SEO for Small Business Owners: A No-Nonsense Guide to Page 1 (Well, A Little Non-Sense)
You’ve got a website. You hear the buzzword “SEO,” but you have no clue what it means or how to do it. OR you’ve already started SEO-ing but aren’t sure about the next steps, or if it’s even working.
This everything guide to small business SEO will break down SEO into simple terms and actionable steps so you can boost traffic, rank higher, and find your customers (or better yet, have them find you!)
What is SEO?
SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It’s the ongoing practice of optimizing your website (and all things digital and related to your business) so your small business website ranks higher on Google, and customers can find your site.
Why Does SEO Matter for Small Businesses?
Google (the largest search engine on the internet) gets about 8.5 billion searches daily.
8.5 BILLION.
If your business website doesn’t show up on Google, your business is invisible to anyone on the World Wide Web.
Doing SEO for your small business website helps you:
Build website visibility on search engines
Show up in front of the right people at the right time
Match queries to high-quality, relevant results
Businesses need customers to generate revenue. SEO is a tool to help your small business find those customers, generate revenue, and build an empire!
Does Your Small Biz Need to Do SEO?
Yes. And…
Like choosing the right social media channels for your business, you need to assess the stage of your business to decide if now is the time to focus on SEO.
Do SEO Right Now If
✅ People aren’t brand loyal when they purchase your product/service. (Think home services or local cafes.)
✅ You run a small business and you’re looking to capture a local market.
Don’t Prioritize SEO Right Now If
🚫You operate in a highly niche market, with little or no organic traffic.
🚫Your company sells very specific products/services that people don’t search for.
In these cases, you’ll be better off starting with a well-developed social media strategy for your small business. There you can hone in on microcommunities and influencers who tap your market. Start an email list and build out your small business email marketing.
SEO Basics for Small Business Owners
If you’re brand new to SEO, follow this simple SEO guide for small businesses.
Understanding the Google Algorithm
SEO works thanks to a top-secret, ever-changing algorithm, or formula. It assesses and deciphers the quality of your website and its content, how well it answers questions, and whether or not it provides a good user experience to visitors.
This algorithm is plugging away 24/7, sorting through web pages to find the best answers to search queries. In terms of organic search —not to be confused with paid advertisements, sponsored links, and other features that show up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)— the pages that do the best job, rank the highest.
This algorithm is a complex puzzle that digital marketing pros live and die by. Since the formula is kept secret, we don’t know exactly what variables impact SEO, or how much weightage they have, but based on history, and some information provided directly from the horse's mouth, we have ideas about how the sausage is made.
Keywords for SEO
Keywords are the words and phrases people type into Google (or other search platforms like Bing or Yahoo) to find information, products, services, and businesses like yours. Using the right keywords in your online messaging helps you show up in search results.
Keywords come in two varieties:
1. Short tail keywords: These are generic terms that are related to your business. They have high search volumes (lots of people look for them) but they’re general, broad, and hard to rank for since they’re competitive.
Examples:
As of January 2025
Bakery near me has a monthly search volume (MSV) of 673,000
Plumber near me MSV = 201,000
Financial advisor near me MSV = 33,100
If you try to rank for only these generic terms, your pages can get lost in the sea of results.
2. Long tail keywords: Longer, more specific phrases. They have lower search volumes but they’re easier to rank for. And, since they’re more precise, they do a better job of attracting the right customers.
Examples:
As of January 2025
Gluten-free bakery Miami MSV = 320
Kitchen sink repair MSV = 720
Retirement planning service MSV = 590
Ideally, you’ll use a blend of general and specific terms on your website to reach your audience.
Good Quality Content
SEO works best when what you publish is valuable, well-written, and genuinely helps users.
Content should be people first, focused on talking to real humans, instead of trying to target Google’s algorithm. It’s easy to use the spammy, outdated practice of keyword stuffing by throwing in irrelevant or excessive mentions of keywords to ‘boost your rank,’ but Google has gotten wise to this tacky practice. Now, it rewards pages that answer people’s questions (match search intent) by providing content that they’re looking for.
According to Google, this is called helpful content and it calls for content to demonstrate 4 essential ingredients based on the acronym E-E-A-T:
Experience
Expertise
Authoritativeness
Trustworthiness
Of course, your page should also match Google’s SEO other suggestions including:
Structured meta-data - Organize pages with clear headers and use relevant meta tags.
Page speed and fast load times - Visitors tend to bounce — leave your page — when it takes a long time to load.
Mobile friendly - Ensure your site looks and works seamlessly on smartphones and tablets to keep visitors engaged.
Easy to navigate - Pages on your site should be no more than 3 clicks deep from the home page.
Index pages - Submit new pages or page updates using Google Search Console for faster crawling and indexing. (More on this later)
Local SEO
If your business is primarily for local customers, take these steps to improve your local ranking on Google:
Build a Google Business Profile - Claim and optimize your page to show up in local searches and Google Maps. This boosts visibility and helps you attract more local customers.
Get consistently good reviews - Positive reviews build trust and help you rank higher on search engines. Regularly ask customers (ideally, happy ones!) to leave feedback.
Need support for your online business reputation management? Click the button below.
Show up, EVERYWHERE! List your business on Yelp, Angi, and other industry-relevant directories to boost your chances of being found. More listings = more visibility!
Measuring Your SEO Success
Even with DIY small business SEO, you can take benchmarks to see how your digital footprint performs today, and again after you’ve made some changes.
Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are your digital marketing best friends. And, much of the functionality that would be useful for a new-to-SEO small business owner is free!
These softwares help you understand website performance, and then make strategic improvements to your SEO efforts as you move forward. Review metrics like:
Organic traffic - How many people land on your site from search engines?
Traffic sources - Where do your visitors come from? (social media, emails, direct to your website. etc.)
Bounce rate - Are visitors staying on your page thanks to valuable information, or leaving right away?
Conversions - Do visitors do the thing you ask them to do? (sign up for a newsletter, make a purchase, etc.)
Keyword performance - Which keywords do you rank for and get people to your website?
For more advanced SEO for small businesses, tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs can offer deeper insights into your keyword rankings, compare your footprint against competitors, and help you refine a backlink strategy (more on this below!)
3 Easy Wins for Small Business SEO
SEO for a small business website (or any website for that matter!) is a long game.
Read that again. ⬆️
No one does perfect SEO or ranks on page one overnight.
At BigBadMarketing we recommend consistency over speed.
Here’s our formula:
Set clear business goals.
Take small, actionable steps.
Improve.
Refine.
If you’re still in a hurry to the top and looking for as-quick-as-possible SEO tips for small businesses, here are three things to do right now:
1. Optimize Your Website
The word optimization is part of the SEO acronym, so it only makes sense to, well, optimize!
Set your small biz website up for success by structuring it well. Make sure features like title tags, meta descriptions, and headers are relevant and clear.
The Big Bad Marketing Blog is a great example of how to set up titles, subtitles, and metadata for small business SEO success! Notice how we’ve used relevant keywords in the headings throughout each page (like this one.) Google likes this, and rewards us for it, by sending people our way.
Keywords and phrases should be included naturally. Don’t overdo it for the sake of jamming keywords in.
🚫 Avoid keyword stuffing - It’s a lose-lose, since readers hate it, AND algorithms hate it.
2. Build a Blog
A blog attracts visitors to your website, educates them, and builds trust and authority. Then, when the time comes to buy, your small business is the obvious choice.
Blog posts can:
Address customer concerns
Answer FAQs
Dispel myths and misconceptions in your industry
Explain how to use your product or service
Demonstrate thought leadership and expertise
Building a blog comes at a low upfront cost. No need to invest a ton of money to get it off the ground. Plus, it can be done relatively quickly.
Choose topics that address and answer common customer questions and concerns. If you’re not sure what to write about, use your small business user personas to better understand customer needs.
If you’re not sure if your business needs a blog, how to do it, or more importantly you’re too busy to tackle it all on your own, let’s talk.
3. Make Your Small Biz Website Work Well
There’s nothing more annoying than clicking a button on a website that doesn’t work, or leads you in a big loop back to where you started.
Noodle around the website yourself.
Click every button. Double-check for broken links (like the ones that lead to 404 errors) or outdated pages, then remove or update them. A business website should employ a simple menu bar, be user-friendly, and be easy to navigate without a map.
Next Level SEO
You’ve followed our basic SEO tips for small business owners, you’ve implemented the easy SEO wins, built a blog, and you’re tracking your organic traffic. Now what?
Here are 3 steps for SEO-savvy entrepreneurs to kick it up a notch on a small business website:
1. Backlinks to Build Authority
Aside from having a huge team of marketing and SEO professionals behind them, digital powerhouses (aka wildly successful sites that consistently rank in the top three positions on Google) have one thing in common: lots of backlinks.
Backlinks are when other, separate websites link to your pages. Google takes this as a demonstration of your authority or trustworthiness on a given topic. It’s the digital equivalent of a referral; one site points to another website through a link and says, ‘Hey, you can find more about what you’re looking for here!
The more you can get other websites to link to your site, the more Google promotes your page. And, the more sites linking to your site, the more frequently Google will crawl and index yours. Crawling and indexing is an audit where Google takes in data about your small business website to assess its credibility and potentially boost your rank!
2. Content Clusters and Interlinking Strategy
The content on your website —everything from product pages to blog posts— should be organized thoughtfully. Pages should seamlessly lead customers through the buying journey and right into a conversion.
A content cluster gives shape to the structure of your website through pillar pages (overarching themes) and then related subtopics. We sometimes call this strategy a hub and spoke content model. Where there is one (or several) hub pages, and each hub page leads out into multiple, more specific topics within the hub.
Once the clusters (hubs and spokes) are established, think about how the content connects. You can interlink related pages together, or add hyperlinks when you mention something relevant to another piece of content on your website.
In addition to making it easy for visitors to navigate the site, and find content that's most helpful for them, it also helps the algorithm understand your site structure, giving you an advantage in the ranking game.
3. Competitive Analysis
One great thing about digital marketing is that it’s like a poker game where everyone’s cards are showing! You can easily see what your competitors are doing with their SEO in a quick search. Checking on how they are doing is the same way you’ll check in on how you’re doing, so you can do this shamelessly.
Step-by-Step Small Business SEO Competitive Analysis:
Go to your search engine of choice
Type in the short and long-tail keywords you’ve decided to focus on
See which competing businesses show up.
You might be surprised to see new or unexpected players targeting the same keywords. Or, you might find that they are gearing content to a specific audience or theme.
Review the competitors’ SEO strategies to see what’s working for them. Check for gaps where you can swoop in and take the lead. Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs (as mentioned above) can help uncover competitors' top-performing keywords, backlink sources, and content strategies.
If this is overwhelming or intimidating, don’t worry, Big Bad Marketing is here to help.
When Do You Need a Small Business SEO Expert?
As a solopreneur or one-person-show, trying to juggle digital success AND single-handedly managing the day-to-day operations of your business can be impossible. Working with a top notch digital marketing agency takes the intimidation factor out of small business SEO. This makes winning at digital marketing a little less daunting.
Consider getting expert support for your business SEO if:
You don’t know how to do any of this
You’ve outgrown the DIY SEO for small business steps
You need help figuring out if what you’re doing is working
You’re ready to kick it up a notch
You need a big, bad comprehensive marketing strategy
You want more traffic, more conversions, more sales, more revenue, and world domination
Level Up Your Small Business SEO
SEO is a long game. Play it sustainably.
Challenge yourself to start with just one thing, like updating a meta title on a single webpage, or looking up the organic traffic to your website.
The sites with the most SEO success are the ones who approach with consistency. Take your time, and do it right. Partner with a team of experts to get your website to bring in the big bucks!
