The Three Big Problems with SEO for Small Business

Problems with SEO

Problems with SEO: Every business needs to start its SEO effort at a point it can afford. It's really hard on small entrepreneurs who put heart and soul into starting their business and feel dead in the water because they have great websites but get no visitors and no sales. The same is true for small established businesses moving online for the first time.

BUT..!

  • We're all sick of receiving 'page 1 Google guaranteed' and 'pay on performance' emails and don't know who to trust
  • We all know someone who's been bitten by amateur SEO posing as elite-tier professionals
  • SEO costs money and commitment - it's true that is takes many weeks to get results and by the time you realize things are not going as promised, you're money's gone. Worse than that - months of opportunity have also gone and the follow-on costs are horrendous in terms of lost sales.

These problems with SEO lead to the worst possible situation - we know we need SEO but we are extremely hesitant to commit and our business online is going nowhere fast.

If you are a small or medium sized business facing these issues, this article is for you.

Do No Harm to Your Website

Because your confidence level is low, your first step in preventing problems with SEO  is harm-avoidance. Whoever you first hire must execute a set of steps that can do no harm and yet be effective in the initial establishment of your online presence.  Here are things that can undermine your business on Google and make it harder to rank:

  1. 1
    Poor On-Site SEO (technical and content)
  2. 2
    Links from irrelevant websites
  3. 3
    Links from 'link farms'
  4. 4
    Bad 'anchor text' on external links that make them subject to penalties (e.g. having too many links with the same link text) 
  5. 5
    Duplicate content on your website
  6. 6
    Overuse of keywords on your site
  7. 7
    links from 'bad neighborhoods' - servers with spam generating sites, pornography etc.

So What's Safe SEO I can Use to to Begin With?

There are a range of SEO exercises that  we always recommend to new websites, to avoid problems with SEO and to start local ranking:

  • Monthly citation building in a diversity of online business  directories
  • Online Press Releases - Monthly or bi-monthly
  • Monthly blog content of high quality and your selected keywords
  • Google My Business presence with regular posts and products 
  • For some businesses Facebook page with weekly posts
  • For some businesses Instagram page with weekly posts
  • For some businesses LinkedIn page with weekly posts
  • Rich media citations where they can be posted - with video and photos 
  • Website structure that will tell the search engines which regions you service.

These SEO activities will give your local business presence a significant boost and make your business visible on Google. They are without risk and will never damage your website search engine status as long as all the materials you post are relevant and good quality. Usually though, the benefit is limited to local ranking. For national ranking an extended effort is needed which we'll tell you all about in our next article.  In the meantime, you can find our Local Starter Pack SEO here and start getting noticed online. 

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