How to Create an SEO Strategy for Your Small Business: A Step-by-Step Guide
- Rhiannon
- Oct 15, 2022
- 13 min read
Updated: Jun 18
Creating an SEO strategy for your small business doesn’t need to be overwhelming, and having a clear plan makes all the difference. Whether you've just launched your first small business website, or want to improve the performance of your existing website, this beginners' guide will walk you through how to create an SEO strategy for your small business that gets results, in five steps. From identifying your target audience to doing keyword research and planning your content, you’ll learn how to increase your visibility, drive more website visitors, and grow your small business online — even with limited time or budget.
TL; DR: In a hurry? Here's a quick summary:
SEO strategy is important for small businesses, as it helps you focus your efforts on the SEO keywords and tasks that will drive results. It will also help you stay organised and consistent with your SEO strategy and SEO management. Here's a quick overview of how to create an SEO strategy for your small business in 5 steps:
Identify Your Target Audience and Your Target Audience - Know who you are targeting, what problem or need you solve, and how you help your target clients / customers solve their problem or need. This is critical!
Audit Your Website - Use your website as though you are a visitor or potential customer. Identify any user experience (UX) issues, such as broken links or outdated information, and fix these for a (relatively) quick win!
Keyword Research - Identify on a short list of highly relevant and attainable keywords. Identify a list of commercial keywords for your product / service pages, and some informational keywords for your blog posts.
Carry Out Essential On-Page SEO - Ensure the focus keyword for each page appears in key places, including the SEO title and h1 heading tag.
Create Your SEO Schedule - Prioritise the pages you want to drive traffic to, and commit to optimising a page or blog post each month. Focus on one page and one keyword at a time to make faster progress.
Why is SEO Strategy Important for Small Businesses?
Having an SEO strategy is important for small businesses because it helps you to focus your time and effort on what matters most. Instead of guessing, you will have a clear plan to improve your search engine rankings and website traffic. Here's why SEO strategy matters for small businesses:
Target the right keywords - A small business SEO strategy will help you know which search terms to target with each page, so you reach the right people.
Improve your search engine rankings faster - With a clear SEO plan, you can move up the rankings and get results more quickly.
Save time and effort - An SEO strategy will allow you to focus on the SEO tasks that will make the biggest difference, whilst staying organised.
Drive the right people to your website - A clear small business SEO strategy will help you drive your target audience to your website, whether that's local customers or people actively seeking your products or services.
Support organic, long-term growth - A strong SEO strategy will help drive organic, sustained visibility and traffic to your small business.
SEO is an extensive, ongoing project that can quickly become overwhelming. Therefore, having a clear small business SEO strategy in place will help you get the results you want, without wasting time and effort on low-impact tasks.
How to Create an SEO Strategy for Your Small Business in 5 Steps
SEO is an ongoing project, and with everything it involves, it can quickly become overwhelming. However, most small businesses can start by focusing on the basics. I've broken the process down into five steps, designed to help small business owners focus on the SEO tasks that will make the biggest impact. If you want to partner with a professional small business SEO consultant, take a look at my affordable SEO services for small businesses and book a complimentary discovery call for a no-obligation chat.
Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience and Your Niche
Before you optimise your small business website for search engines or answer engines, you must know who your target audience is. Your target audience will inform every step of your SEO strategy — from your choice of keywords to your blog content. Failing to speak to a clear target audience is one of the top reasons why small business websites fail to drive growth. Therefore, identifying your niche — i.e. the specific problem you solve, and who you solve it for — is the crucial first step in creating an SEO strategy for your small business.
Why is it so important to identify your target audience when doing SEO?
Your SEO strategy is there to drive visitors to your website. If you want this traffic to turn into enquiries and sales, them you need the right people to find your website. Here's why identifying your target audience is the critical first step in your SEO strategy:
It will save you from spreading yourself too thin - Having a specific niche in mind when doing your SEO will help you focus on a narrow set of keywords, making the task more straightforward and less daunting.
It will support better enquiries and more sales - By speaking directly to your target audience, your SEO strategy will have a better chance of attracting the people who want your products or services.
You can probably help lots of different people solve lots of different problems. However, when you are an independent business owner, who is managing your own marketing and spinning all the plates, focusing on one thing at a time is crucial. Focusing on your core target audience will help you get better results, quicker, because you'll be establishing your brand as the expert, solution, or answer to a specific problem or desire, rather than just one voice among many.
How do you identify your target audience as a small business?
When trying to identify your target audience, consider the following:
Who do you most love working with? Who are your best, happiest clients or customers, who have had the best results or left the best testimonials?
What problem do you most often come across when people enquire? What is it they are trying to achieve or solve?
What do your customers say about your business? What words and phrases commonly come up in customer messages, testimonials, and reviews?
Your target audience does not need to be a sector or demographic. It can be a specific as the common values, goals, problems, or obstacles faced by the people you want to help.
Step 2: Audit Your Website for User Experience
SEO is not a five-minute job, and it does not offer immediate results. However, there are tasks you can do today that could start to improve your website's rankings within a week or so. By auditing your website and fixing common user experience issues such as broken links, you can make some SEO quick wins.
Why is it important to audit a website?
A good user experience (UX) is part of SEO. Broken links, slow leading, and poor website structure can all affect your website's UX and your SEO. A website audit is important for several reasons:
User experience issues can impact your SEO - You can have the best keyword strategy and fantastic content, but technical problems will hold your website back.
Poor user experience can result in lost conversions - High rankings and lots of traffic are pointless if your website visitors cannot find the information they need, or aren't able to checkout.
Your website does not have to be big, expensive or fancy. However, it does need to be well-structured and functional. The path to checking out, signing up, or enquiring should be easy to follow and require as few steps as possible. Before diving into blogging and optimising your website for keywords, check that your customers can easily use your website to book, buy, or enquire.
Can I audit my own small business website?
You can audit your website yourself by using it as a customer would. This can help you to spot any issues that need fixing, such as broken links or buttons, checkout issues and missing or outdated information. There are also free website auditing tools available online, which can highlight some technical SEO issues.
A word of caution: If using an SEO auditing tool, you will almost certainly receive a list of errors, warnings and notices, along with suggestions for how to fix these issues. I always advice my clients to exercise a degree of caution when following any SEO audit as though it were a checklist. This is because, sometimes, we can actually make things worse in the process of "fixing" them, because the fix causes further SEO issues! For example, I have known business owners to change almost every URL / slug on their website because the audit tells them to shorten it or add a keyword. This inevitably leads to more broken links, redirect chains, and general chaos and confusion for little to no real gain. Always consider the risk-reward balance, and if you aren't sure about something, seek professional advice.
Step 3: Carry Out SEO Keyword Research
Keyword research is critical to a small business SEO strategy that is organised, structured, and effective. Your SEO strategy will be centred around a list of target keywords, which you will need to select carefully. The number of keywords you target will depend on the size of your website and the type of business. Larger websites will require more keywords, whilst smaller websites and niche businesses may need to target fewer keywords. As a rough guide to get you started, you want to aim for one keyword for every website page that you want to rank.
If you need help with keyword research for your small business, my SEO keyword research service gives you the keyword clarity you need to get your SEO strategy off the ground, and start ranking for the keywords that will work for your business.
How do I choose the right SEO keywords for my small business website?
Your target keywords need to be selected carefully. Whilst you will change your target keywords as your small business SEO strategy evolves, it is important to choose relevant but attainable keywords initially. This will give you the best chance of driving some organic traffic relatively quickly, giving you something to build on. Here are some guidelines for choosing SEO keywords for your small business:
Your SEO keywords must be relevant to your business - Your SEO keywords should describe your business, products, services, solutions, expertise or subject area.
Your SEO keywords must be relevant to your audience - Try to identify the keywords your target audience would use.
Your SEO keywords need to have intent - What are people looking for when they use that keyword? Are they seeking information, or are they actively looking to buy? Can you create content to captivate, connect, or convert off the back of that keyword?)
Your SEO keywords must be specific - Generally speaking (but not always), a more specific keyword with a lower search volume is a better target than a broader keyword with a higher search volume. This is because a specific, low-search volume keyword is likely to be easier to rank for and will drive the most relevant traffic.
Types of SEO keyword: commercial and informational
Broadly speaking, you can split SEO keywords into two main categories.
Commercial keywords: The first category contains keywords that directly describe a product or service. These keywords will usually (but not always) have a relatively high search volume, and they will often be more competitive. However, these keywords are often "high intent", meaning the people searching them are more likely to be actively looking to make a purchase, enquiry or booking. These keywords are likely to appear across your website, especially on your product / service pages.
Informational keywords: The second category contains (usually) longer, more specific keywords. These keywords often include questions or "how to" searches. These keywords are often less competitive, but they may have lower search volumes and a "low intent" because the search engine user is not actively looking to buy something - they are simply seeking information. These keywords can make really good blog topics because they can help you build visibility and credibility among people who are new to your brand and who may one day become customers.
When optimising your small business website for the first time, it is a good idea to focus on commercial keywords because these keywords are more likely to drive high-intent traffic from people who are actively looking to purchase.
Keyword research example: Online equestrian retailer
Imagine you are an online equestrian retailer, and you sell riding boots. Your riding boots include women's, children's, long boots, short boots, black boots and brown boots. Below is a list of some of the SEO keywords you could target, along with their search volumes, keyword difficulty, and search intent:
Keyword | Search Volume (average monthly) | Difficulty | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|
horse riding boots | 8,100 | 28 | commercial |
women's riding boots | 270 | 6 | commercial |
childrens jodhpur boots | 590 | 2 | commercial |
womens black riding boots | 480 | 3 | commercial |
what shoes to wear for horseback riding | 30 | 6 | informational |
Based on the information above, which SEO keywords would you focus on? Here's my answer:
Start by targeting the middle three keywords: "women's riding boots", "childrens jodhpur boots" and "womens black riding boots". Ideally, have your e-commerce website set up so that each of these keywords represents a category or a sub-category. Integrate these keywords into individual product pages where relevant.
Why? These keywords are very specific, have commercial intent, have a reasonable search volume and are very low in terms of keyword difficulty. They will be relatively easy to rank for, and they will bring people to your website who are ready to buy.
As for the other two keywords, these could form part of your longer-term small business SEO strategy. The keyword "what shoes to wear for horseback riding" could make a great blog post aimed at people new to horse riding. You can explain what makes a safe, comfortable riding boot, and outline why it's worth investing in a pair of proper riding boots. You can also link the blog post to some of the riding boots you recommend for beginner riders — perhaps some budget-friendly jodhpur boots, for example?
Traffic from this keyword is less likely to result in a quick sale, but it could help grow your brand visibility among new horse riders, and establish trust and recognition ready for when those people come to purchase.
The final keyword — "horse riding boots" — is much more competitive than the other keywords, with a very high search volume. It's also less specific that the middle three keywords, making it harder to target the right people. This keyword is one for your long-term SEO strategy. With consistent efforts, laser-focused on the more specific keywords, you could rank for "horse riding boots", but I would not waste time trying to get a brand new website or very small business to rank for it. Your time would be better spent driving traffic (and sales) from the more attainable keywords.
What are the best free keyword research tools?
There are several free or cheap keyword research tools available. Google Trends, Ahrefs and Chat GPT are three options, and they will help you get started. I use SE Ranking, which allows my clients to benefit from keyword research that is based on recent, detailed data and in-depth insights that you cannot get using free tools.
Step 4: Essential On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to optimisation of the website page itself. Every page on your website needs an SEO title, an SEO description (also known as meta titles and descriptions) and a h1 (header 1) tag to get started. Your CMS help section will show you where to update your SEO titles, SEO descriptions, and h1 tags.
Create a spreadsheet to keep track of your pages, target keywords, and progress. Have a column for each item (e.g. seo title, seo description, h1 tag, etc.) and a row for each page. Then, mark the items that have been optimised.
Optimising your SEO titles & descriptions
If you don’t specify SEO titles or descriptions, Google will just pull them from the text on the page. SEO titles and descriptions are what you see when you search for something in Google. Each search result has an SEO title (in blue) and an SEO description (in black / grey), and they are used by search engines and search engine users to identify what the website page is about.
Your SEO title should be around 55-60 characters long and it should include your focus keyword. Your SEO description should also include your focus keyword, but it should be around 155-160 characters long. Use an online character counter to check the length of your SEO titles and descriptions.
For more detailed instructions, read my how-to guides on writing SEO Titles and SEO Descriptions.
Optimising your h1 tags
H1 (header 1) tags also tell search engines and your readers what is on the website page. They appear on the page itself, usually at the top. In your CMS, they will be marked or formatted as “h1” or "heading 1". Again, refer to your website CMS help section for assistance.
Your h1 should include your focus keyword for that page. It needs to clearly state what the page is about, and it should be different from your SEO Title.
These are just the basics
SEO titles, SEO descriptions, and h1 tags are the very basics of on-page SEO. For best results, you should also optimise your subheadings, body text, images, CTA buttons and your website / page structure. Other, more technical elements, such as sitemaps, page load speed, and schema markup will also form part of an effective small business SEO strategy. Explore my SEO services for small businesses and book your complimentary discovery call if you want to partner with a professional SEO consultant who specialises in supporting small businesses.
Step 5: Create Your SEO Strategy Schedule for Your Small Business
You now have your basic small business SEO strategy mapped out. This will form the foundations of your wider SEO efforts, which you can carry out over several weeks or months depending on your time constraints.
Depending on how much time you have to commit to your SEO, you could aim to optimise one or two pages every month and write a blog article each month.
Once you have completed the steps in this guide, you will have made a really good start on your small business SEO strategy. Creating an SEO strategy for your small business will allow you to embark on your SEO campaign safe in the knowledge that you are on the right track, and it can offer some relatively quick wins when you optimise the right pages for attainable keywords.
SEO Coaching and Consultancy for Small Businesses and Introverted Entrepreneurs
I specialise in helping small business owners and introverted entrepreneurs liberate themselves from marketing burnout and maximise their website as a revenue-generating asset, so that they can grow their business authentically — without exhausting launches, constant social media visibility, or feeling like they have to be someone they're not.
My clients include equine businesses, local businesses, online service providers and introverted small business owners who want organic, sustainable online growth. They work with me on a range of affordable SEO services for small businesses, including project-based done-for-you services and marketing training and support programmes. Whether you require small business SEO strategy, blog content writing, or SEO migration, I can offer support that is tailored to your business and marketing goals.
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About the Author: Rhiannon Harradine ACIM
Rhiannon is an independent marketing consultant and Associate of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (ACIM), who has been supporting small businesses with their marketing since 2020. She helps small business owners and introverted entrepreneurs liberate themselves from marketing burnout, and use SEO, blogging, and email marketing to grow their businesses authentically — without exhausting launches, constant social media visibility, or feeling like they have to be someone they're not.
