5 Challenges Small Businesses Face
in Running SEO Campaigns
Contrary to your belief that SEO (search engine optimization) is only for large companies, small businesses can also benefit a lot from SEO. But as a small business, you have a huge responsibility to keep up with. It usually takes an expert team to help you complete your marketing goals. And, not to forget, SEO also needs hours of monitoring your digital performance to come up with more methods for improving your overall search engine rankings.
So, if you want to establish your small business as a reliable brand presence online, SEO is the key to your woes. But you have to be prepared to face the challenges that come with it.
5 Reasons why SEO is harder for small businesses
Here are the five difficult challenges that you’d face when it comes to small business SEO...
1. You have less budget
The number one reason why SEO is difficult for small businesses is that they have less budget. You got to spend more money to grab more attention on social media. The big reason why companies spend more money on ads and marketing is that they bring better ROI. But bigger companies often have bigger budgets they allocate for hiring more employees and top-notch consultants. But small businesses don’t have such huge budgets and they have to manage things on a small budget only.
2. You have got less time
It’s obvious that when you have got less money, you’ve less time. Few people on the marketing team certainly mean that everyone is dealing with different tasks. And, they are not focused 100-percent on one particular task. Some small businesses are very small that they only have two to three people handling everything. This makes work on SEO harder.
Real SEO takes so much time to create worthy content with well-optimized web pages and secured links. With a small team, small businesses often end up doing their work in a rush. Due to this, they often neglect SEO and have poor rankings.
3. Focused on some other task than SEO
When a small business is short on its resources, its SEO tasks get pushed down on the list. Blogging and other content creation are major examples of this. First, everyone starts working with their best intentions to write several posts. But in the end, nothing gets written and published.
So, the truth is that if you keep waiting for SEO to be done after everything else or other tasks, SEO will always be neglected. That’s why huge companies work with dedicated teams of SEO to improve their rankings without excuses.
4. It’s difficult to keep up with Google algorithm changes
Again, this one is related to resources. An SEO expert always has time to keep up with the ever-changing search engine landscape. They know if Google has made a significant update or a major algorithm change that may affect websites’ rankings.
But with small businesses, often times, search engine marketing is not handled by expert SEO professionals. Due to this, small businesses fails to keep pace with fast changing Google’s search engine algorithms. That’s why they often rank poor in SERPs.
5. Google favors brands
In SEO, Google favors brands — after all, everybody tends to favor big brands. Google ranks these big brands higher because their people trust brands, and Google search behavior analyses corroborates this idea as more people chooses to click on recognized brand websites.
So, if small companies have to compete for a keyword that bigger brands are also focusing on, they certainly need to work harder. That’s why it is difficult for small businesses to keep up with big rivals or competitors
Does SEO Work for Small Businesses?
While it seems to be intimidating to compete with big companies that already have an established web presence, it is still important for small businesses to focus on SEO. With proper SEO techniques, they can improve their chances of ranking higher on search engine results.
But being recognized online is not as easy as you may think. Even established brands struggle for gaining the top rank on SERPs, despite having higher resources than small businesses.
It is because the rankings on search engines cannot be bought. There is no way for paying to get a higher rank on organic keywords. This also gives small businesses equal opportunity to rank higher for a specific keyword. With the right SEO approach, small businesses have the same chance at ranking higher than companies with more budget.
Key benefits of SEO for small businesses
Here are the major benefits of SEO for small businesses:
1. Gain a competitive edge
With billions of people using the internet all the time, small businesses owners have the opportunity to gain a strong brand position in search engine rankings. SEO is a very cost-effective way to improve exposure while gaining a competitive edge in the industry. Small businesses can utilize tools like Google My Business (GMB) to gain an edge over big businesses.
2. Reach your target audience
Rather than going to different customers, SEO helps in bringing customers to you. Both on and off-page SEO strategies are useful for targeting certain segments of your potential audience. The targeted SEO campaigns also helps small businesses to make useful customers and connections online.
Small businesses can edge out big brands by focusing their SEO efforts on location specific keywords and search phrases.
3. Gives customers the relevant information
With the help of SEO, small businesses can redirect potential customers to their websites for relevant information. Therefore, it is best to work on SEO consistently to enable readers to look for the right information they need to solve a certain query.
4. Expand brand’s presence
With both on and off-page SEO techniques, you can work on improving your brand’s presence on the internet.
5. Educate prospective clients
Creating compelling content is an important part of SEO. Besides that, it helps in ranking your website for different content and topics that help in establishing your brand authority.
Small business SEO and local search ranking factors
When search engines are figuring out what to rank in local search result pages, there are certain factors that they consider:
- Do you have a good online reputation?
- Is your website up-to-date?
- Where are your services or store located? Is it near to the searcher’s location?
- What are you offering? Is it related to what a person is looking for?
All these factors help you gain more customers as per the relevant information and content.
How to tackle small business SEO challenges
Given below are some important tips to consider for tacking small business SEO challenges:
- Find the right keywords: First, you need to work on finding the right keywords that your customers are typing/speaking when finding your services or products on the internet. Make a list of around 30 to 50 keywords and use Google AdWords to find the search volume of those keywords. Depending on the search volume, you can start targeting certain keywords to help you rank higher than competitors. For that, you got to use the targeted keywords on your web pages and other relevant content to improve ranking on SERPs.
- Focus on your USP: When you are competing against other businesses, you have to focus on your unique selling point (USP). so, look for words that help you stand out from the rivals as per your location and demographics.
- Don’t overstuff keywords: Never make the mistake of overusing keywords on your website. If you are putting keywords everywhere without thinking, you may get penalized by Google. So, be careful of adding keywords only a few times on a web page.
- Build backlinks to your website: The higher the other sites link to your website, the higher you’re likely to rank on SERPs. So, consider focusing on getting more backlinks on other websites.
- Publish high-quality content: Next, you have to focus on publishing more and more compelling content offering quality information to the readers. Also, include relevant keywords on your content for increasing your content’s online visibility.
- Get social: Don’t forget to promote your content and business on social media platforms. It is an essential part of SEO because more and more people are spending their time on social media platforms these days. So, when you are also on those platforms where your target audience is, there are more chances of higher online visibility.
The gist of small business SEO
The tools and strategies we mentioned in this article will help local small businesses in moving up the ladder of SERPs and build their online presence. Initially small businesses may struggle to reach the first page of Google search but the right approach and working consistently local SEO plan will help small businesses prevailing in the web presence.