30 Tips For Small Business SEO

This blog we are going to post our quick YouTube clips for each step in the 30 Step program.

Use the comments section to ask questions, like and share with your friends to help them with their Search Engine Optimization. I am writing and creating from the standpoint of a former ecommerce owner with a limited budget. For the most part of almost 20 years in the ecommerce space, I managed the SEO in house on a limited budget. We did outsource the function for a year or two but saw a drop in results and brought the SEO back in house.

🔑 Key Takeaways from This Blog Post:

• Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools early — they give critical insights on what’s working (and what’s not).

• Target long-tail keywords when starting out — they’re easier to rank for and bring in highly targeted traffic.

• Claim and optimize your business profiles on Google and Bing to build trust and control what people see when they search for you.

• Stop creating new content blindly — improve existing high-performing pages for quick SEO wins.

• If only your homepage ranks, that’s a red flag. Internal linking and better page structure can fix it.

• Use Google Trends + Google Search Console together to discover rising keywords and improve existing rankings.

• Set up 301 redirects if your URLs change — or you’ll lose SEO equity and valuable traffic.

👉 These are just the first 7 of 30 SEO tips — each explained in a short video designed for small business owners managing SEO on a budget. Here is the entire list below in our Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Set Up Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

• Target Long Tail Terms in the Beginning Too

• Claim Your Business Profiles & Optimize Them Too

• Optimize Your Best Content

• If Only Your Home Page Ranks

• Free SEO Tool Combo Hard to Beat

• 301 Redirects - How and When to Use Them

• Google Hates Slows Sites - What Can You Do?

• Be sure to Tell Google To Ignore These Pages

• Make Sure Your Blog is Helping You Not Hurting You

• Google Ranking Myths

• How SEO Settings Are Killing Your SEO

• Boost Your SEO Fast: Instant Strategies

• Sneaky SEO Tricks That Actually Work

• You Don't Need Expensive SEO Tools For This Tip!

• Is Your SEO Plan Already Burnt Out?

  
  

SEO Tip 1 - Set Up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

This tip is number one because it can tell you so many things about your website. While I could not readily find stats on how many business owners have these set up, it was written in multiple places that many small business don't take this step and set these up and even fewer look a the results info that these two tools provide on what to work on. Don't make this mistake and set these up, it's easy (or relatively easy to do - there is a little tech involved in verifying) and make sure to check in on the info that is there. There is a ton of useful info and stats you can use. We don't get as much data like back in the early 2000's from our web site stats but this does supplement some of the missing data.

SEO Tip 2 - Target Long Tail In the Beginning Too

In the beginning you likely are not going to rank for head terms. Head terms are one or two or maybe even three word search terms that likely are very valuable to your business. Long tail terms have 3 or more keywords in them is the official definition. Depending on the scenario, I would put some 3 word phrases into Head terms sometimes. Or at least consider them valuable traffic driving terms. When we started out, we were fortunate to rank for head terms pretty quickly. If you find you are not having much success getting rankings and traffic, look to longer tail terms with less traffic and most importantly less competition (or difficulty) for those keywords. This is where keyword research and targeting are huge. Before I sold my business, we had our keyword research dialed in and understand which words drove traffic to the website. If you are not getting the traffic you want, try to target more keywords when combined will yield traffic. Just be careful of agencies that promise #1 rankings. They are able to do that with keywords that will drive almost no traffic to your website.

SEO Tip 3 - Claim Your Business Profiles & Optimize

The reason this tip is #3 verse moving down further on the list is it will take time to build up your profiles. Might as well get started now and it can be as simple as just claiming these profiles. Many businesses don't claim their profile and even fewer claim and optimize their profile. When a current customer or prospective customer searches for your name, you want them to see your best foot forward. This is an opportunity to show photos, describe your services, post your hours, ask for an appointment, and showcase your reviews. Always be on the look out for reviews from your customers. Create a program or system to regularly ask for reviews from your customers. A simple follow up text, a QR code in your business or a follow up email are great ideas to build your number of reviews.

SEO Tip 4 - Stop Creating More Content - Optimize Your Best Content

One way you can create a quick win is by optimizing your best content you already created. How do you know what your best content is? Well check your Google Webmaster Tools information to see what pages already rank and for what keywords. Then see if there are other similar words you can rank for or slight variations. This can be a source of quick wins - just by working with what you already have created.

SEO Tip 5 - If Only Your Home Page Ranks - That's A Sign of An Issue

Your interior pages should also rank like your product pages, category pages, service pages, FAQ pages, blog pages etc. If they don't that may be a sign that your site structure is not as good as it could be or that you are not linking strategically to other pages on your site. Be sure to make sure your Home page links are being used wisely to tell your visitors (and Google) where they need to go. If you are not linking to key pages, that is likely a big miss that you can correct with minimal effort. Make sure you are linking strategically amongst your pages.

SEO Tip 6 - This Free Combo of Tools is Hard to Beat

Google Search Console and Google Trends can give you ideas on search terms you may not have thought of. Keep an eye out for what people are searching for in Google Trends. But keep in mind it must be relevant to what you are selling. For example, it does not help you much getting traffic that is not relevant to your site. People will just leave right away which will likely hurt your site. Google Search Console will also show you what terms are driving traffic and if there are terms you can move from page 3 results to page 2 results and from page 2 to page 1 results.

SEO Tip 7 - 301 Redirects - Make Sure You Use Them Or Lose Your Pages in Google

When you migrate your website to a new platform, chances are you url's are going to change. Make sure you have every old url mapped to the new url of your new platform. You do not want to lose all of that hard work. And if you have changed some url's, you can let Google know that the new page exists with a 301 redirect. Setting up the 301's are not usually difficult to do but is a critical step to not losing all that traffic just because you changed the url's of your website.

SEO Tip #8 - Google Hates Slows Sites - What Can You Do?

Google will not give your site a lot of love if you website is slow. What does it deem slow? Well there are tools both paid and free (of course) that will help you speed up your website. Make sure you are monitoring images and code to speed up your site as much as possible. Chance are you have a large image file or even several that are not optimized. Remember too this goes for large pdf's or downloads you offer on your website as well. Take the time to look at how fast your website is downloading to improve the user experience and also your Google rankings. A slow site is rarely if ever going to rank on the major search engines.

SEO Tip # 9 - Be sure to Tell Google To Ignore These Pages

Especially when you have a small site and even when you have a larger more established website you want Google to focus on pages that it will rank in the future. You do not want to waste your Google Crawl budget on pages that it likely won't rank anyways. These pages are your shopping cart, checkout pages, search pages, filter pages etc that are a big part of your website but likely won't ever make it into Google's search results anyways. And while you don't have a budget in the sense of dollars for your Google crawl budget, you do have a budget as far as how much time Google is going to spend looking and updating your website in its search results index.

SEO Tip #10 - Make Sure Your Blog is Helping You Not Hurting You

So you started a blog years ago thinking it would be the silver bullet to better rankings. Well if you are not updating your content or just writing very short content that really does not add any value than chances are you may be hurting your website. And make sure your content is not duplicated from another website or another part of your website. Duplicate content will hurt your SEO. Another simple thing to implement can be seen here on this blog. E.g. a summary, a FAQ section and even a Table of Contents. And even most recently look to add Schema mark up to your blog posts to help with getting into the AI results in the future. Make sure your blog is not hurting you!

SEO Tip #11 - Google Ranking Myths

If you are chasing the top spot on Google rankings, you might not have the right strategy here. Just because you have rankings in the top position, does not mean they will drive traffic. Make sure you dial in your keyword strategy to go after keywords that will drive traffic to your site. Use a similar spreadsheet that I have shown on videos and webinars that rank your keywords. Make sure they are relevant to your website, they are attainable and they drive enough traffic to your website to justify the time and money you need to invest in the SEO traffic.

SEO Tip #12 - How SEO Settings Are Killing Your SEO

Often the default settings for Title Tags and Meta Tag Description, are a simple formula. And not likely doing a good enough job to drive traffic to your website. Meaning that the words it your default settings almost certainly could be improved with some basic strategy. Make sure if you are building pages that they have words that your customers actually use when looking for that information or product. Otherwise, all that work will be wasted with either very little traffic or driving the wrong people to your website. And when you are building product pages or category pages, make sure you have content that is unique. Do not rely solely on your suppliers to write this information. Provide more information than your competitors and allow both positive and negative comments about the product too.

SEO Tip #13 - Boost Your SEO Fast: Instant Strategies

Here we discuss below 3 tips you can do today to help you rank higher in Google and Google Business Profile too. Step 1 - you have to make sure Google Console is set up so you have track your information and find out about any errors or suggestions to improve your rankings. Step 2 - be strategic in naming your images. Don't just use the default name that you are given from a supplier or from the place you bought the image. Use keywords that relate to that image and the content on the page you are putting that particular image. Step 3 - share your Google business profile with your customers to get 5 Star reviews from your customers. It's a system you should have in place to ask each customer to leave you a positive review on Google. Even set up a QR code or share the url in a text message to ask customers for a review. Bonus tip - combine all three tips into your strategy to see even more of a boost. You need to be doing different things than your competitors to improve rankings. The key is to do a different combination of activities. That is the power when you are doing 25 or 50 small steps that combine to a powerful strategy vs your competitor that might be only doing 10 to 15 steps. Your unique combination becomes a competitive advantage.

SEO Tip #14 - Sneaky SEO Tricks That Actually Work

Learn what your competitors are up to. I was able to get ideas on back links and new keyword ideas by studying my competitors. Some of them are paid tools, others are free. Tools like Moz, Ubersuggest, SimilarWeb all can help you piece together what your competitors are doing. And while it's not enough to do what your competitors are doing, you can gain some insight into what is working and what is not working. Get a picture on keywords to target, backlinks to target, understand new trends in search all with some zero cost or low cost tools. Just like a carpenter, you need to have tools that you can rely on to do your job.

SEO Tip #15 - You Don't Need Expensive SEO Tools For This Tip!

Just like Tip #14, you don't need expensive tools to get started with your SEO journey. Use a simple search in Google - site:yourdomain.com - This will pull up the pages that Google has in their index. Also, you can take a look at the Title Tags and Description tags for these pages. Take a look at this information. One quick tip, see if you have your Domain Or Brand Name in every title tag. Chances are you will rank for that brand or your name, don't waste the limited space you have adding your name / brand name to each and every page. You can also do this for a few of your competitors to see what they are doing. Are they better than you? Is their home page targeting other keywords than you are? Those may be keywords you want to rank for and build pages for too.

SEO Tip#16 - Is Your SEO Plan Already Burnt Out?

Similar to when you go camping and want to build a fire without a plan, your SEO plan needs to be on point. And you have to make sure you have key points in your plan. If you are looking to hire a SEO Agency or even interviewing someone to bring in house, be sure to ask them a few questions. What is their keyword strategy? What is their strategy for building backlinks? What's your plan for content? Do they work with Return on Investment? Make sure you understand if your agency will even track ROI.