51% of website traffic comes from organic search results and 92% of those searches are done on Google.

As a small business owner, you don’t want to be left behind and let your business suffer due to lack of traffic and customers.

All your effort to create a website and content on your website is ineffective if your content is not found by Google, not deemed relevant to important topics that the customers are searching for and not ranked high enough for people to see it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps you ensure that your website and your content are found by Google, indexed as relevant for the topics your business cares about and start ranking higher so that customers can see it and visit your website and ultimately your store.

In order for you to drive organic (without spending money on paid search) traffic to your business, you need -- high-quality fresh content and high domain authority (authority for your website).

In this article, you will learn to drive organic traffic to your website with this 8 step guide to creating and executing the SEO strategy for your small business or startup:

1. Define SEO strategy for your small business
2. Create high-quality content that solves a problem for your customers
3. Register with search engines to make your new web pages searchable
4. Learn about your competition so that you know who you need to beat to be on page #1
5. Build domain authority for your website by building backlinks
6. Learn link building strategies that work
7. Do On-page SEO right to make content readable to consumers and search engines
8. Identify and measure key metrics so that you are not shooting in the dark

Google values website that demonstrates Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT) and ranks them higher.

In addition to solving problems for the consumer, your SEO strategy must focus on Discovery, Relevance, and Ranking.

If you publish high-quality, fresh content on a regular basis, then the Google search engine would find this content fresh.

If your content is highly relevant to the topic and searches around that topic, your authors are credible, and other reputed sites are referring to your content then the search engines find your content authoritative.

If you focus on certain topics and build a reputation that demonstrates expertise in those topics then your site becomes a trustworthy site for those topics.

In a nutshell, your SEO strategy boils down to two things:

1. Create high-quality content consistently on topics you want to own so that the search engine can find your content and its relevance to the keywords and the topic. If you don’t have fresh content, there is nothing for the search engine to do.
2. Increase domain authority for your website by getting backlinks from other reputed websites so that you increase authority and ranking of your website.

You can find more information about how you can create a content and blogging strategy on our blog which offers the Step-by-step guide to the blogging strategy for your small business.

You can also find a more holistic guide around digital marketing and download the definitive guide to digital marketing for small businesses and startups.

Blogging is one of the most inexpensive and effective ways to drive organic traffic to your small business website.

Every week, on the selected days, if you start publishing fresh blogs focused on the topics that your customers care about, you will start seeing growth in your traffic. It will also start improving your authority, relevance, trust, and ultimately ranking with Google search engine.

Your content must include the keywords you are targeting for search engine as well as long-tail keywords (or topic keywords) so that it is discovered when the consumers search.

You can learn more about how to start creating a topic cluster and start building expertise around specific topics with consistent blogging, by reading the Step-by-step guide to the blogging strategy for your small business.

If your new web page is not registered with the search engine, it will not be discovered and indexed and it will sit on the shelf without being shown to the consumers who are searching.

Once your new web page or blog is published on your website, you can go to Google Search Console and type the URL of the new content page in “Inspect New URL”.

Since it is a new page and it is not indexed, Google will tell you “the URL is not on Google”.

At this point, you click on “Request Indexing” to request your new web page to be indexed so that Google can find it and display if someone searches for relevant topic or keywords.

It is important to understand that when consumers search on Google, what content is ranking high and showing up on the first page of the search.

The pages that are showing up on the first page of search results are doing something right and you need to figure out what they are doing right and who you are up against.

For example, if you are trying to be known for the topic – “Thanksgiving turkey recipe”, you will find several pages on the 1st page of Google search.

For example, let’s assume, one of the pages that shows up on the 1st page is https://cafedelites.com/roast-turkey/

You use the Ahref authority checker: and type this URL for the roast turkey to check on the Domain Authority, backlinks and other metrics. You might see the result as be

Ideally, you will check this for every URL that shows up on the 1st page of the search for “Thanksgiving turkey recipe”.

This will give you what Domain Authority score and how many backlinks the successful pages have. You can compare those to the domain authority and number of backlinks to your website and you will know that you have some work to do in terms of building backlinks.

Additionally, the pages that are already successful are doing something right. You can check their look and feel as well as the structure of the pages. You need to adopt to what’s already working and keep the structure of your new webpage for “Thanksgiving turkey recipe” similar.

You can differentiate with your unique content and you should. However, the structure of the page should be similar to the successful pages since Google seems to like that. For example, if each one of them has a video at the beginning of the page, you should consider having that too.

Lastly, in order for you to start showing up on the 1st page of this search, your content quality, the number of backlinks (as well as the quality of them) and ultimately the domain authority needs to be higher than your competition.

In order for you to start showing up on the 1st page of this search, your content quality, the number of backlinks (and quality of them) and ultimately the domain authority need to be higher than your competition.

Let’s start looking into how to build domain authority for your website.

First, your content has to be discovered, then your content has to be relevant and then your website has to have authority – if any one of these doesn’t happen, your chances of ranking higher diminish rapidly.

Hence, once you have high-quality, relevant and fresh content, building the domain (or website) authority becomes very important.

You can build domain authority for your small business website by:

1. Focusing on topics you want to be known for and writing content that is focused, relevant and fresh would help you with the relevance and eventually with authority
2. Ensuring that you have credible authors as their credentials help increase the authority
3. Distributing your content so that is talked about in the articles, press or social media by reputed websites so that the authority of your website goes up
4. Building backlinks to your website from another reputed websites who are citing or referring your content via backlinks, to improve the authority and trust of your site

For example, if you are cited or referenced by reputed sites such as Forbes or a reputed US university or a Fortune 500 company, or any other site with high domain authority, the authority and trust of your website starts going up. You can use Ahref’s website authority checker to check the domain authority for your site and other sites.

Once you have high-quality content and it is consistently fresh, building backlinks becomes extremely important. Without the site authority, your great content will sit on the shelf and won’t get noticed.

Why would a reputed brand refer your small business via a backlink to your website? What are the right sites to seek backlinks from instead of shooting in dark?

You can be very strategic and disciplined about identifying the right websites and authors and then requesting and building the backlinks.

Identifying the right targets for backlinks:

1. Check existing backlinks: first, check the existing backlinks to your website by using Ahref’s backlink.
2. Check competitor’s backlinks: Then check who your competition is getting backlinks from. You can use the backlink opportunity checker from UberSuggest tool from Neil Patel to find additional targets who are already backlinking your competitor’s websites. They are likely to have synergies with your business as well and hence more open to backlinks.
3. Major media outlets or brands in your industry: Think of major media outlets or companies who are synergistic to what you do and there could be a mutual benefit in providing a backlink to your business.

Once you identify the targets for backlinks, here are a few simple techniques you could use to get the backlinks from highly reputed websites that you care about:

1. Build a relationship: Follow the authors from your target brands on social media, comment on their posts with your insights and start building the relationship and trust before you ask for a backlink.
2. Offer help instead before asking: Inform the author about a broken link on their site to establish a connection and then request for a backlink. This way, you helped them a little before asking for a backlink.
3. Tell what’s in it for them: When you reach out, make sure you have referred their website in your content and you are clearly telling them “how they would benefit” or “how both businesses have synergies” instead of just begging or requesting for a backlink.
4. Respond to Press Alert Requests: Press release alert requests from HARO or Source Bottle can be a goldmine for backlinks since you can get backlinks from very reported magazines without spending a lot of time. These sites connect the journalists to the people or experts who could be the “source” of news or information. If you subscribe to these press alert requests and respond to the ones that are relevant to your business with the information or quote the journalist is looking for, you are likely to get a backlink in the article the journalist is writing. The key is to respond quickly.
5. Be a guest blogger or writer for a reputed site:Being a guest blogger or writing content for other sites that have a backlink to your website is a great way to get a backlink from the reputed sites.
6. Content quality and relevance on your website:If your content is high quality and synergistic with the other brands, they can see the benefit of being associated with your brand, and your chances of getting a backlink will go up.

The on-page or technical SEO makes it easy for the search engines crawlers to find, access, and make sense of your content.

Not only your content needs to be readable to the consumer but also to the search engines so that they discover, index and rank the content properly. A proper SEO friendly structure of a blog or a web page would consist of the following items:

a. Title/Heading
The title/heading of your blog should have the topic and the keywords you are targeting for the blog. The title of your blog should use the H1 tag.

b. Sub-topics/headings
The subtopic headings in your blogs should use H2 tags so that the important topics are recognized by the search engines.
Understand that the H1 and H2 tags are informing the search engines and website visitors about important topics and sub-topics of your blog. These tags should be used only in heading and subheadings to make the job of the search engines and readers easy.

c. Bullet points and snippets
A blog must look pleasing to the eyes of the reader. There should be less clutter and more white space.
Instead of writing a long paragraph that highlights 5 key elements of a sub-topic, making them as 5 bullet points makes them more recognizable to the search engines and will make them more readable for your readers.
You can use the H3 tags for the bullet points to highlight the importance. To help highlight important points, H3 tag, bullet points and making some phrases bold is great idea.
Additionally, more white space on the page is better for readability. Your paragraphs should be short – 2 to 3 lines so that the reader can quickly glance.

d. Meta description
Meta description should ideally consist of a brief summary of your page. In essence, you are telling what (benefits) the reader will get out of this blog if they read it. The more relevant your meta description is to the topic and the content of the blog, the more chances you have of getting a higher ranking on the search engine. You must make sure your long-tail keyword (topic) and the primary keyword you are targeting are included in the meta description.

e. Relevant and appropriate use of keywords
Your article should contain relevant primary keywords and long tail keywords (which is your topic). These primary keywords should be aligned with the topic of your article. For each blog, you should target only one or two primary keywords for better discoverability and focus.

f. Keyword density
Don’t stuff the article/blog with keywords or overuse them. As per the SEO experts, the ideal usage of a keyword in an article should be 1-2% of the number of total words of your article. This means that there must be only 1-2 keywords in every 100 words of your article. Search engines would penalize you for stuffing the keywords. If you have to use keywords at a higher frequency, then use a combination of the target keywords and their synonyms to avoid keyword stuffing.

g. Call to action (CTA)
There can be multiple call to actions in your blogs. The most popular ones are ‘Buy now’, or ‘Download now’. These call to actions should be made available to the users at appropriate places in the blogs.
As a best practice, near the banner image of your blog (top section of your blog) is a great place to offer a CTA to download an eBook or a guide.
Once you have introduced the topic and got the user hooked, your next CTA could be more subtle (after first 1 or 2 paragraphs) which could just be a hyperlink to the blog text.
Lastly, towards the end of the blog, you should have a prominent CTA with a proper banner image.
For example, if you are talking about using headphones to listen to certain style of music, the link to buy the headphones should be provided in the same sentence. This CTA will encourage the reader to take action, fill a form, download an eBook or even make a purchase!
You should avoid “Find more information here” or “Click here” type of CTAs. Adding hyperlinks to the text within the blog that is highlighting the blog topic and keyword is a much better alternative.

h. Videos, Banners, Images
Instead of long monotonous text, adding videos, banners and images in the blog will keep your readers engaged and lower your bounce rate substantially.
For certain topics, Google tends to show videos near the top of page 1. That gives an opportunity for you to improve the ranking of your blogs.
Additionally, having images and videos will provide you with an opportunity to add Alt text which is great for SEO.
For example, if the reader is specifically looking for “how to assemble a floor lamp” on a search engine, then the search engine is more likely to show the videos and photo-based instructive blogs ahead of purely text-based articles.

i. Alt text:
Alt-text is the small description like a caption written for images in your blog. This text becomes very important to make sense of the image when the user cannot see the image for some reason.
A well descriptive short alt text is important for the website’s accessibility and SEO. The alt text should capture the essence of the topic of the blog and also should have the primary keywords you are targeting.
In a nutshell, if your web page or blog helps solve a problem for the reader, provides on-page SEO structure which makes it easier to be found by the search engines, is easy to read by the consumer and if you do that consistently for over 6 months, you will start seeing growth in organic traffic to your website.

If you can’t measure, you can’t get better. You need to first measure the current state of your website and get the baseline results so that you know where you stand and how far you need to go.

key SEO metrics that are essential for your success are:

• Domain Ranking (DR): domain ranking represents the authority and trust in your website. DR between 40 to 50 is average. DR above 50 is good. DR below 40 means you need significant improvement.
• Organic traffic: Organic traffic outlines how many visitors are coming to your website as a result of the organic search.
• Keyword Ranking: It refers to your web page’s spot on the search results pages for a particular topic or keyword.
• Number of Backlinks: This represents the number of backlinks from other websites as they refer your website in their content. Higher the number of backlinks (and from reputed sites), the higher your site’s authority is.
• Page load time: If your web pages take longer to load, users will go away from the page and your bounce rate will be higher. A page load time of 9 seconds means your web page is faster than 50% of the web pages.

Once you know your key success metrics and the current state of affairs, you can set SMART goals for improvements.

For example, if your Domain Rank is 30 then your goal could be to “improve the domain rank to 45 within 6 months”. Or “increase the organic traffic to your website by 50% within 6 months”. Or “increase the number of backlinks from 250 to 500 in 6 months”.

In summary, adopting and implementing a systematic SEO strategy would not only help you drive traffic to your business but save a lot of dollars you would spend on paid search and other advertising channels.

In the pandemic and post-pandemic world, small businesses are going digital for every aspect of their business to survive and thrive. If you create high-quality content that solves consumers’ problems and creates fresh content on a consistent basis, build domain authority with high volume and high-quality backlinks, do the on-page SEO right and track your key success metrics, you will start seeing growth in organic traffic to your small business website.

Learn all about Digital Marketing with our Definitive Guide to Digital Marketing for Small Businesses and set yourself for success!