Organic SEO for Small Business: Free Tips & Tricks

Organic SEO simply means that you’re not paying for search engine traffic. You’re pleasing the search engines by formatting your website correctly, keeping your content updated, and are getting inbound links from sites that they respect.

When someone wants to learn more about your business, the first thing they’re likely to do is “Google” your business name. So right now, before we go any further, I’d like you to Google your business name. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

If you’ve optimized correctly, you’re likely to find these things in the top results on page one in Google:

• Your website
• Your local business listing in Google (complete with contact info and map)
• Your Facebook profile
• Your Yelp reviews
• Your Twitter profile

These listings give a customer every opportunity to get in touch with you by their preferred method of contact, but they also offer powerful inbound links to your website, which can’t be stressed enough.

The basics of organic SEO for small business

Make sure that the title tag of your website includes the name of your website, and also any keywords that people may be using to find your business. Also include a proper description that tells people who see your listing in Google, who you are and what you do.

Here are some great combos for some small businesses who have properly labeled their businesses.

And below is what happens when you don’t tell Google what to use as your title or description. When you don’t tell search engines what to display, they will try and figure it out for themselves, which isn’t always relevant or helpful.

Learn more about meta tags and how to use them on your website.

How social media affects your SEO rank

Owning page one: First of all, you want to own page one in Google. When someone searches for the name of your business, you want every listing that shows up on the first page to be about you. Your best method for doing this is to launch your social media profiles. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Yelp are all great sites to start with that get ranked very well. This also knocks out any similarly named businesses from the listings so that people click on the right links to your business.

Indexing your site faster: Any link you post back to your website via a social network like Facebook or Twitter will give you extra Google juice. If you are posting blogs, it will get them indexed in Google and showing up in search results about 10x faster than just posting them and waiting for people to show up.

Ranking your site higher: Google uses social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as leverage for credibility. The more people re-share your content on these social networks, the better reputation you have with the search engine Gods. This is especially important if you have a blog on your site, because those blog posts will get ranked higher, the more “likes” and “retweets” each individual post has.

Getting into Google local search

Another way to own a listing in Google is to add your businesses to Google Places, which will give you a local listing in search results, which includes your address, phone number, map and anything else you want to add to your profile. It also offers you analytics as to how people find you.

Being listed in Google Places is also important because it means you’ll show up when someone locally is searching for something related to your business. So for example, if you’re a Boston burger joint, and someone in Boston searches for “burgers”, they might get your listing before they get a more generic listing like Burger King.

Dishing out updates and expertise via blogs

Since your website doesn’t change often, search engines won’t index it often, and Google really likes fresh content. So if you and a competitor had the exact same website, using the exact same keywords and the exact same copy, you’d find yourself ranking higher than them if you added a blog on your site and they didn’t.

Blog posts also offer you unlimited opportunities to get ranked on new keywords. If you are a coffee shop, you could offer how-to’s on Latte Art, or if you’re a restaurant, you could offer secret recipes.

So let’s think of an example. You’re a bakery and you make great pies. You decide to share a blackberry pie recipe, so you use the Google Keyword tool to find out what people are looking for.

• You type in what you want to write about
• You choose the “Only show search ideas related to my search terms box”
• Google returns results keyword phrases that people are searching for
• You click the “exact match” results, which will tell you how many people are looking for those exact keyword phrases

Since “Blackberry Pie Recipe with Fresh Blackberries” has 880 people searching for it per month (and 720 local), you’ll want to find out if you have any chance of ranking for it when you title your blog post something like “Our Best Blackberry Pie Recipe with Fresh Blackberries“.

• You google “Blackberry Pie Recipe with Fresh Blackberries” in quotes so that you can see how many people are searching for that exact phrase.
• Google tells you there are only 1,790 pages on the web competing for that phrase.

As a small business, if you can find a keyword phrase with any search competition under 5,000, you’re likely to get ranked on your given keyword. Closer to 10 and 20k pages of competition can get trickier but can often be worth it to try.

If you begin to implement all of these strategies today, I can practically guarantee that you’re going to start seeing a lot more website traffic and personal interaction with your small business. When it comes to SEO, organic is the way to go.