Even though Google favors big brands, the truth is that small businesses can compete with the bigger names for organic search engine traffic. This is possible even though big brands often spend tens of thousands on SEO without batting an eye, and even though small businesses are spread thin on budgets and staff. Here’s how a small business can get its fair share of organic sales leads on Google:
Step 1: Take Inventory of Your SEO Assets
If your small business has a domain that goes back to the 1990s or 2000s, you’re sitting on an SEO goldmine. Google is impressed with old domains because it signals a business is stable, reliable, and competent—just the sort of company Google wants to serve up to people searching for the products and services you sell. Don’t abandon an old domain to pursue some sort of branding or URL/SEO tactic, as it will do more harm than good.
Review Google Analytics to see which pages of your website and blog get a lot of organic traffic, get a lot of overall page views, are popular entry pages, are infrequent exit pages, and have page views of three minutes or longer. These make good initial SEO target pages because they are already valuable to your website visitors. Google knows this, and will reward those pages with good visibility when they become part of a sustained SEO campaign…
