What are the Main SEO Challenges for Small and Medium Sized Companies?
By Shamit Khemka
Introduction SEO can seem daunting to small businesses. There’s content, coding, organic search, paid search and more to consider. It’s nothing a little effective online marketing can’t cure. I’ve listed several common small business SEO ailments, their symptoms, and offer a few tried-and-true remedies.
1st - Creating Content Small & medium businesses are betting on content marketing. According to eMarketer, 74% of small businesses planned to increase their content efforts in 2013. The trend continues for 2014. Dos: • Start by setting up an editorial calendar for the year. Then you can tackle content in chunks – by month, week, or even day. • Also, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when creating content. You can repurpose content for use across various channels.
2nd - Promoting Content Even the best content is useless unless your prospects and customers can find it. Start by promoting your content to current customers and subscribers via email, social media, etc. They will be your advocates as they share the content with their networks. Next, email people that have an established audience that matches your target reader or customer. Identify a website that has an audience. Create content that would be valuable for their audience. Write an email introducing yourself to the website owner and share your piece of content.
3rd - Brand Recognition Increasing sales and growing your business is the ultimate goal and an important way of doing that today is to build brand recognition. Provide good products and services so your customers share positive reviews (trust). Establish your business as an expert in its field (authority). You can do this with relevant content, customer reviews, webinars/videos/podcasts, presenting at conferences, and more. You also can create goodwill by participating in fundraisers (reputation).
4th - Putting the SEO in Social If you’ve created a presence on key social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and others then kudos to you. But that’s not enough. Just as you use keywords and keyword phrases in your site content, do the same on your social media sites. For example, back in 2011, Twitter was handling 1.6 billion searches per day. People are searching on social media sites like Twitter to find specific information. It’s the next evolution in search and social.
5th - Mobile is a "Must" Just when you think you’ve got a handle on SEO, along comes mobile. No matter how big or small your business is you can’t ignore mobile. Mobile now accounts for over 13% of all Internet browsing compared to 10% one year ago (via Net Market Share, Browsing By Device Category Trend).
Concluding Comments First- focus on the quick wins first. This is basic cleanup for your SEO strategy. Second- content is the highest priority for many small businesses. Finally- start implementing a mobile strategy for your website.
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