspect of SEO. As a small business, you need to be particularly resourceful to get the most impact from everything you publish.<\/p>\n Prioritise quality over quantity, and don\u2019t fall into the trap of trying to do too much with a limited budget. Choose your battles wisely and concentrate on winning them, one at a time.<\/p>\n For a more in-depth look at SEO content, take a look at this recent article explaining how smaller companies can do content marketing like big businesses<\/a>.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t matter how great your content is if the user\u2019s experience on your website is so poor that they click straight back to Google search. Google, in particular, knows how important user experience is for search, which is why it\u2019s incorporated so many UX signals into its algorithm over the years:<\/p>\n Keep in mind that this only covers the SEO essentials for user experience. You have to work much harder to satisfy users themselves, especially if you want them to fill out forms, make payments, buy products, and keep coming back for more.<\/p>\n The greatest tip on how to achieve this is to think about imparting value in everything you do<\/strong>.<\/p>\n A person landing on a complex blog post, for example, may benefit from some definitions of industry jargon, links through to related content, and other types of content like images and videos to help with their understanding of the topic:<\/p>\n If you have pages on your website that have higher bounce (or exit) rates<\/a>, take the time to look at the data about the people using these pages. Consider the queries they are using to find the content online and what they are trying to achieve. Then, consider how valuable the content is matching their wants, needs and pain points, and how to provide more value to what they are looking to achieve.<\/p>\n Applying this layer of human understanding will form a great basis for your user experience.<\/p>\n So far, we\u2019ve focused on optimising your website and the content on it, but to maximise visibility, your online presence needs to spread beyond your website. Links from other websites (aka backlinks) are still an important factor for a high ranking on Google<\/strong>. And on top of that, off-page SEO connects you with audiences outside of search engines and helps build your brand<\/strong>.<\/p>\n There are four key elements to this, and as with many items for small businesses specifically, you\u2019ll want to prioritise these and gradually check them off:<\/p>\n Whilst these 4 areas may differ in regards to which to begin with, I\u2019d suggest taking a look at backlinks first in many cases.<\/p>\n There are different ways to start creating backlinks and the effort and money you need to invest can be adjusted to fit your situation.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re creating the best content in your niche, you should naturally earn quality backlinks from valuable sources. However, as a small business that doesn\u2019t have a strong brand and reach yet, it can be hard to attract these kinds of links from the very beginning.<\/p>\n Luckily, there are a few ways you can start building backlinks and growing a reputation in your niche.<\/p>\n Posting your content on third-party websites (guest blogging) is one of the easiest ways small businesses can get started building up their backlink profile.<\/p>\n You can start with simple steps, such as connecting with other companies in your niche through LinkedIn and asking if they’re willing to collaborate on content.<\/p>\n However, don\u2019t only think about backlinks when partnering with other sites. Also, consider their audience and getting your brand\/content seen by the right people in places you don\u2019t yet have visibility.<\/p>\n Sometimes, the brand awareness and click-throughs from guest blogs are more valuable than backlinks and the ranking boost.<\/p>\n The term linkbait<\/a> refers to content designed to attract the audience’s attention and generate new links.<\/p>\n Seobility\u2019s free Backlink Checker<\/a> is a great example of a link bait page as it provides a lot of value for free.<\/p>\n In the same way, you can make link-bait pages within your own niche where your target audience is naturally inclined to link because it is so valuable.<\/p>\n Of course, you don\u2019t have to learn how to code in order to use this strategy. Besides offering free tools, there are other options for creating linkbait content, such as statistics, surveys, and more. This article by Seobility provides great ideas for how to build high quality backlinks<\/a>.<\/p>\n Analysing your competitors\u2019 backlink profiles can be a great source of inspiration for your own link building strategies. With Seobility\u2019s free Backlink Checker<\/a>, you can easily identify the pages that link to your competitors\u2019 websites.<\/p>\n You could even try to “steal” your competitors’ links by creating content that’s better than theirs, contacting the sites that link to them, and offering your content as an alternative.<\/p>\n Building new quality links is one of the most important things for improving your search ranking, but the links are useless if they are lost or are of bad quality.<\/p>\n Plus, if you can maintain your backlinks and you don\u2019t lose them, at times you can put less effort into building new backlinks if other things need your attention.<\/p>\n Seobility\u2019s Backlink dashboard<\/a> provides all the insights you need to manage your website\u2019s backlink profile:<\/p>\n There are two important factors to consider:<\/p>\n Direct traffic describes sessions where the user visits your website by typing a URL into their browser bar, instead of clicking through from a search engine or third-party source. Google has said many times that direct traffic is not a ranking factor<\/strong>, but this doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t important.<\/p>\n Building brand awareness<\/a> with SEO and non-SEO campaigns should result in higher levels of direct traffic. This is a strong indicator that your SEO strategy is working<\/strong>, while greater brand awareness also encourages more users to click on your results when they show up in search.<\/p>\n You can increase brand awareness in many ways, and this includes both offline and online activities.<\/p>\n Part of this can be as simple as being more active in the community, online forums, and main social media channels<\/strong> specific to your industry. A useful way to achieve this is by answering people’s questions and educating them on areas of expertise that are relevant to your business offering.<\/p>\n Reddit is an example of an online forum where you can engage with communities on almost any topic you can think of:<\/p>\n You can also bring your brand in front of wider audiences by becoming more active in networking events (again, this can be both online and offline). Consider even hosting your own events, such as workshops, webinars, or educational sessions that are related to your business.<\/p>\n By being actively involved in scenarios where you are able to shine a light on your expertise and key staff, you can introduce your brand to engaged audiences in a value-based way.<\/p>\n Brand mentions are also incorrectly cited as a ranking signal, but only because their value is misunderstood. Like direct traffic, brand mentions (without links) are indicative of brand awareness<\/strong>, although they don\u2019t generate any traffic. Meanwhile, brand mentions with<\/em> links are backlinks with branded anchor text \u2013 very valuable from authoritative sites but not considered brand mentions. Both are valuable but in very different ways.<\/p>\n As with direct traffic, building brand awareness in the ways described in the previous section is the key to generating brand mentions.<\/p>\n Off-site engagement refers to all interactions with your brand that take place outside of your website:<\/p>\n All of these interactions contribute to brand awareness, visibility, the customer experience and your SEO strategy \u2013 some directly, others indirectly.<\/p>\n But don\u2019t worry, you don\u2019t have to take on all of these at once. Instead, you can pick one area to focus on and start building your off-site engagement from there.<\/p>\n For example, you can start sharing your thoughts on platforms like LinkedIn, which can later lead to SEO opportunities like content collaborations.<\/p>\n In this article, I\u2019ve condensed small business SEO into four basic steps:<\/p>\n But there\u2019s one final item on this checklist:<\/p>\n The key element that brings this all together is ongoing analysis and optimisation.<\/p>\n SEO isn\u2019t a set-it-and-forget-it marketing strategy. It\u2019s an ongoing process of creating quality content assets and constantly optimising them to enhance\/maintain performance:<\/p>\n Focus on doing a really good job of everything we\u2019ve covered in this article. By the time you cross off everything on this checklist, your SEO strategy will be making a bigger contribution to your business, and you\u2019ll be ready to start implementing more advanced strategies. Don\u2019t try to rush things; concentrate on building (and maintaining) solid foundations first \u2013 because the more advanced strategies fall apart without them.<\/p>\n Want to learn more about SEO for small businesses?<\/strong> Check out the other articles in this series:<\/p>\n And if you\u2019re not using Seobility yet, sign-up for a free 14-day trial of Seobility Premium here<\/a> to run technical and on-page SEO audits, monitor your rankings, analyse your backlink profile, and more.<\/p>\n1. Know who you\u2019re optimising for & why<\/em><\/h2>\n
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![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Google-Business-Profile.png\")
<\/p>\nKnow Your Audience<\/h3>\n
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2. Identify SEO opportunities<\/h2>\n
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Step 1: Start by listing your seed keywords<\/h3>\n
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Step 2: Spot relevant keyword opportunities<\/h3>\n
![\"Keyword](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Keyword-Research-Tool.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"list](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/list-of-relevant-keywords-to-target.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"URL](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/URL-Domain-of-the-Keyword-Research-Tool.png\")
<\/p>\nStep 3: Prioritise the most potential keywords<\/h3>\n
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![\"right](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/right-keywords-start-by-looking-into-the-search-intent.png\")
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3. Optimise your website<\/h2>\n
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Ensure a flawless technical SEO setup<\/h3>\n
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![\"comprehensive](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/comprehensive-technical-SEO-audits.jpg\")
<\/p>\nImprove Your On-page SEO<\/h3>\n
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![\"meta](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/meta-tags-and-page-attributes.png\")
<\/p>\nCreate high-quality and optimized content<\/h3>\n
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Perfect Your User Experience<\/h3>\n
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![\"search](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/search-intent-category-with-seobility.png\")
<\/p>\n4. Optimise Off-page SEO factors<\/h2>\n
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Start Building Your Backlink Profile<\/h3>\n
Engage in Guest Blogging<\/h4>\n
Create \u2018Link Bait\u2019 Pages<\/h4>\n
![\"Seobility\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Seobilitys-free-Backlink-Checker.png\")
<\/p>\nAnalyse your competitors\u2019 links<\/h4>\n
Maintain your backlink profile<\/h4>\n
![\"Seobility\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Seobilitys-Backlink-dashboard.png\")
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Take Advantage of Direct Traffic<\/h3>\n
![\"Reddit](\"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Reddit-is-an-example-of-an-online-forum.png\")
<\/p>\nGet People Talking: Brand Mentions<\/h3>\n
Build Off-site Engagement<\/h3>\n
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5. Bringing it all together: Analysis & optimisation<\/h2>\n
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Keep Analysing and Optimising Your SEO Performance<\/h3>\n
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