Over 64% of marketers actively invest in search engine optimization.
(HubSpot, 2020)

Whether your SEO is in-house or if you would like to do some prep work and bring it to your agency, I hope that as a small business owner, you may find these low-budget and small time investment ways of jumpstarting SEO helpful.

When it comes to being visible to your audience, paid ad placement is not the only avenue you should be using. If you haven’t directed any marketing budget for search engine optimization, then you are sorely losing out on valuable space, and you’re practically giving away free space to your competitors.

Are you showing up where your customers are looking?

According to Google:

  • “Where to buy” + “near me” mobile queries have grown by over 200% in the past two years.
  • 72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles.

If you’re ready to begin search engine optimization, then it’s time to formulate how it is you want to reach your audiences.  But, what if you’re short on ideas of how to start? Fear not. This is exactly why I’m writing this blog.  Every now and then a little jumpstart is needed to understand how to get from point A to point B.

Keep in mind that I suggest having the Google keyword tool handy below. Even though this keyword tool is made for using with Google AdWords, it is equally useful  for researching keywords for organic ads.

There are some basic things you can be doing now to start targeting your user organically:

  1. Understand the kinds of questions they’re asking. Very easily, you can get an idea of what your audience finds relevant. Start with using the Google suggest feature – that is, the Google search bar that auto suggests some other queries relevant to your query.  Input some general words that would describe your product or service and note the suggestions that come up. You can also leverage some more keyword suggestion tools that are listed here . Then, go ahead and use those suggested queries with a free keyword research tool to help you refine those keywords.
  2. Look to Google, once again. What are your competitors ranking for in their paid search ads? If they’re paying for that ad spot on Google, you may very likely see that there are keywords there you can optimize for in your organic optimization.
  3. What kinds of questions have customers brought to you? Any common questions that have been brought to you regarding your product or service can be leveraged for you to be more understanding of where your audience is coming from. Remember, there will be different personas and use cases for your product or service. Keep this in mind when thinking about how your audience is thinking about your product or service. Leverage the questions with the same kind of free keyword tool mentioned above to help you optimize for different keywords and key phrases.
  4. Browser plugins will be your new best friends.  There are plenty of SEO Chrome extensions you can use to help you jog your brain for keyword ideas. These tools allow you to capture on-page SEO of other websites. Of course, if you see a lot of non-relevant keywords, there may not be an SEO strategy in place, and that’s for a different blog.  Use SEO plugins to audit your competitor pages, your own web pages and perhaps any other industry websites to see if any of the keywords or key phrases captured may be a good fit for your keyword research plan.
  5. I must emphasize – don’t forget to optimize for local search! If you haven’t yet set up that Google, Bing, Yahoo or other business listings, drop what you’re doing and do so immediately. Then, optimize for your local listings.  Looking for help to do this? Then send us a shout.