Small Business Marketing: How do I create a SEO plan?

I’ll get right to it. To create an SEO plan for your small business you’ll need to:

Optimize your current web pages and create a search engine friendly site

You’ve probably put a lot of time, effort, energy, attention and money into your website. However, no matter how cool or visually pleasing it is, if it isn’t performing just like your services and solutions, it isn’t a good website.

In this case, that means making it perform in terms of SEO basics. After all, if you don’t end up at the top of the SEO mountain, no one will even see your website no matter how great it is.

When we’re talking about on-page SEO, we’re talking about:

• Coding
• Copy
• Content Structure

Get your Google My Business and Bing Places page producing results

A Google Business Profile is a free tool through Google that helps you improve your online presence when people are searching for an service business or provider. If someone searches your company’s name, a profile, called a knowledge panel, will pop up with your company’s information like address, phone number, and website URL.

With a Google Business Profile, a searcher could type “plumber near me” “accountant near me” lawyer near me” or “dentist near me” and three choices, known as the Google 3-Pack, will appear. Optimizing your Google Business Profile means you have photos of your company positive reviews, and posts to announce information you want the public to know. A well-optimized Google Business Profile means your firm should be part of that 3-Pack.

While Google is always updating Google Business Profile, some features are effortless to optimize:

1. Pictures of your business — We are a visual species, and pictures catch the attention of people quicker than just about anything. Give your audience pictures of the vehicles, equipment, tradeshows attended, interior and exterior of your business. Also include photos of employees and any service in action.
2. Reviews — A good reputation will get you far today, and establishing a reputation has never been easier than it is now with online reviews. You will want to showcase these reviews as part of your Google Business Profile. More information on how reviews can create a powerful message!
3. Posts — Google Business Profile has a post function that allows you to feature recent content posts you’ve made such as blog posts, new service announcements, operation updates, and more. Take advantage of this post feature!

Make sure that your data is correct and complete across directories

An online citation is a mention of your service business and its information (address, phone number, etc.) online. It’s important to build your local citations because the more times your company is mentioned online with correct contact information, the better your local rankings will be.

Areas to build your local citations include:

• Chamber of Commerce
• Facebook
• Yahoo Local
• Google Business Profile
• Apple Maps
• Bing

Citations are so important because the majority of research that’s done before buying something is done online. If your service business information (NAP name, address, and phone number) across the web, your local rankings will be boosted.

While just a piece of the small business SEO puzzle, citations are an important piece. The more your business appears online, the better off you’ll be. Be sure to make citations a part of your overall SEO strategy.

Acquire links back to your content from related websites

Getting backlinks can seem like a daunting task. How do you get other businesses to link to your site online?

If you don’t have any backlinks yet you can get up and running pretty quickly by tapping your existing partners and resources within your community. Things like the local chamber of commerce online listings, alumni directories for the founders’ schools, and church and community directories are great places to start. This is the low-hanging fruit, and getting these backlinks set up is a great way to ease into the next steps in a backlink strategy.

Developing this list is easy. Doing the work behind each one of these is hard.