If you own an SME and want to improve your online visibility, you cannot neglect the indexing of your website. Here’s how to improve SEO and appear in search results
Over 90% of the Italian business fabric is made up of SMEs: the importance of small businesses is therefore evident, and it is essential for them to make themselves visible on the market in order to thrive among competitors in their product sector. One of the most effective methods today to promote your business is to make yourself visible online with targeted activities such as SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
Together with paid promotion, SEO is an extraordinarily effective way to improve your positioning on the web and traffic to your site or online store, achieving the business objectives you are aiming for.
Does doing SEO necessarily mean having hyper-specialized digital agencies available or spending thousands of euros every year? Not necessarily: if you really know SEO and master its main tools, you can move independently, at least for the small but essential first steps in SEO for small businesses.
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SEO for SMEs: why is it important?
The first hurdle that entrepreneurs encounter when they want to tackle a topic like Search Engine Optimization is to understand exactly why SEO is so important, especially for small businesses.
The explanation is basically simple: because today, the web is the preferred channel for promoting oneself, and not exploiting it basically means giving way to competitors. While it used to be enough to advertise your business in medium-sized newspapers or rely on local radio stations, today, we need to consider the new methods consumers use to meet their purchasing needs.
What is the first gesture that anyone makes when they want to find out about a service that interests them or find the nearest store that can provide them with the product they are looking for? It is grabbing your smartphone and typing your request into the Google search bar, thus obtaining the information you want, a myriad of options to choose from, or the contacts of the store you want to visit.
When you find yourself managing an SME, it is practically impossible to think of not appearing precisely among those search results: the most effective methods to build your solid online presence step by step
is through SEO, a free digital marketing strategy, and ‘advertising through paid or PPC campaigns, which instead requires a capital investment to be implemented.
Combining the two would be the ideal way to go, but if you want to keep costs down, website optimization for search engines is the key to achieving satisfying results.
The main problems of SMEs on the SEO side
While large and consolidated companies generally have high budgets and substantial resources to devote to their digital marketing activities and their promotion campaigns, small and medium-sized enterprises often face a smaller reserve of capital and means. Although SEO does not require, as already highlighted, huge budgets to be implemented, it certainly requires a minimum investment in terms of time, energy, and personnel.
When the company budget is limited, as often happens especially in start-ups or small local businesses, it is difficult to think of channeling a part of it for activities such as SEO: it seems there are increasingly pressing urgencies to manage, which delay the optimization of the own website always at the bottom of the “to do” list.
Paying an external marketing agency that supports you in your work may seem marginal, as well as investing in the correct digital training of your internal staff: it is a pity that these could be the turning points to reach a wider audience, increase sales and find yourself in more capital available to reinvest in the business.
The internal organization of small-sized companies also often leads to staff management in a multitasking perspective, where individual tasks are flexible, and there is no department purely dedicated to marketing and effective care of corporate communication.
Without adequate training and the creation of a valid experience in the field, however, it is unfortunately difficult for a resource to reach good levels of specialization in the most targeted tasks: once again, however, reserve part of the staff for the management of activities such as SEO optimization, even locally, social media management or web content creation, can prove to be a crucial point to grow, expand and thrive in the market.
How to do SEO for small businesses?
Once you have understood the potential of SEO for SMEs, it is natural for an entrepreneur to tackle the issue head-on and try to make his way on the web through careful optimization. If you are serious about working on your business’s SEO, many tactics can lead to a good ranking in the Google SERP.
What are the useful tips for the SEO of SMEs? What are the small but decisive actions to take the first steps in search engine optimization?
Analysis tools
First of all, it is a good idea to start familiarizing yourself with the main tools of the trade, widely used by CRO specialists, which allow you to perform detailed analyzes of your website and the traffic it receives. Which? The two above all are Google Analytics and Google Search Console, indispensable tools for obtaining useful reports on traffic and conversions, understanding how your audience moves within site and how the latter is shown in Google search results.
Keyword research
Secondly, it is essential to try to master a strategic aspect such as keyword research, that is, the search for the best keywords for which you want to position your website or develop keyword advertising campaigns. Before proceeding with keyword research, it is essential to understand its importance and effectiveness: numerous tools can support the operation, such as SEOZoom, SEMRush, Answer The Public, or the keyword planning tool of Google Ads.
On-page SEO optimization
What to analyze? Once the preliminary analyzes have been carried out, on your site and on the best keywords, but also on your reference market and above all on the target of your product, brand, or service, you can devote yourself to a so-called on-page SEO optimization: that is, you must make sure that each element of the website is sufficiently optimized, includes the main keywords and is best structured. For Example, aspects such as meta tags (i.e., the title, description, and headings of web pages), the site map and its hierarchical organization, as well as the structure of internal links that connect the proposed contents.
Directory and backlinks
One of the most important pieces of information to know about SEO is that Google considers the presence of inbound links to a particular website: they represent one of the ranking factors and give, if well studied, excellent authority to the destination website.
A good way to get links pointing to your site is to look for collaborations with similar but not competing sites, other authoritative web spaces on the net, suppliers, or relevant people on the net who can insert a so-called backlink to their address on their sites.
Another tactic, with multiple usefulness, is also to include your company in the main business directories, such as Pagine Gialle, i.e., online directories that collect activities, shops, freelancers, and businesses and which facilitate their finding on the net. , relevant link building and visibility.
Finally, registering on a service like Google My Business is another excellent method to boost your visibility on the net, work on the SEO optimization of your website, and be found just when a user is browsing in search of a product. Or service like the one offered to the market.
Small tips can make a big difference in starting a winning SEO strategy.
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