How to Create an SEO Strategy for Small Businesses

SEO takes time, patience, and confidence—three things most startup founders are running low on.

It may feel overwhelming. Especially so when your team is juggling ten priorities, your budget is stretched thin, and your “SEO guy” is well just… You.

But here’s the thing—SEO doesn’t have to be complicated or resource-intensive to deliver results.

With the right approach, even a small team can create a powerful SEO strategy that drives traffic, builds brand awareness, and fuels business growth

Want to know how?

With this guide, we will help you create an SEO strategy for your business by breaking it all down into simple actionable steps.

Let’s get started.

A clear SEO strategy is essential in making any forward-thinking startup a success. Here’s why it’s important:

• Boosts online visibility: Brings you closer to your target audience by ranking your website at the top of search results
• Drives targeted traffic: Attracts users who are actively searching for your product/service
• Builds trust: Higher rankings on search engine builds credibility and earns customer’s confidence
• Helps compete with big players: Provides a cost-effective way to compete with established businesses
• Increases sales: SEO efforts contribute significantly to increasing the business’s bottom line, i.e. profits

That said, SEO is a long-term strategy that supports the growth and scalability of your small business.

How to create an SEO strategy for your business: step-by-step guide

Let’s begin our step-by-step guide to building a small business SEO strategy:

1. Define your SEO goals

Define your SEO goals, i.e., what you want to achieve with SEO, and make sure that the goals align with your overall business objectives.

Your SEO goals could include increasing online visibility, generating organic traffic, enhancing brand awareness, or increasing overall sales. Considering these goals, define the KPIs and set metrics you will use to track your goals.

Refer to this table to understand metrics for different SEO goals.

2. Research keywords your audience is searching for

Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO strategy.

It helps you find the words and phrases that your target audience enters into a Google search.

Now, keyword research is a skill that takes a while to master. However, to get you started, begin with a simple Google search.

Let’s say yours is an organic brand planning the launch of your new product: Moringa powder.

As you enter the keyword in the Google search console, it will populate a list of suggestions for you.

As you can see, this result offers valuable insight into common searches people make related to your keyword.

Even the “people also search for” section offers a great array of keywords you can target.

This is just scratching the surface. To ensure that you choose the right keywords, take note of the following considerations (for real).

Search intent

Search intent typically falls into three main categories:

• Informational: Users are looking for answers or knowledge, i.e. health benefits of moringa powder
• Navigational: Users want to find a specific website or brand, i.e. organic moringa powder
• Transactional: Users are ready to make a purchase or take an action, i.e. buy moringa powder online

Identify the intent behind different keywords before you aimlessly use them to target your product pages.

Search volume and keyword difficulty

Search volume tells you how many people are searching for a given keyword.

Practically, high-volume keywords drive significant traffic but they are difficult to rank. On the other hand, low-volume keywords attract limited traffic but offer more opportunities to rank.

Ideally, you should focus on a mix of high-volume, competitive keywords for visibility. And, low-volume, long-tail keywords for niche audiences with high conversion potential.

For instance, a quick Google search shows that the keyword “moringa powder” has a search volume of 201,000, while “moringa powder benefits” gets 49,500 searches.

Of course, it would be much easier to rank your pages for moringa powder benefits for health than moringa powder.

Relevance to your business

Not all popular keywords are a good fit for your business. Prioritize keywords that align with your brand, products, or services to attract the right audience.

For instance, trying to rank for “moringa powder recipes” is relevant but “moringa plant care guide” is irrelevant.

Competitor’s analysis

Use Ahref’s and SEMrush to analyze the keywords your competitors are targeting. This can give you insights into market opportunities and help you find untapped opportunities.

Here are a few things you must look out for while analyzing the competitor’s site:

• Top ranking keywords: Identify the keywords driving the most traffic to your competitors’ websites
• Content gaps: Look for weak or incomplete content on their site where you can provide more value
• Keyword gap: Find keywords or topics your competitors rank for that you haven’t targeted yet
• Underperforming keywords: Identify keywords where your competitors rank poorly but have potential
• Long-tail keywords: Spot long-tail, low-competition keywords they rank for and target these to attract a niche audience

3. Build a website optimized for SEO

You can’t just build a website. You need to optimize it using various technical fonts to enhance your SEO efforts. Only then will search engines rank your pages at the top.

Here’s a quick checklist you need to follow to build an optimized website:

Build a mobile-optimized website

According to a Statista study, mobile devices (excluding tablets) account for nearly 60 percent of web page views worldwide. This means the majority of your audience visits your website using their mobile devices.

It’s important that you build your website with a mobile-first approach to cater to this audience effectively.

However, mobile responsiveness isn’t just about resizing elements to fit smaller screens. As Steve Schoger, the designer at Tailwind, suggests, adopting usability patterns inspired by native mobile apps can make mobile-responsive websites more adaptive.

For instance, fitting anchoring models to the bottom of the screen instead of the middle makes them easier to reach.

To help you better, here’s a quick checklist you can refer to while optimizing your website for different devices:

Loading speed

If your website is taking longer than 3 seconds to load, it’s likely to drive visitors away. You don’t want to risk frustrating your potential customers.

Here are a few quick ways to improve the loading speed of your website:

• Compress and Optimize Images: Compress files and minimize data size before transmission
• Selective Rendering: Display only visible elements to optimize rendering performance.
• Enable Browser Caching: Configure caching to store reusable files locally on users’ devices
• Split the code: Split a bigger application bundle into multiple smaller bundles for efficient loading
• Implement Lazy Loading: Load images and videos only when users scroll to them
• Optimize Server Performance: Select a high-quality hosting provider and reduce database bloat for quicker response times

Build clean URLs

Clean URLs are simple, descriptive, and easy for both users and search engines to understand. A well-structured URL can improve click-through rates and make your content easier to crawl.

Make sure that you use concise and simple URLs that reflect the page content. For instance,

✅truephill.com/moringa-powder-benefits

❌truephill.com/page123?item=benefits&id=456.

Further, follow a uniform structure across your site to help search engines and users navigate more easily.

As you can see, these URLs follow a similar structure enhancing both user experience and SEO performance.

Lastly, make sure that you include the primary keyword throughout the site’s URL. This will improve search rankings and enhance the user experience telling them precisely what to expect.

XML sitemaps and Robots.txt

An XML sitemap is a file that provides a roadmap of your website to search engines. It shows all the important pages for crawling and indexing. XML sitemap helps search engines discover your content effectively, even if your site has a complex structure or some pages lack internal links.

Schema markup

It’s a type of code that you add to your website to help search engines understand your content better. Think of it as giving search engines extra details about your page in a language they easily understand.

A schema markup can:

• Show off your product details, reviews, or FAQs right in search results.
• Make your events, recipes, or business info stand out.
• Help search engines really understand your content so more people can find you.

This little snippet helps your content stand out in search results with rich results, like star ratings, event dates, or FAQs which can attract more clicks.

Additional points for website optimization

• Fix Broken Links: Regularly check for broken links and update or redirect them to prevent user frustration.
• Ease the navigation: Create a clear, intuitive navigation structure with logical menus
• Optimize for voice search: Structure content with concise answers to align with voice assistants
• Secure websites: Implement HTTPS with an SSL certificate to encrypt data and protect users

4. Create high-quality content that solves problems

One of the best ways to bring organic traffic is to create content that fulfills the search intent of your audience.

So before anything else, understand what type of content your potential customer is looking for. With keyword research, you can understand the intent and create pages that target important keywords for your business.

For instance, if you’re selling moringa powder, a customer would appreciate educational content like:

• Top organic moringa powder brands
• Health benefits of moringa powder
• How much moringa powder should I consume
• Snack recipes using moringa powder
• Can a breastfeeding woman consume moringa powder
• Side effects of moringa powder
• And much more

Follow the EEAT principles—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness as you create content for your website. This is especially essential when you’re talking about medical, fitness, or financial subjects.

Like, check how the top rankings for moringa health benefits belong to websites experts in health matters.

As you create content, analyze the content of top-performing sites. See how you can:

1. Create content different from them
2. Create content better than them

Find gaps in the existing content and look for ways to satisfy the search intent more effectively.

If your website manages to rank here, an expandable menu under each point can lead the readers to your website.

In addition to these points, there are a few other things you can do to make your content more helpful for search engines:

Infographics and video

See if there’s a way you can explain some complex concepts through visuals and incorporate them into your blog posts. Infographics satisfying the user intent tend to dominate search engine results. Additionally, you can also create long-form and short-form videos targeting the keywords your target audience usually searches for.

Experiment with content structure

You can create content snippets in the form of FAQs within your long-form blog posts. These FAQs can answer the questions readers might have after reading your blog posts.

Additionally, you can add tables or charts to present comparisons, data, or step-by-step processes. For instance, a chart comparing the nutritional benefits of moringa vs. other superfoods.

5. Optimize your website content for search engines

Now publishing content isn’t enough. It’s important to optimize the on-page SEO elements to help search engines crawl and index your content effectively.

Here’s how you do it:

Add hierarchy

Your blog post needs headers such as H1, H2, H3, and H4 broken into systematic flow. No one enjoys text-dense pages even if it’s the most helpful content on the web. So ensure that you break down the texts into paragraphs no longer than 3-4 lines.

This will add readability and help the readers skim through the content.

Add keywords naturally

DON’T stuff keywords. Google is smart and it can instantly detect stuffed keywords without any context.

Instead, focus on natural placement. Add the combination of helpful keywords naturally throughout the blog post and incorporate NLPs (Natural Language Processing).

Ensure that the title, heading, and introduction (within the first 100 words) feature a primary keyword. Also, add long-tail keywords to target specific user intents.

Optimize title tags and meta description

Your title tag should address the user’s search intent and feature a primary keyword. Also, it should be within 60 characters.

Similarly, create a meta description summarizing your article in about 160 characters. Feature a primary keyword and a CTA in your description.

A meta description may seem inessential until Google crawls your article and creates its own description like this.

Alt text

Your blog posts should have sufficient images with meaningful alt text that can help Google with indexing. So make sure that you add descriptive file names including your primary keywords. A high-quality infographic and image will inevitably increase web traffic to your website.

Add a CTA

Don’t leave the readers clueless. Add a CTA whether you want them to sign up, check your pricing page, or apply for a free demo.

Navigation

Add a table of contents to help the readers easily navigate through the content.

It’s these little things that will optimize your website for Google and other search engines.

6. Focus on local SEO to attract nearby customers

Businesses serving a specific geographic area or physical location, such as restaurants, salons, garages, cafes, grocery stores, and retail outlets, can greatly benefit from local SEO.

Think with Google reveals that over 76% who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a physical place within 24 hours and 28% of those searches result in a purchase.

You want to leverage this opportunity to enhance search visibility.

Now, there are things you can do to enhance your Google search results when people search for your products and services.

Let’s check them:

Create your Google business listing

Build your Google business profile and make sure that you mention the NAP (name, address, and phone number) accurately.

If you have different addresses or contact details across different platforms, Google might rank you lower. Besides, by keeping wrong and inaccurate information, you’re simply redirecting your target market to your competitors.

Consider your Google business profile listing as the digital equivalent of your store window. You want to offer enough relevant information to top the search engine rankings.

Now, let me walk you through a GMB (Google My Business) profile I came across while traveling to Michigan. I was craving a cozy Japanese meal and of course, I used Google to look for Japanese restaurants near me.

Ima Izakaya stood at the top with their neat and polished profile.

As you can see, it has options like ‘reserve a table’, ‘order online’, ‘call’, and ‘directions’—everything that would nudge me to take a convenient action.

Additionally, there are menu highlights with yummy pictures, all tempting me to pig out, ASAP.

Add to that, there are plenty of reviews from fellow customers giving me first-hand insight about the restaurant, its signature dishes, and the hospitality.

This is exactly what your GMB profile should include, at the least.

Make sure that you,

• Include local keywords in your description, i.e. Japanese restaurants in Michigan, Best Japanese restaurant in Michigan, Japanese restaurants near me
• Add high-quality images of the premises (restaurant interiors/exterior)
• Images of your product/service (food and beverages)
• Clarify the operating hours (post brunch or late hours)
• Respond to the reviews
• Add your websites and social media

Build local backlinks

To build local backlinks, collaborate with organizations, businesses, or influencers in your area. Partner on events, co-host workshops, or support local charities to earn mentions and backlinks from their websites.

You can also sponsor community initiatives or contribute guest posts to local blogs to establish your presence.

For instance, Ima Izakaya’s news update and blog post on Metro Times.

Use local directories and citations

List your business on trusted local and online directories such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and niche platforms relevant to your industry.

These platforms bring in major traffic. So ensure that you regularly audit your listings to update contact details, hours, or offerings to avoid any misdirect.

In addition to these, you can create locally focused content, engage with local influencers, and engage with media to gain better organic search visibility.

7. Build backlinks to increase your website’s authority

Now, another important aspect of small business SEO strategy is to build backlinks, both external and internal. Backlinks signal to Google that yours is an authoritative website and ultimately improve your search engine rankings.

Internal link building

Internal linking is basically linking one page of your website to another. It improves user navigation and demonstrates to Google that your website has a hierarchy and structure.

Internal link building is much easier when you follow a pillar-cluster model. Here, you choose a pillar topic around which you create clusters. These cluster topics are then linked to the main page where you want to increase search traffic.

Let’s say the pillar topic for your moringa powder is “health benefits of moringa powder.”

The cluster topics interlinking to this page could be

• The ideal time to consume moringa
• Side effects of moringa powder
• 8 ways to include moringa powder in your diet
• How to use moringa powder
• Moringa benefits for pregnant women

Internal linking builds your authority and pushes your content towards the top.

External linking

Here you ask other websites to provide backlinks to your website, generally a website with higher authority than yours.

Sometimes, you approach them strategically to get a link and sometimes your useful content will get you a backlink without asking.

Now, it takes time and skill to get websites to link to you. Especially, the websites with higher authority. However, we have a few strategies that you can use to gather backlinks for your small business.

That said, you constantly need to put in efforts to make your site bigger and better so that Google recognizes you.

8. Track your SEO performance and adjust

Deploying strategies isn’t enough. You need to track the performance of each strategy to understand what’s working and how it complements your overall digital marketing strategies.

This way you can identify low-performing strategies, decode the reasons for that, and make necessary changes to your strategy.

Remember, tracking and monitoring is an ongoing process that continues as you deploy, remove, and introduce new strategies. So it’s essential you use tools that can help you track your SEO results seamlessly.

We recommend SEMrush and Ahref the most.

Now, take the key metrics you established earlier to track the results and take necessary actions.

With that, we’ve discussed a systematic way for you to implement an SEO strategy for your small business. If you’re starting from scratch, scale the SEO gradually while not compromising on the fundamentals.

8 common SEO mistakes you should avoid

Before you go ahead and develop your plan, here are a few common SEO mistakes that most small businesses make:

• Expecting results too early: Instead of pivoting too quickly, give your SEO efforts some time to reflect the changes
• Ignoring the search intent: Understand what users want instead of pushing the pages aimlessly
• Ignoring the old content: Revamp the content, change its structure, make it more relevant to continue ranking
• Stuffing keywords: Focus on the natural placement of the keyword (yes, keyword stuffing still exists)
• Overlooking local SEO: Underestimating the importance of local search
• Thin content: Not covering the depth of content and offering surface-level fixes
• Duplicating content: Publishing identical or very similar content across pages
• Ignoring metrics: If you don’t track, you can’t leverage opportunities or get rid of weak strategies

Build your SEO strategy with Upmetrics

With this guide, you now understand how to create an impactful SEO strategy. But let’s face it—strategy alone isn’t enough.

To succeed, you need a clear plan that outlines your SEO goals, budget, and actionable steps. A plan that provides a roadmap to achieve your goals without making them look stretched and unattainable.

Having a structured SEO plan can truly make all the difference.

Don’t worry, we’re not asking you to create a massive 30-40-page document. All you need is a lean, efficient plan that takes less than 10 minutes to prepare using Upmetrics.

With an insightful SEO plan, you can turn your strategy into measurable success faster than ever.