SEO for Small Business

Andrew Shotland, CEO, Local SEO Guide offers insights and tips on SEO for small businesses.

Introduction

SEO for small businesses can seem to be a complicated issue, and in some scenarios it is. But there is a lot small businesses can do to impact how they show up in the search results for keywords that matter most.

We sat down with Andrew Shotland, a leader in the search engine optimization (SEO) and local SEO space and CEO of Local SEO Guide (bio below), to talk about how small businesses can get started. From understanding Google search results to finding ways to earn new links to your site, Andrew offered great insight into SEO for small businesses.

We’ve posted the full interview below and the full interview transcript as well. Please excuse any typos or misspellings in the transcription as this was captured by a voice recognition software.

FULL VIDEO INTERVIEW

Getting Started with SEO

Joe Morsello
So what would be in the beginning point, like the starting point, if you’re a small business and “Hey, I really need to understand what SEO is, how it works, what it why it matters for me,” where would you begin to have that discussion with a business that maybe is totally foreign to it?

Andrew Shotland
Well, I think we’d start with talking just about the basic concept, right? Because a lot of people don’t really understand what’s going on in Google, when they go to Google. They’re not sure what they’re looking at, maybe they know, but they don’t really think about it too hard. So, you know, first we start out, okay, so when you search Google, you get ads. And you get website links, and you get kind of Google stuff, let’s just call it right. So something like Google My Business results might be what we call Google stuff, right? It’s not an ad, it’s not a link to a website, it’s some other thing that keeps you inside of Google. And so the ads we don’t really talk about, those are straightforward. Though, the website links and the Google stuff, that’s all stuff that you can affect with your website, or your brand’s visibility in, through SEO.

And so SEO is kind of this art and science of improving your visibility of your brand to potential customers when they’re searching for stuff that you might want to offer them. There’s a lot of other reasons to SEO, but in general, most people are like, how do I make money from it? How do I get customers? So we’ll start with that. There are other things like there’s reputation management SEO – like, hey, someone’s saying, like, my restaurant sucks. And it ranks number one in Google. How do we get rid of that? That’s a whole other thing. But it’s all related.

So once you kind of explain that to them, then they start to kind of see the matrix a little bit.  So you don’t pay to be there, right? It’s like, well, you might pay an SEO person to help you get there. But there’s not like a pay $5 a click right. And so the SEO job is to figure out what are all those things that your customers are searching for? That might be a, let’s say, a conversion event for you. And it could be they want to buy something, maybe you want them to hit your website, so you can cookie them so you can show ads to them. Maybe you want them to sign up for your newsletter, or whatever it is, right. There’s all these tools and data available that you can use to do research about how people search for stuff.

And that’s kind of where you start, like how do people search for stuff? And then what is Google showing at the top of the results for whatever we decide your customers are searching for? And once we’ve kind of figured that out, we can say okay, well, I want to rank for I don’t know, hotdog stand in Chicago, and I can see what Google’s showing as the number one results for that kind of search. And so I say, okay, well now what you need is someone to kind of reverse engineer, why is that thing showing up at number one for hotdog stand Chicago, or number two, or whatever. And so what the SEO job is to do is to kind of figure that out at scale.

So it’s not about one keyword. It’s about 1000s or maybe millions of keywords that your customers are searching because not everyone searches the same. And try to come up with a viable strategy based on budget and potential and all that kind of stuff.

Prioritizing SEO Efforts

Joe Morsello
Yeah, I just wanted to follow up to that point real quick, because it’s like, yeah, you could target 1000s of keywords potentially – depending on your industry, depending on your location, whatever. There’s so much to go after. And so if you’re coming in as a small business, how would you then prioritize? Like you said hotdog stand – so hotdog stand, maybe that’s a good place to start, you know, it’s not complicated, right? So you have that but then what would you say as a quick tip – would you then take hotdog stand with a location qualifier? Where would you then take that keyword to expand it maybe to a longer tail?

Andrew Shotland
So in the case of hotdog stand, you have to start to think about well, that’s not just what you are. You’re also a lunch place. Right? And you’re maybe you’re a caterer right. Like cuz you do kids parties and kids like hot dogs. So you kind of start to have to think that way and you have to kind of figure out like, what are all these different ways that people are thinking about you – or could think about you? Then it’s kind of based on some research – well, what do people search for the most or what’s most valuable to you.

And so in the case of the hotdog stand, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s kind of limited, which is good. You don’t have a choice. But if you are a dentist, well, there’s all the services you offer – teeth whitening, and that kind of thing. Or a med spa, right? There’s a billion different services. And so you kind of have to start to think about what your priorities are just like with everything else in your business. And it’s usually going to be the category is the priority, dentist or hotdog stand or restaurant maybe. And then everything else is kind of secondary.

But most markets are pretty competitive. So it may take you a while and a significant investment, to do well for your category. And so thinking about it in a longtail way, well, just to simplify it, like let’s say there’s 20 keywords that matter. So maybe you don’t go after the big ones that are going to be most competitive, you go after the smaller ones where you can move quicker. That’s kind of how we’d approach it.

Joe Morsello
The other part that I’m kind of curious to get your feedback on – we’re talking about what’s happening underneath the ads underneath the map pack, because your Google My Business profile, obviously, is really pushing what’s actually happening in the map pack. And you’re ranking there, right? Is that correct?

Andrew Shotland
But we would start with that too, because that’s what’s gonna show up most of the time for a local query. And so you don’t want to kind of view your Google My Business Page and your website as separate things, even though they are separate. You want it’s like all part of the same program. They work together.

HOW TO COMPETE IN SEO

Joe Morsello
Exactly – so if you’re entering a space, and you don’t really have any brand equity, you don’t really have any time in the market and like you said, most things are competitive and only continuing to get more competitive as people get more sophisticated and kind of adopt these these tactics, so going long tail makes a lot of sense. But you really need to be ranking for category keywords too and you need to be in the mix somehow. In this scenario, how can you compete and what would be a timeline to expect if you’re entering a market like dentists, for instance? What do you think it would take to get decent ranking in those local queries.

Andrew Shotland
It’s impossible to say because it’s all so case dependent. But in a super competitive market, like you should expect that it’s going to take a while. But there may be some simple things that you’re just not doing that can unlock a lot of value quickly.

For example, just making this up, but let’s say it is dentists and you’re in Chicago, and your homepage doesn’t say dentist on it, for whatever reason. And it doesn’t have a neighborhood that you service on it or something, maybe just adding the word dentist and the neighborhood you service will enable you to rank really well in a five mile radius of your office. And because you don’t really care about all of Chicago, it’s too big and maybe someday you’ll be number one when someone does a search in Chicago, but what you really care is in your service area, which is probably, you know, I don’t know what it’s gonna be. But let’s say it’s, it’s within 15 miles radius or the max someone might be willing to travel. And so you’re really not trying to rank for dental Chicago you’re trying to rank for when someone puts dentist in Google and Google geo targets the results based on the user’s location, which isn’t Chicago but some neighborhood in Chicago, or some zip code maybe.

So that kind of thing you can often do pretty well but the problem is, is that okay, now I’ve won the two blocks around my office now what’s it going to take to win five blocks around my office, right? And keep going out? Because, you know, there’s gonna be more competition as you go farther away from your office.

THE POWER OF LINK BUILDING FOR SEO

Joe Morsello
You kind of touched on reviews. There’s just so much to SEO. It’s hard to say let’s talk about this one area, because you took all this stuff you can go so far into and there’s so many ways to approach all of it. Lets say you’re entering a market or you’re established in a market, you maybe have a decent footing. Okay, now, here’s the next step, you haven’t really put much into SEO, your ranking for, you know, dentist in wherever – what’s the next step to accelerate. You’ve got your on page SEO stuff. And then you’ve got reviews, and then you’ve got your Google My Business, you’ve got all these different pieces. Everything takes time, everything takes, you know, investment to some degree, where would you begin to, to kind of like, move the needle?

Andrew Shotland
So nine times out of 10, what any website, whether it’s an SMB, or you know, Facebook, right, what they need are content and links from other sites. Reviews are good, definitely get reviews that can help Google better understand what you should be ranking for the words in the reviews can help that.

let’s say we’re working with a 10 location law firm or something, what they – actually lawyers is a great example – lawyer websites, like, are probably the most some of the most advanced for SEO, like they spent the most on SEO over the last decade, let’s say. And so they already have a ton of content, because they’ve written like 50 million, like how to get out of a DUI articles and stuff. And usually, to move the needle for those guys, you what you want to do is one, they probably have too much content, Google might look at their site, it’s just a bloated, like crappy site. So you want to kind of refine the content to be better targeted. And then what you want to do is get better more and better links from other websites, in getting links from other websites is usually like the gas that accelerates this stuff.

Joe Morsello
Sure, also, probably one of the most time consuming and challenging unless, like, so tell me – there’s ways you can kind of buy links, essentially, some better quality than others, obviously. There’s a lot of talk about like supporting local sponsors, or nonprofits, whatever, maybe getting a link back from their sponsors page. In your eyes, what do you think is one of the more valid, viable and affordable ways to approach link building?

Andrew Shotland
Well, the easiest way is, is having a network of people who have websites that you could ask for links from, right. So I would look at if you’re, let’s say, a dentist, I would look at who are all the businesses in my area that I’m partnered with, that I have a relationship with? And can I get stuff, right? Then what are the typical things I’m doing? I that might be able to generate links so am I donating to charities? Do i have a booth at street fairs or whatever? Like all those things, all those entities have websites. And so those people, you could ask for links.

And then after that, there’s a bunch of obvious places you can go like, hey, do you have all your social profiles filled out? Right? Those are all links will link to you and can help you? Are you a member of any other organizations like the Association of dentists or whatever, and like, those are all places that can link to you, right?

Typically, you exhaust that list pretty quickly, right? Because the business doesn’t really want to do it, or they do it. They have a they got three links. Great. Okay, now what? So those are all the kinds of cheap, easy way, easy things to get. After that, you’ve got to it’s like any other marketing channel, you have to have a program and a process to go out and get links and figure out a good reason why anyone would link to you.

And there are plenty of SEO companies that will sell you links. You don’t want those. You don’t want anyone who’s going to sell you a link. And he was like, oh, a link is X dollars. And, you know, they’re like opening their trench coat. Some of those actually will work. There’s a lot of spammy links that work. The problem is you don’t know which ones will and which ones won’t. And you don’t know which ones will come back to haunt you.

One of things you mentioned was local sponsorship link building, we actually used to do that. And it was pretty easy to get right. You’re like, Hey, I’ll give you 50 bucks for this. And will sponsor your turkey run right and just link back to this lawyer or whatever. That was easy. But what we figured out with the, with the sponsorship links is one, everyone started doing them. Yeah. Because it was easy. And to those sponsorship, those websites tend to get updated every year. And you they with new sponsorships and you lose the old links. Yeah. So it’s basically like you’re renting links and right. And we didn’t think that was ethical thing to sell to clients like a temporary link.

And so we built our own capabilities to essentially go out and get links. And it’s you can read, there’s probably a million articles on the web about this, it’s really straightforward, right? Come up with a reason that someone should link for you link to you, like create a piece of content, let’s say, like, the worst dental disasters, right, let’s say, here’s my photo gallery, the worst dental disaster. And then have a process to find hundreds, maybe 1000s of websites that are relevant to dental to dentists, or Chicago or wherever you live. And, and then come up with an email campaign to target them. And that means like sending out emails being like, hey, like, I have this dental disasters page, I think it would really fit in well with you, oh, and I’ve even created a version for you guys. You can put it on your site, right? And do that over and over again, and keep iterating and improving your messaging until you can see it reliably converting. And it’s like a direct response game, you have to send out 100 emails to get one link. Right?

And then you have to keep doing it over and over again, play the numbers game. And so you need a process to do that. No, SMB wants to do that. So that’s where you start to say, maybe there’s someone who does this for a living that I can use? Because it sounds weird to me. Right? And that’s when you get involved with an SEO professional and be like, okay, like, I don’t care what don’t know, I don’t even want to know what you’re doing. Just go do it.

Joe Morsello
Do you think organizations or groups near you – do you think there is more value to link to another site that shares the location keywords that you share on your site? Is there more value to that link than some company across the country?

Andrew Shotland
It’s always really hard to measure value, because at the end of day, who really knows. The way we look at it is, does this URL rank for the keywords that we want to rank for? Or a keyword that we want to rank for? Does it? And if it does, it’s relevant. At least Google thinks is relevant. So that’s kind of the major criteria is, is it ranking for a query that we think is relevant?

And then is the traffic to that site as best we can tell going up or down? You don’t want links from a site where the traffic’s going down? Because there’s a good chance that Google has penalized that site. And so you can use like tools like SEM rush, or ahrefs, or any of these things that publicly report on right site traffic estimates.

MAKING “GOOD” SEO CONTENT

Joe Morsello
So you also talked a little bit about content – what is good SEO content? Obviously, it’s not easy, but what is it? What could it look like from a small business perspective?

Andrew Shotland
So the stock answer is write content that someone would want to read. And that’s going to vary based on your topic, but make it good for us. That would be the ask. 90% of people can’t do that. Use research to decide what to write about. So again, look at what Google is rewarding, understand the queries your customers are doing. And look at what Google is rewarding in those queries.

As an example, we had a client who was in the skincare business they had like, let’s say, moisturizer, for face moisturizer. And so they’re like, we have the best face moisturizer in the world – why don’t we rank number one for face moisturizer? And if you look, it probably is this way today. If you search face moisturizer, and Google probably the first result is like our reviews of the top 10 face moisturizers on some skincare magazine or beauty mag. And so in that case, you have to kind of change your thinking, if you want to rank number one for, for face moisturizer, you probably have to consider writing editorial about face moisturizer, not just having a great product and a product page.

So you have to look at what’s working in Google. And then you have to research. What does Google seem to be rewarding for queries with this intent? Meaning it’s not just the first result, it’s the first, let’s say, 50 results? What do all these pages have in common? That we can kind of pick apart? Like do they all use the word moisturizer in the title rate or something like that? Or do they all have an image or a video? Or what is it and then you need to take that data and turn it into an SEO brief that a writer can use to create content that kind of starts with SEO as its foundation.

Joe Morsello
So you kind of start touching on types of content a little bit. If you were to look at all these different types of content – blogs, you have long form, video, reviews, social guest posting, you have all these types of content – is there a certain type of content that you find is really the most valuable when it comes to boosting your ranking for a certain keyword? Is it a mixture of everything? Is it combining them all and connecting them all? What form of the content do you see as being most valuable?

Andrew Shotland
Well, like I said, it’s totally contextually dependent on the keyword. In most cases, text is your best bet. But there’s certain keywords that will only generate videos, like movie name plus trailer, text isn’t gonna help. It’ll be the trailer. Even when you do video, you should be publishing a transcript of the video, which is text that a search engine can grab onto.

TECHNICAL SEO

Joe Morsello
So you have your kind of foundational SEO aspects, you know, for a small business, your Google My Business, your on-page SEO, obviously, the keyword research in advance of all of that. But then you get into like more of the technical optimizations, PageSpeed Search Console errors, like all that stuff, which is like really kind of time consuming. How does a small business get from, Hey, I got a Google My Business profile to Hey, my website has no errors Google search console and page speeds are really great. How do you get to that?

Andrew Shotland
There’s no such thing as no errors? Don’t stress out about it. Most small business websites, nine times out of 10, technical SEO problems is not their issue. So of course, you want your pages to be fast. So whoever built your site for them, like be like, why isn’t my page faster? Make it faster right? Certainly if half of your site is serving an error and is broken, well fix your site, right?

But don’t worry about every last little thing in Google Search Console. It’s not your concern. That stuff is mostly for like, I have 10 million URLs and complicated website and like, I need help to figure it out what’s going on? A 10 page website is not usually a technical SEO problem.

Joe Morsello
I really appreciate you spending some time with me. Thank you so much.

Andrew Shotland
No problem Joe. Happy to