Revamp Your Small Business’s SEO Strategy In 2022

Lack of labor and capital are two of the biggest concerns small businesses face.  While not always the case, SEO is often an excellent inbound marketing strategy that can help alleviate both.

If you’re interested in building out your small business’s SEO strategy in 2022, here’s some tips on how to get the best results as quickly as possible.

Why SEO is Important for Small Businesses

As mentioned, the big hurdles when it comes to establishing your small business are going to be labor and capital.

Inbound SEO marketing can be the key to helping you leap these hurdles.

It’s simply a matter of numbers. While the figure changes by industry, SEO conversion rates are about twice as effective as PPC.

This effectiveness isn’t shocking. Being at the top of the search engine results is easily the best way to get traffic. And you can do so at a lower ROI than chasing PPC.

However, gone are the days when you could keyword stuff an article and end up in the first position on Google. SEO needs to be executed correctly.

Unless you have the specialized knowledge to succeed at SEO, you’ll want to hire an agency to handle it for you.

Tips to Boost Your SEO Strategy in 2022

Get Specific

In 2022, small businesses should stop focusing on the sheer search volume of short-tail keywords. Levels of competition are more important than scale.

Instead, these businesses should pivot their strategy to long-tail keywords with lower keyword difficult scores.

It’s much better to try to carve out your own niche. If you’re not a major corporation, you aren’t going to have the resources to compete with the big guys.

You might, however, have the capability to win at keywords that work in your own niche.

For example, don’t just go for “candy”. The word “candy” has a monthly search volume of over 500,000 in the United States alone—but with a keyword difficulty of over 90%.  Trying to fight for that word is going to be a losing battle.

But what if we honed in on the kind of candy and a location? The phrase “best chocolate in Los Angeles” has a monthly search rate of roughly 480, but a keyword difficulty score of just 44%. Capturing 25% of 480 monthly searches is significantly higher than 0% of the short-tail.

Getting more focused on your keywords isn’t only an easy adjustment, but it’ll generate more impressions, more clicks, and result in a higher conversion rate.

Content

We all know content is king. But how you execute your content strategy and the type of content you’re producing can greatly affect your performance on Google and your organic conversion rate.

Quality over Quantity

Small businesses lack time and resources to execute a large content strategy—a single well-written blog post can take 6+ hours to write!

In 2022, we highly recommend a quality over quantity approach to content.

Rather than trying to execute a slew of poorly conceived blog posts, take your time and produce just one or two, high-quality, well-researched, and informative posts per month.

A single high-quality piece of content is more likely to rank well in Google and drive more traffic to your site than several poorly written pieces of content that don’t rank well.

Converting Content

Beyond quality, the type of content you produce will greatly influence your average organic conversion rate.

If you focus your energy on writing brand awareness content for your blog, you may see traffic increase but your conversion rate drop. That’s because brand awareness content typically performs better for top-of-funnel search queries.

If you’re keeping a close eye on your bottom-line, focus your efforts on SEO landing pages. SEO landing pages tend to focus on bottom-of-funnel keywords that convert at a much higher rate than top-of-funnel blog posts.

We highly recommend reading our recent article, An Introduction to SEO Landing Page Best Practices.

Make a User-Friendly Website

Small businesses might worry about the amount of effort needed to really nail the technical aspects of SEO.

However, there are plenty of ways you can improve your website without getting too technical. Any good B2B digital marketing agency will tell you that a little user-friendliness goes a long way.

Just imagine that you were using your own website. Is it easy to find things? Do the headings all make sense?

If people can easily navigate your website, they will more likely stick around, read content, and make purchases. Lowering your bounce rate is never a bad move.

Using heat mapping to track user behavior is also super useful. From heatmaps, you can create hypotheses to improve specific metrics, like bounce rate, Avg time on site, or conversion rates. Then you can use Google Optimize to A/B test your theories.

Get Help

If you are a small business, you might feel that you don’t have time for even the simplest of changes to your SEO strategy. And that’s okay.

Every small business has its own challenges. And every challenge needs its own set of solutions. But you don’t need to deal with these challenges alone.

Partnering with an SEO marketing agency can be one of your biggest chances for improvement in the New Year.

You can advance your search engine optimization to be competitive while keeping all of your own team focused on other tasks.

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency to help you excel in 2022, don’t hesitate to contact us today. We’ll be happy to audit your website, prepare customized SEO strategies, and work within your budget and parameters. Hiring an SEO agency is often a small businesses best bet at successfully executing a fully-realized organic strategy.