Absolute Beginner’s Guide to SEO for Small Businesses (with examples)
There are lots of beginner guides to SEO online. I read a lot of them when I was trying to teach myself SEO and I pretty much hated all of them. They were rarely basic enough, didn’t offer actionable steps, and didn’t provide examples.
So I wanted to fix all that. Here’s what this guide will cover:
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a fancy way of saying “how to get ranked better in Google” (other search engines are also available).
The importance of SEO
I have an old travel blog I’ve put about one hour of work in over the last two years. Below is the Google Search Console data showing clicks and impressions from Google Search from November 2022 to March 2024.
At the top you can see I’ve had 24,000 clicks and more than 1 million impressions from people searching in Google. And the chart you can see it rises and dips.
Reminder: in the last five years I have put almost zero effort into this website. What could you do with 24,000 people visiting your website?
That's the power of SEO.
Now imagine, unlike me, you're continually optimizing your site, adding great new content, following SEO best practices, and have a solid strategy to convert your website visitors into paying customers.
Okay, but how do I actually do SEO?
You’ve probably hard of SEO before, and you know you should do it, and as you saw above, it can have a huge impact on the success of your business.
But SEO is hard to understand, because you rarely see immediate results. It's not like you can publish a piece of content and have Google tell you that, okay, that piece of content is worthy enough to always show up in position #15 in search results.
There are tons of factors that go into your search ranking, such as:
What did the person searching Google actually search for? Is your content relevant for that specific search? Do other websites have similar content? Is your content region specific? Does the searcher want to find something local? Is your website trustworthy enough? Was your content relevant a year ago but now is outdated?
These are just some of the questions to consider, there are millions more. But doing SEO broadly comes in these 4 steps:
Keyword research
The first step to improving your SEO is to determine what you actually want to rank highly for in search engines.
Let's say you own a small boutique hotel in Nowheresville, Germany.
You probably want to show up if someone searches “best places to stay in Nowheresville”. That's great, but so does every other hotel or accommodation option in Nowheresville. Maybe Nowheresville has some huge hotel chains with giant marketing teams and big budgets; you can't possibly compete with them.
As a small business, you should focus on what are called “long-tail keywords”. These are longer phrases that might have fewer people searching but much less competition and therefore be much easier to rank high in search for.
Maybe a selling point of your boutique hotel is the great ocean views. “Hotels in Nowheresville with ocean views” could be a good long-tail keyword. Or how about “hotels in Nowheresville with free breakfast”.
How do you find long-tail keywords to focus on?
There are various tools to help, but the best one for a small business is Google Keyword Planner. You can put in some rough ideas of keywords and it'll suggest related keywords, and for all keywords it will show an estimated number of monthly searches for the location you specify and the level of competition you can expect. You're looking ideally for high-volume, low-competition keywords, i.e. things that a lot of people are searching for but not many websites are trying to rank highly for.
For this screenshot my base keyword was “affordable hotels” in Germany (in English), and it’s telling me that that specific keyword has 10-100 average monthly searches and low competition, and something like “cheap hotels” is 1K-10K average monthly searches and also low competition, so I should focus more on “cheap” than “affordable”.
Note this is just one small part of keyword research - for just “affordable hotels”, Keyword Planner gave me 240 related keywords to analyze, then I can try other keywords. Or you can enter your website URL and the tool will suggest lots of keywords based on all the content on your website.
2. Creating great content
You've identified your target keywords, now what?
You need to create content around those keywords. Okay, but what exactly is content? Content, as it relates to SEO, is anything that’s publicly available to search (aka “index”) by Google. Content can include:
Your homepage
Your contact page
A blog post
Every image on every website page
Infographics
Embedded videos
Social media content
Podcasts
Even something like a Google Sheet can rank high in search, if it’s public on the web. At time of writing, when I search “automakers”, I see this Google Sheet in position #3:
If your goal of SEO is to get your website to rank high in search, your content should be on your website.
Google is aggressively and increasingly trying to combat low-quality and unoriginal content in search, so you can’t just use an AI tool to write something that you publish as a blog post without editing. Google and other search engines will penalize you, and in the worst case, could completely de-index your entire website.
Instead, focus on making your content fit Google’s EEAT criteria, which means:
Experience
Expertise
Authoritativeness
Trustworthiness
There’s no secret recipe to displaying these perfectly, instead just focus on making your content unique, insightful, and entertaining, i.e. something that visitors can’t find anywhere else online that they find enjoyable and that they want to share.
As an example, for your boutique hotel in Nowheresville, write in detail about the facilities of your hotel, write about local attractions (especially ones that might not show up as top sights in TripAdvisor), use high-quality images and videos of your hotel, etc.
Publish your content and search engines will start to index it.
3. Building backlinks
You’ve researched the perfect keywords and published some amazing content, now you’re waiting to be ranked #1 in Google.
But there’s a problem.
Google still doesn’t trust you, because no one has told them you’re trustworthy. You’re just someone yelling at them about how great you are, and when that happens in real life, you invariably want that person to get out of your face. It’s true with SEO too. But there’s a solution.
You need to get other people to tell Google how great you are.
Enter backlinks.
Backlinks are other websites that link to yours, and depending if that website is trustworthy, Google will think you’re more or less trustworthy. One website linking to yours = 1 backlink. But backlinks are about quality. Consider this example:
If the New York Times travel section posts an article about your boutique hotel and links to your website, congratulations, you’re getting a whole truckload of trustworthiness points (and tons of direct traffic from NYT visitors!).
If spamsite.xyz links to your website, that’s also one backlink, but it’ll do more harm than good.
Building backlinks is a huge part of effective SEO, and it’s difficult. There are lots of sites and services online that will promise 300 backlinks for $50 or some other impossibly cheap deal. I promise you, these will not be 300 backlinks of New York Times level quality.
As a small business, building backlinks is especially difficult because you don’t have much (or any) budget to do PR (which is a great way to build backlinks), and your site authority is low so no one wants to work with you at all.
The best methods of building backlinks for small businesses include:
Looking for guest post opportunities on other websites
Trading links with adjacent businesses, for example local tour groups - they can mention your hotel, you can mention their tours
Share your content on social media, and encourage other people to share it to their networks (creating unique & insightful content helps with this!)
Get listed on local directories (Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places, Yellow Pages, etc.)
4. Technical SEO
Now you’ve done research, created amazing content, and you have a bunch of great backlinks; hopefully you’re starting to see some good results in terms of your search rankings, but it’s still not as high as you’d like.
There’s one other big thing that might be stopping you reaching the #1 spot.
Technical/on-page SEO.
Google is actually pretty dumb. Even if well-trusted sites confirm to Google that, yes, your amazing content is actually amazing, sometimes Google is just like, “I can’t read it.”
There are a lot of very technical aspects of technical SEO (well, duh) that especially as a small business you probably don’t need to care about. And most website builders automatically take care of setting your website up for SEO success for you (read more about the best website builders for small businesses here). But there are some basic on-page SEO things you should keep in mind when it comes to SEO:
Page speed - your page must load quickly, because people don’t like to wait. I’m sure at some points you’ve closed sites before they’ve fully loaded because they were taking more than half a second to load. Use PageSpeed Insights to help diagnose page performance issues.
Only use one title tag, and use it well. The title tag tells search engines what your page is about. If your boutique hotel’s homepage title tag is “Fishing Spots Near Nowheresville”, you’re going to have a bad time.
Minimize your dead links/404s. If your website has a ton of links that go to 404 pages, search engines won’t like your site.
Don’t have multiple versions of the same content.
Summary
Hopefully by now you have a solid understanding of the basics of SEO.
First, do keyword research to identify opportunities for success, looking for high volume and low competition keywords.
Then create great content, focusing on making it unique, insightful, and entertaining.
Next, reach out to other websites and build out your social media presence to build backlinks.
Finally, check your content for on-page and technical SEO optimizations.
I’ll see you at #1 in Google in no time!
If you have any questions about anything above, or want an example for your specific industry, let me know in the comments!
