SEO Tips for Small Business

Toward our mission to help small businesses with client acquisition and retention, I’m going to highlight some work we’ve been doing in those areas at GoReminders. This blog post centers around our effort to communicate more effectively to our potential customers, so they can more easily find and learn about us. This all ties into Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. –Moz.com

We’re always trying to find ways to get people to easily understand how our product works and how it will make people’s lives easier. One way we’re putting that into action is clearly explaining various aspects of GoReminders and how they help save our customers time and money.

Two Concrete Examples

To help you understand what all this means and how you can put it into effect for your business, I’m going to give you a behind-the-scenes look at some SEO work we’ve recently done for the GoReminders calendar reminder app.

Text reminders

We recently launched a page dedicated to how text reminders work in GoReminders. Text message appointment reminders are part of the core functionality in our product. Here were our goals in creating this page:

Making sure people who get to our website are aware of our useful features related to text appointment reminders.
Helping people find us when they look for text reminder services on the web.
Helping everyone understand how to use these features to grow their business and save time.

Using high quality images is a great way to show of your product or service. In our case we used screenshots with relevant captions. This example highlights a feature of our text reminder functionality.

Appointment scheduling software

We also launched a page focusing on the appointment scheduling software aspects of GoReminders. We’ve worked hard to make our scheduler app easy to use and want to get the word out. Our goals for this page were:

Educate website visitors about useful features that might not be obvious when glancing at our homepage.
Help potential customers learn about us in the first place when they search for an appointment scheduler on the web.
Get everyone to understand how we have crafted a product that saves them time and money.

Here’s a screenshot we used on our appointment scheduling software info page.

The Importance of Goals

As you can see, the goals are focused on helping our customers. It’s important to make these goals before creating your content, because it will help you figure out what to write and how to present it. The goals need to make sense and be customer-centric because that’s the point of doing SEO for your business—finding ways to help people find and learn about your company. If you don’t create goals, you risk wasting time creating keyword-rich nonsense that no one will find interesting. If no one is interested in your content, these problems can happen:

People who click your page in a Google search results page go right back to the search results and click another site’s page because they didn’t find useful information on your page. Google realizes that and lowers your ranking.
No one links to your content from their blog posts and websites. Google interprets that as your page not being worth linking to, which means you’re losing out on Google increasing your rank if other high quality pages link to your page.
People who know about your company think less of you because the content isn’t helpful.

End up with people loving your page and Google thinking highly of you!

Sorry to be so negative, but the point is that if you set customer-centric goals then you’ll avoid those pitfalls and end up with people loving your page (more likely to pay you for your product or services), and Google thinking highly of your page which leads to higher ranking in search results (i.e., more people finding you in the first place).

Conclusion

If you’re looking at getting started with SEO for your business, or improving on your existing SEO efforts, think about how you can apply the above examples to your specific business. Think of how your customers would describe your products or services (I’ll be covering techniques for figure that out in a future blog post) and start writing content that will help them understand how your business will help them.

If you’re reading this, you have a business that you care about and probably do your work well. If you try the tips above, you should be able to get some good growth for your business by helping people find you and understand how you can make their lives better!