Simple Small Business Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Written by Peter Lawlor Friday, 29 April 2011 09:40

Small Business search engine optimization generally requires optimizing a website for particular towns, cities, and/or states. In other words, it's local SEO.

Small Business search engine optimization generally requires optimizing a website for particular towns, cities, and/or states. In other words, it's local SEO.

It's easy to do if you know how to optimize your small business website for local SEO.

If your small business website targets only one town, then there aren't too many variables to consider. You can optimize each keyword in conjunction with your town.

Where it gets more complicated is targeting several towns. Most small businesses, although small and locally-based, do serve more than one town.

How do you optimize for multiple towns/cities?

The easiest way is to publish a lot of content.

Suppose you run a pizza restaurant. Your obvious keywords are:

pizza pizza restaurant pizza delivery wood-fired pizza pizza parlour cheap pizza (if you offer cheap pizza)

The list goes on.

Now suppose you're targeting 5 towns - we'll call them A, B, C, D, and E.

You want to target each "industry keyword" with each town. As you can see that's 25 web pages.

Be sure each Web page is written from a unique perspective; don't use the same content among all the pages.

Not only will publishing all these Web page target your local communities, but you'll be building a larger website, which in itself is good for SEO.

Putting Small Business Search Engine Optimization Together

Your home page should target your main town and your best industry keyword. Perhaps "A Pizza".

Then inside pages would target "B pizza", "C pizza", "D pizza", "E pizza".

You must do this for every combination. More Web pages would target "A pizza restaurant", "B pizza restaurant", etc.

Don't forget about your state or province. Many people search for businesses, services, and products by state or province.

Once you have your list of keywords and targeted towns, you must properly format your Web pages for local search so that they will rank for your keywords in the search engines.

If you're getting traffic to your small business website, but few customers, you have a conversion problem. Fortunately you can incorporate simple conversion techniques to improve conversion rates.

Finally, don't forget to build backlinks to all of those pages. Many business websites simply get links to their home page. I prefer building links to all my business website pages. It's more natural and helps the inner pages rank better.