What is SEO? A Beginner’s Guide For Small Entrepreneurs

SEO-Small-Entrepreneur

SEO stands for search engine optimization and refers to the process of maximizing your site’s ranking in the organic, unpaid listings on internet search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. When someone searches for a term or keyword, the search engine shows results for what it considers the most relevant pages.

Your site’s position on the search engine results page (or “SERP”) for a particular keyword is known as your “keyword rank.” Every search engine has a proprietary algorithm which determines the ranking of a website on the SERP. These algorithms depend on numerous variables, including (but not limited to) relevance of content, on-site optimization, social media presence, and backlinks.

Without diving into excessive details, let’s learn about three easy SEO strategies you can try right now to improve your small business’ performance in search results.

Step 1. Target Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are essentially simple search queries that are more than four words long. If you are a small business offering shoes, then a keyword could be “dress shoes” and a long-tail keyword phrase for the same would be “Italian made leather dress shoes.” Focusing on long-tail keywords will allow you to attract customers with higher purchase intent.

Step 2. Construct Quality Content and Backlinks

Content relevance and inbound links are major ranking signals for Google and other search engines. However, link-building can be particularly difficult for those product or category pages on your ecommerce website. People don’t normally share or link to these pages. Luckily, we have a simple strategy for you: Create link-worthy content that users want to share.

The more links you can get to a page, the better. Links are significantly important as they point to the relevance and quality of the content on the page. This link authority can then be strategically channeled through different pages of your site.

For example, you can create an infographic about the “latest designer Italian made dress shoes.” This infographic is likely to attract social shares and links from other sites dealing with dress shoes. Your page with the infographic would then develop authority and you would be able to channel this to your category page for dress shoes. Ideally, this will help you rank for your category page.

Step 3. Influencer Outreach

We mentioned in step 2 that infographics are a great way to attract links. But this is only possible if you constantly promote your content. You should spend the majority of your time on promotion. Post the infographic on social media, post it on relevant forums, go to Quora to see if there are any questions it may answer, and submit to infographic directories.

Once you’ve done all the above, start with actual influencer outreach. Search Google for popular websites about dress shoes. Build a spreadsheet with article titles, author names, and email IDs. Do this for the top 50 pages on Google for the organic search of “dress shoes.”

Now write to those website owners asking them to check out your infographic and link back to it if they find it interesting. Start with the top 50 Google search results and try to attract as many eyeballs as possible. In most cases, if your infographic is relevant and engaging they will gladly link back to it. These relevant contextual links will then get you the traffic you require.

This is a simple guide to the basics of SEO. While it’s not too difficult to understand at the most fundamental level, developing an advanced knowledge of SEO and executing a powerful and exhaustive implementation plan is more challenging. We have built the LXRSEO tool to empower entrepreneurs like you. You’ll find enough help and resources through the tool to start growing your online business yourself.

  • Jack

    I have been surfing online more than 4 hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours.
    It’s pretty worth enough for me. In my view, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the net will be much more
    useful than ever before.

  • Jacob Hagberg

    I agree most with your point about blogging for your audience. We see a lot of success when strong integration from social sites are implemented and the blog contains actionable advice.

  • Mutesa Sithole

    I love this. I’ve been asked by friends who have set up their own small businesses to help them get to grips with the basics of SEO. Often, I find they’ve been bamboozled by over- complicated advice that they simply do not have time or expertise to execute. I shall be directing them to this post!

    • LXRSEO

      Thanks! We would love to have your friends visit us.

  • This is an awesome post.Really very informative and creative contents.

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