Small Business SEO - A Get Started With SEO Guide

The following is a short, high-level guide to some foundational SEO initiatives that can help a small local business or start-up gain some much-needed SEO traction.

We often work with small businesses and find that there are some similar challenges we face when helping them get off the ground. Many businesses come to us with very little website content, and no history of SEO, clicks, or rankings.

This means we often have to work on building a foundation before we can even really get into optimization. That building process can take several months, which means we don’t get to impactful SEO initiatives until 3 or 4 months in. I wanted to give some guidance on some things you can do as a business owner to get SEO moving. We often hear that they didn’t know what to do or where to start, so hopefully this quick-start guide will give some insight for you. Click the linked heading below to visit each page for more info on each tactic.

We will occasionally be adding new guides to the list below, and even expanding these guides as we find helpful tactics that you can execute.

Step 1: Minimum Viable Pages

Step 1 is arguably the most important step – getting your minimum viable pages done. This short guide will show you what an MVP is, what content you need on it, and how to execute this for all the pages that need it.

Step 2: Service Area Location Pages

Step 2 is going to help you gain some local relevance. Most businesses need to focus on their backyard first, and we’ll help you start gaining some valuable landing pages to highlight your service area in the search results.

Step 3: Google Business Profile Creation

If you don’t have your Google Business Profile, this short guide is filled with links and resources to help you get a Google account, set up a business profile, and get the basic in formation added and verified.

Step 4: Google Business Profile Optimization

This guide is a look at the local business listing ranking factors in Google and how you can get your business listings to meet comprehensiveness and relevance to boost your ranking potential.

Step 5: Google Analytics and Event Tracking

This is a little more in-depth guide with links and resources if you get stuck. We are starting to get a little more technical from here, but understanding what is happening on your website and how to track key events will help you make better marketing decisions.

Step 6: Keywords and What To Target

A beginner’s guide to keywords – this one doesn’t go in-depth, but it will help you think about keywords in a new way. You’ll get some guidance on how to choose and target terms, and some beginning tactics on how to optimize a page for them.

Step 7: Links and Authority Building

Content and links are still two of the reigning ranking factors, and in this guide we’ll define what links are (internal and external), what makes a good link, and some ideas on how to start getting them.