Organic SEO for Small Businesses – Part II

The first article described a number of organic SEO steps for small businesses during the construction of their website and touched on the issue of link building and the associated pros and cons.

This article will take a detailed look at link building strategies for small businesses and determine the most suitable strategies for different types of business.

At this stage of a website project your target market/audience should already be defined in terms of the following factors:

• Business/Residential
• Demographics
• Geographical Location

All of the above items will play a role in determining your link strategy and should be reviewed on regular basis.

Let’s spend a moment on the definition of a link often referred to as a “backlink”. A link is a connection between another website and your own website. It allows a visitor to directly access your website by clicking on a hyperlink on another website. The name of the link, which is known as the “anchor text” may contain your company name but consideration should be given to including your primary key-phrase, i.e. Manchester plumbing services, particularly if your company name is not very descriptive of your business’s services and products.

So what’s the purpose of a backlink? As outlined above it may bring visitors to your website and it may increase the popularity of your website on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Some backlinks will perform both functions. Some websites will require links that perform both functions while others will require links to generate website traffic or increase the ranking (popularity) of their website. A number of factors will determine this criteria such as the geographical location of your business, facilities available on your website i.e. e-commerce, your business type etc.

Let’s now take a closer look at how you start to arrive at a determination as outlined in the previous paragraph.

Example: Small business providing local services only, website does not include any e-commerce facilities.

Solution: There is little point in generating traffic for this website unless it is from visitors in the same geographical region so the likelihood is that a link building strategy for this company’s website would involve the sourcing of backlinks that improve their website’s ranking on the search engines.

Estimates now suggest that 60% of users now use the Internet to source products and services locally with the vast majority using Google to find companies and service providers in their area. Backlinks that improve the ranking of your website are crucial in this regard and may also reduce your reliance on pay per click (PPC) programs such as Google AdWords to generate business leads. Google AdWords can then be used for tactical internet marketing such as new product launches, new service offerings or expanding your business into a new geographical region.

The third part of this article will expand on the topic of link building strategies for small businesses including example plans, trusted backlinks, free and paid web directories, social media, local directory services etc.