SEO Advice for Small-to-medium Sized Businesses (SBM)

Over the years, SEO has certainly not become "less complicated." No. In fact, it’s much more complex and – more than ever before – it involves the culmination of "building a brand online," as much as it does technical SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, usability/conversion rate optimization, PR/outreach/social promotion, and expert analytics/reporting.

There have been very few things that have made SEO easier for the SMB (small-to-medium sized businesses).

For too many SMBs, an SEO budget might be $300 to $500 per month, and what should an SMB do, given these circumstances?

Many SEOs would tell you to take the money and stick it in your pocket, but there are a few things that you can do – some that may require that you’re willing to get your hands a little dirty – that can help you with your organic search presence.

First, let’s cover some of the basics…

In order to do well in SEO, there are – as mentioned previously – "a bunch" of things that are the ingredients to "doing it right" in 2015. But, there are some key ingredients that may be "good enough," that you should focus on, first.

Content and Links

So often, where SMBs go wrong is the very basics of simply not having enough of the right content on their websites. Technically speaking, it doesn’t take an "SEO" to write content. Where an SEO might help is in guiding you to what type of content that you need to create, the promotion of the content, and specifics of how you might optimize the content. With your limited budget, you can at least do the basics of this, and create the content.

You can spend hours in keyword research, certainly. But, as an SMB, you are running your own business and time is not something that you have "extra" of. So, the very easy/quick way to gain insight on what content you should create is to find a competitor who is doing it "right" and emulate them (we’ll call this "best practices").

In order to find those who are "doing it right," you might start simply by searching some keywords/phrases that you feel are on target, and see who is ranking for these. When you begin to see a pattern of one website showing up consistently, you can take that domain/website and run it through SEMrush.

Quick Tip: Just because a website ranks number one on "that one major keyword" does not mean that they are the website that you should try and emulate. Keep reading, so that you can better understand why I’m saying that.

For this example, I’m targeting the "google ping submission list" in google.com

Step 1: Search Google for "google ping submission list" and check out the results:

here we see that siteber.com is on top (#1). we also on at 8 position in this search.

Content

The first step that I take (again, keeping this process intentionally simple for SMB owners out there) is to search on Google, this query – site:siteber.com. Notice that I do not have a space between the colon and the URL. Also, you should try this both with www. and without www. (a website might have content on a sub-domain, such as blog.websitename.com). This will help you to see the content that is currently in Google’s index (again, not a perfect number, but "workable").

In this case, this website is showing 1030 pages indexed in Google:

One tip: I typically click through as many results as I can (toggle through the pagination at the bottom of the Google results page), until I get to "the end" (or close enough to the end) of Google’s results for this query.

In this case, I clicked through until I saw this

So, even though I had initially seen 1030 pages indexed, I believe the number of "good pages" to be closer to 286 (this screenshot).

At this point, you ask yourself…how many pages of content do I have? You might also ask yourself, what types of content have these guys created? And, most importantly, where are the gaps in the content that I have versus what I should have?