Today’s marketing landscape is much different than it used to be. To survive as a small business in 2022 it takes a much different marketing skill set than it did 10 years ago. This is the beauty of the ever changing business landscape. Today’s business owners need to be adaptable in their marketing tactics, especially when it comes to digital marketing for their business.
Nowadays business success relies on the internet more than ever before. Good reviews online can make or break a business, and most customer’s buying decisions rely on the quality and quantity of those reviews. Business owners need to leverage this to be the best in their respective fields. Google My Business reviews are important for many different reasons. They dictate how potential customers see you online, and immediately set their perception of your business. That outlook also extends beyond potential clients, it also extends to the search engines themselves.
Search engines like Google focus on people’s perception and experiences with different businesses. Google looks at reviews, website traffic, time spent on that website, user actions, and much more to determine where to rank your business online. With so many factors at play what do you need to focus your limited time on as a business owner in 2022? Do you work on getting backlinks? Writing more content for your pages? Adding more blog posts to your site? Improving the user experience? There are so many different factors at play when it comes to SEO for small businesses.
Since there’s so many different SEO strategies for small businesses out there let’s look at what you can do now to help get your business found online.
Leverage Your Google Reviews
The first step to start leveraging reviews on Google is to claim your Google My Business page. Once you’ve done that you can start accepting and responding to reviews. Send out your review link to past clients and ask them to leave an honest review. Get as many reviews as possible from past and present clients. The more the better. Once you get reviews on your Google My Business listing it’s time to start replying to them. Google rewards active business owners who interact with their client base. It’s as simple as thanking the person who left the review! You can find and respond to your reviews in the Google My Business dashboard.
Google reviews are one of the best digital referrals in 2022. They can work for you, or against you. Today 6 out of 10 customers look to Google My Business reviews as their main decision before visiting a business, physically or digitally. People are reading these reviews, and it shows, business with a large number of positive reviews end up being busier than similar local competitors with less. Not only do people trust Google reviews, they act on them. Businesses with raving reviews and lots of them tend to get more of the same types of reviews more quickly, it’s like an exponential effect.
Google are more important than ever before. They’re already one of the biggest deciding factors when it comes to a potential new client visiting your business. People searching on Google, and Google themselves are looking at how people rate your business. The higher number of stars in your rating and the higher your number of ratings the more Google rewards your listing when it comes to SEO. Google prioritizes businesses with higher ratings and ranks them higher when people search, just look at this example when we search for “Tulsa Coffee Shops” google shows the highest rated with the most reviews first.
Improve Your Website Content
Google looks at a lot of things when it comes to your SEO rankings. One of them being how many people visit your site and how long they stay for. Google’s goal is to serve the best search results to its searchers, so our goal is to be the best when it comes to what we deliver people landing on our site. If your content is high quality and provides the right kind of value to the person who searched for it Google will reward you with a higher rank.
What content do I improve? That depends on what you want to get found for. If you run a local service business in auto repair that content will be different than if you’re an online e-commerce store selling the latest gadgets. The main goal here is to make it so people who land on your page want to stick around for a while. We can do this by using captivating images, writing the exact kinds of content they’re looking for, and ultimately solving the problem we’re searching to solve to begin with.
Let’s run through an example. Say we’re a local SEO company, what does someone who’s searching for “Drone Photographer SEO” really want? If we had to guess they’re looking for help ranking themselves for that term “Drone Photographer”. Our goal in this case is to convey the right solution for them, which is how to do SEO for a Drone Photographer. This could be done by providing a basic step by step strategy for them to follow, giving them basic SEO knowledge on the page, and offering to help with someone from our SEO company if they don’t want to do it themselves.
Ultimately Google’s goal when someone searches for something is to pair them with the best possible result. So if you aren’t showing up first then do your best to be the best possible result. Add content to your page, give the person options, and provide more value than they are looking for. You’ll be rewarded with better rankings, and better business.
Drive More Traffic From Social Media
Another key ingredient for SEO is sending the right social signals. Google is looking at where people come from when they land on your site. If your business has a good social media following you should leverage it to send people to your website, this not only gets you a better ranking, it also helps you determine what kind of content to make. Social media trends are a great way to get ahead of the competition, and if you quickly create website content to leverage those trends you’re on your way to SEO success.
Your posts don’t have to be blatant self promotion either, the goal is to add value once again. If that’s creating and posting a funny video with a link back to your site, or some industry inside joke that works so much better than a canned “visit our site and check out this thing” post. People have grown numb to business self promotion, stand out from their newsfeed by being different and valuable. Whatever form it ends up taking, the goal is genuine audience engagement, and getting people excited about your brand.
What are you waiting for?
That’s it! These are the 3 things to help jumpstart your small business SEO in 2022. Start applying these techniques right away and the results will come. These points are only getting more relevant as search engines continue to influence our daily lives. Will you be a part of the change, or lost to it? Your actions (or inaction) will decide!
