When it comes to doing any form of marketing for your independent brand or small business, it really helps to have a strategy in place. SEO is no different. A clear SEO strategy is required if you want to drive relevant organic traffic to your website and ultimately drive more sales. However, creating your SEO strategy need not be complicated. My guide shows you how to create an SEO strategy for your small business, even if you are an SEO beginner.
How to Create an SEO Strategy (Skip to a Section)
Step 1: Audit Your Website and Your Business
Effective SEO starts with a functional website that offers a good user experience. Your website visitors are potential customers or clients, who must be able to find the information they need, contact you, and carry out the conversion action (e.g. a purchase, booking or enquiry) that you want them to do. Not only is user experience key to driving conversions, it is also part of SEO best practice, and a poorly-built website can impact your rankings. After all, what's the point in people finding your website if they cannot find what they need, get in touch or make the purchase or booking?
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.
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 This can help you to spot any issues that need fixing, such as broken links / buttons, checkout issues and missing or outdated information. There are also free website auditing tools available online, which can highlight 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.
Need help, or want an expert's insight? I offer an SEO audit service!
If you want to understand how your website is currently performing, so that you can either carry out your own SEO campaign or work with me on one of my SEO coaching or SEO consultancy packages, then my SEO audit service is the place to start!
For small businesses looking to invest time and effort in carrying out their own SEO, or who want to work with me on an SEO coaching basis, my Essential SEO Audit is ideal. Choose up to 3 pages on your website for me to analyse, and I will provide you with bespoke, actionable recommendations for how you could improve your rankings, technical SEO and user experience. You will receive everything as an easy-to-understand written report, and we will go through everything on a 90-minute Zoom call.
For businesses considering working with me on a consultancy basis, or who have in-house SEO expertise, my Full SEO Audit is just what you need. My Full SEO Audit provides an in-depth analysis of your entire website, providing you with an overview of how your website is performing, where the issues are and the actions you can take to improve your website's SEO. Not only can you save time on auditing your own website, but you can be safe in the knowledge that you are on the right track when you come to optimising your website.
If you would like to book either SEO audit package, visit my SEO audits page to find out more and book. Alternatively, please feel free to contact me to enquire.
Step 2: Know What to Optimise For: Keyword Research
When you carry out SEO on your website, the aim is to drive organic (free) traffic to your website from search engines such as Google. So, when your target audience searches for relevant products, services or topics, your website can appear on that first page of results.
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.
Your target keywords need to be selected carefully:
They must be relevant to your business,
They must be relevant to your audience (i.e. are people actually using them?)
They need to have a purpose (i.e. what are people looking for when they use that keyword? Are they seeking information, or are they actively looking to buy?)
Broadly speaking, you can split keywords into two main categories.
Commercial keywords: The first category contains keywords that directly describe a product or service. These keywords will usually 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.
It is a good idea to target a spread of keywords, perhaps leaning into the less competitive ones to start with. You can always go back in 6-12 months, reassess your keywords and start targeting more competitive ones. The example below illustrates why your choice of keywords is so important to SEO success.
Example: Online Retailer Selling Horse Riding Boots
An online retailer of riding boots will probably want to target obvious keywords such as “horse riding boots”, “ladies riding boots” and “children’s riding boots”. The keyword “horse riding boots” has a search volume of over 8,000 and a keyword difficulty of 30 (SE Ranking, April 2024). It has a commercial intent, meaning people use this keyword when they are looking to make a purchase (in this case they're looking to buy riding boots). This makes it a relatively valuable but also competitive keyword.
On the other hand, “how much are horse riding boots” has a search volume of 10 and a keyword difficulty of 13 (SE Ranking, April 2024). This makes it an easier keyword to rank for. However, the search intent is informational, meaning people use this keyword to carry out research. They aren't actively looking to make a purchase at this time.
Which of these keywords should our online equestrian retailer target? There is no right or wrong answer, as it depends on so many factors. One is easy to rank for but won't bring many sales (at least not as quickly), whilst the other is more difficult to rank for but could lead to significant sales if you can get onto that first page! My advice would be to target both. Use "horse riding boots" on a product or category page, and "how much are horse riding boots" for a blog article that compares the various brands and types of riding boot that the retailer stocks.
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.
SEO consultants like myself use more specialised tools such as 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.
Keyword Allocation
Every page of your website needs a focus keyword, and this should ideally be unique to every page (although this is not always possible). Ideally, you should also allocate secondary keywords to each page. This will take some time, because you will need to organise your keywords based on where they are most relevant, factoring in search intent, competition and search volume.
SEO Tip: Create a spreadsheet with columns for your pages, their allocated keywords, SEO Titles, SEO Descriptions and h1 tags.
SEO Strategy Consulting
If you want to take the legwork out of your SEO strategy creation, I offer SEO Strategy Sessions to independent business owners who want a bespoke, 3-month SEO strategy created for them to implement. I also offer SEO strategy consulting as part of my SEO and content consultancy services.
Step 3: Essential On-Page SEO
This next bit sounds a bit technical, but it’s actually basic SEO and you can absolutely DIY it. 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.
SEO Titles & Descriptions
If you don’t specify SEO titles or descriptions, Google will just pull one 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.
Your website CMS should indicate where you need to enter your SEO titles and descriptions (it's really straightforward in WordPress, Wix and Shopify). If you aren’t sure, visit the help section for your CMS.
For more detailed instructions, read my how-to guides on writing SEO Titles and SEO Descriptions.
H1 Tags
H1 (header 1) tags also tell Google 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”. Again, refer to your website CMS help section for assistance.
Your H1 should include your focus keyword. It needs to clearly state what the page is about, and it should be different from your SEO Title.
SEO Essentials Courses for Beginners
If you have a WordPress, Wix or Shopify website and you want step-by-step guides and extra tips on writing and adding your SEO titles and descriptions, my SEO Essentials courses are a great place to start. Each course comes with full lifetime access, so you will receive any updates or extras as they become available, at no additional cost to you. Visit the Purple Horse Marketing Academy to enrol!
Step 4: Create Your SEO Strategy Schedule
You now have your basic SEO strategy mapped out. This will form the foundations of your wider SEO efforts, which you can carry out over several 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. This involves adding keywords to your website text, writing optimised blog articles for your target audience and optimising the images on your website. I will cover on-page SEO and blogging in other guides.
Once you have completed the steps in this guide, you will have made a really good start on your SEO strategy. Whilst this stage may seem tedious, it will allow you to embark on your SEO campaign safe in the knowledge that you are on the right track.
If you want a short, quick win, you can go ahead and add your new SEO titles and descriptions and h1 tags to your website pages straight away. Then, you can go back and optimise the page text and images on each website page individually. This is how I carry out my own SEO strategy and I usually find it provides a modest SEO boost within a few weeks.
SEO Strategy Consulting Services
Since 2020, I have helped many independent and small businesses get found online with SEO. My SEO consultancy services, SEO coaching programmes and self-study courses help my clients captivate, connect with and convert their target audience.
My aim is to help my clients transform their websites into revenue-generating assets. I offer a range of SEO consultancy services to UK businesses, including SEO strategy sessions, SEO auditing and SEO consultancy packages.
Book your free Discovery Call to discover how your business could grow online through SEO, and explore how you can transform your website into a revenue-generating asset.
About the Author
Rhiannon is an SEO consultant and Associate of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (ACIM). Her aim is to help independent brands, service providers and small business owners transform their websites into revenue-generating assets through search engine optimisation and blogging. Rhiannon specialises in helping her clients captivate, connect with and convert their target audience into clients or customers, through on-page SEO and strategic blogging.
