SEO for Small Business: The KISS Method

There is now a necessity for internet marketing for small businesses.

We actually help make you money by bringing in relevant prospects through the search engines. Large SEO firms don't typically work for the small business. They either price themselves out of your budget or they offer services that they can do with little thought or effort that don't really help you. Have you ever received a call or email offering "the most popular keywords in your industry" or "guaranteed #1 rankings". These tactics are easy for them to do but don't help you at all. First of all, a small business can't compete for the most popular terms, so paying for a list of them is like throwing away money. Secondly, a company that guarantees a #1 ranking is typically going to optimize your page for a term that nobody searches for. Is it worth it to be #1 if nobody ever searches for that term? With both of these techniques, you are paying for something that will never bring prospects to your site. We put the time and effort in to your site to make sure we give you something that will actually help you.

To begin, it is always best for your business to handle your SEO ethically and avoid techniques that can get your site penalized. Our methods follow the ethical standards found most in the industry through leading organizations like SEMPO and leading industry minds like Bruce Clay.

The difference with the K.I.S.S. method is the focus and order of techniques that are used, not the techniques themselves.

K.I.S.S. stands for:

Keyword Research

Inspect the competition

Stick in your keywords

Start over

Now let's take a look at each of these steps in detail, and analyze how a small business may approach them differently.

(K)eyword Research

Most any SEO professional will agree that keyword research is the most important aspect of SEO and this is even more the case with small business search engine optimization. Keyword research involves finding the keywords that are most often searched and "optimizing" your site to be found when users search by those keywords. This optimization is covered under the first S portion of this process, but keyword research can be done a little differently with small business in mind.

Leading SEO professionals will tell you that early in the process you should look at competitive sites and see what they are using for keywords. This can be done by looking in the HTML code under the "View" menu and the "Source" or "Source Code" option. This is handy to do if you don't know good words to start with, but I feel for smaller businesses, the key is to find the words that your competitors are not using. Many small businesses that you may look at may not have a good SEO program set up so they may be using generic terms put in by their web hosting company or that they copied from a larger business, but for which they can not compete.

We have access to powerful keyword analysis tools that your business may not use or want to spend money on. Through these tools you can not only find new keywords using the thesaurus and other built in techniques, but you can find out how often terms are searched and how many competitor pages are targeting the same keywords.

If you are running a small business or have an internet or yahoo store, it is best to target the keywords that you can most easily rank with. Of course you want relevant keywords, but considering the competition, it is becoming less and less common for searchers to even go past the first few pages of search results. It is best to fight for the low hanging fruit that you can easily compete for. It is more efficient for small business search engine optimization to target keywords or phrases that may only be searched less than twenty times a day with very little competition than to target highly popular keywords that have thousands of competitors. For those terms, you have little chance to crack the top 500, let alone the first page. Larger businesses can't afford to waste time on these less searched items. This is where you can carve out your niche.

Once you have researched these keywords and keyword phrases, without necessarily looking at specific results, you will come up with some keywords and keyword phrases you may want to use. Often the phrase will have geographically specific words or may be a longer phrase. This is when you want to look at the competition. This will bring us to the next step. Remember, we can offer you the consulting support or reports to find these keywords and phrases for you to carve out your niche.

(I)nspect the Competition

We are now ready to inspect the competitors you will be taking on with your keywords and keyword phrases. Since your ultimate goal is to place on the first results page for the search term you've chosen, it is important to now look at the sites that are currently in the top ten for these words. What strategies have they taken to reach this point and can you compete with them.

You've already eliminated much of the difficult competition with your keyword research, but if you find that you only have a few competitors for this search term, yet they are highly optimized and large competitors with thousands of inbound links and levels of content that you know you can't compete with, you may need to go with one of your other choices.

You can do this inspection on your own by searching the term and looking at the sites that come up. You can get a feel for how they approach SEO, and using the HTML view we mentioned in the keyword section. You can even see what keywords they are targeting. A little more difficult is figuring out which sites link to their site, which is an important part of search engine ranks. You may find that a site that seems similar to yours has hundreds of links to it that are boosting its rankings that you do not have. The easiest way to get some inbound links is to take advantage of any groups or organizations you belong to. For example a chamber of commerce or national industry group will often offer members links to their sites. Take advantage of these and be listed on their sites. We offer reports that provide in depth inspection of the top 10 sites for your keyword.

If you find that you can compete with the other sites with a reasonable amount of effort and expense, you can move on to actually optimizing your web site. We are on to the next step.

(S)tick your keywords in (the right places)

Now that you've settled on the keywords that you are using based on search counts and competition, you are ready to actually optimize your site by sticking the keywords in to to meta tags, your site content, links, titles and anywhere else you can. However, it is important to follow ethical guidelines. It is also important to have good site content and write information that is useful and helpful to the user. Don't become obsessed with your keyword phrases. There is a fine line between working them in to your content and overdoing it.

We can help you by offering the html you will need to insert your keywords and keyword phrases in to the different meta tags, titles and descriptions for your page. We can also suggest how to include it in your text. Remember that search engines are based on reading text. Many can't even read things like Flash and other fancy site options. You should always have a text option to get around anything you may have that is flash related. Also remember the more optimized pages you have on your site, the more your site in general is respected and used and can get higher search engine ranks.

(S)tart Over

Now that you've gone through the whole process and optimized your site, hopefully you are on the first page of search results for at least one keyword search. The difficult part is that with the constant competition you need to keep on top of things. New competitors are emerging every day and with SEO growing the way it does, more and more competitors will be going after your keywords. You need to keep track of your ranking and stay ahead of the competition or even switch keyword targets on occasion to most efficiently stay on top. It is constant work, but the good news is that we are here to help you. Anything that you can handle on your own is great, and anything that you prefer to let us handle with our expertise and time, we will handle for you. We are here for you for any SEO help you may need. Our techniques are the best way to get affordable small business search engine optimization.

We hope to hear from you soon.