Small businesses cannot fund large scale sponsored advertisements and paid marketing campaigns on search engines, social media and third party websites. Budget is always a constraint. Small businesses are often proprietorship enterprises or partnerships so there are very few people at the helm and they too are preoccupied with their core operations. There isn’t much of a middle management and most employees are already assigned sufficient day-to-day tasks to squeeze out time for anything else. How does then a small business manage its search engine optimization?

Prioritize and Focus on Local SEO

Small businesses do not have to compete with large brands. They do not need a nationwide or even a statewide outreach program. Their marketing exercises can be limited to an area, at the most a city. Hence, there is absolutely no need to worry about the search results that appear for internet users based across the state and beyond. The focus should be on local search engine optimization. The business needs to pop up on search engine results for a given city, area or neighborhood. This is easier than trying to gain a prominent rank on a national or international level. In any case such positions are taken up by encyclopedic resources and they are unlikely to cede their rightful place.

Keywords are the bedrock of search engine optimization. Keyword research is thus a quintessential exercise. There are different ways to find the keywords relevant for your industry, business, products or services. You must also consider the target audience and the platforms you are using to reach out to them during the research. There is a traditional or old school method of keyword research. This process can be broken down into four phases. The following approach can help you find high search volume with low competition keywords and long-tail keywords.

Four Steps of Keyword Research

The four steps of traditional keyword research are finding seed keywords, plugging seed keywords, filtering keyword opportunities and evaluating competitiveness. These steps should get you the keyword you can target with all your contents for effective search engine optimization. The keywords you zero in on should be used for your official website content, marketing articles and other materials you will use to promote your business online.

Search engine optimization was always about content. It was never about stuffing every webpage with keywords and hoping that the crawlers of search engines will place the website at the upper echelons of their result pages. Many people have done precisely that and are now wondering how they can actually rank their website higher than where it is placed now. Low quality contents overloaded with keywords are no longer impressing the algorithms of search engines. The search engines have gotten smarter and they are prioritizing quality. It is hence imperative to improve the content on your website. It is also quintessential to implement content marketing in your SEO strategy.

You must be proactive, active and reactive to prevent or counter a negative SEO campaign. There is no way to completely safeguard your website and seo strategy completely from a negative campaign. What you can do is reduce the number of attack vectors to protect your website and your ever expanding online presence. There are three major areas of interest here. You need to protect your content, manage the backlinks and be aware of the user signals so you can remedy any vulnerable attack vector.

A negative SEO attack can hamper your website SEO and also ruin your reputation. You should be conscious of the possibility of a negative SEO campaign. It may be sponsored by a competitor or there could be other untoward developments. The first step is to be cognizant of the fact that there has been a negative SEO attack or a campaign is currently in progress. You can successfully determine if your website has been a victim of negative SEO attack and take appropriate remedial measures.