Thinking About SEO For a New Business

It’s a common scenario. A new hyper-local small business needs to get their website ranked for their desired service based search phrases. In competitive markets, it’s not always going to be easy. Here are a few things to consider when speaking to someone about SEO for a new small business website.

Sitemap Creation – Tell everyone where you are.

An XML sitemap is important to provide a clear communication and inventory of your website pages to a search engine index. As new content is created, this is how we can let other systems know the content exists.

Google Search Console Verification – Validate who you are and gain insights.

Google offers a search console tool as part of their Webmasters offering. This is key to understanding how your site is perceived by search and activity as content marketing begins.

Content Marketing – Give people a reason to stick around and learn about you.

Your site will not perform unless you provide relevant and useful content for your service. It cannot just be your service descriptions and hours, but a library of content that helps a customer make a choice about your offering. This is a top priority as you get past the initial technical needs for an SEO plan.

Analytics – Learn what works.

Make sure that you have something running to track website traffic information for optimization and conversion attribution. Google Analytics is a popular choice and integrates well with many of the other tools available for digital marketing planning and optimization. It is most important to define a website goal so you have a key performance indicator or a set of KPI’s available for benchmarking site performance.

These 4 items alone do not pave the way for search traffic by the thousands. It is the base of a framework that can help support content marketing to draw users and potential customers making the most of your website over time.