Small Business SEO for £350 per month #LinkLove
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Small Business SEO for £350 per month #LinkLove

18th March 2013

Ade Lewis owner of Teapot SEO gave some great tips on how to carry out SEO for small businesses for as little as £350 a month at LinkLove.  Small business SEO relies on face to face relationships with the client which is very different to those who have large clients and can be executed without many meetings/interactions.

Ade has a rule about opportunities.  If he gets a good opportunity, he says yes.  After last year Search Love, Duncan were Ade chatting at the bar and Duncan asked if he would like to speak and next year’s event.  Now Ade is here presenting to over 300 people at LinkLove.  This is the same way Ade approaches small business SEO.  You need to optimise as much as you can. Be really good at least one area of SEO and know enough about the others, to amplify the business.

What is SEO for small business? “It is anything that we an do via search, social media or hustle to achieve client goals without hustling”.

Who are small business?

The definition of SMEs are small to medium businesses up to 249 people in the company. Ade’s definition of a small business is one that employs up to 10 people.  There are 1 million of these businesses in the UK, but most did not know about SEO.  Ade’s company helped many of them understand SEO but they still have a low marketing budget.

How can you execute SEO for a small business?

1) Know your client’s business

Go to their place of business, find out what is important for their business.

2) Have some goals to aim for

Make sure that these goals are more extensive than increasing site traffic or improving rankings.

3) Educate your client

Tell your client what you are doing and why.

4) Be Realistic

If your client is small and wants to go for competitive search terms, they will be disappointed.

5) Have a great website

If you have a great website, a lot of things like link building will be easier. Clearly communicate your brand, with a logo. Help to optimise the site. People do not want to link build to bad websites. You may need to allocate three months of £350 for redesigning a new site.Be Realistic - Ade Lewis

6) On page SEO

Make sure you do this as link building is very expensive.  The better the on page is, the less number of links you need to do.

Sign up to Distilled Uni if do not know how to do on page work. Also use the SEOMOz on page optimisation tool for the site. Sign yourself up for SEOMoz pro and run the site through the tool to identify crawl errors/duplicate content areas.

7) Local Search

This is really important for local businesses.

8) Add a blog

Many small businesses do not know what to write, but Ade educates their clients on what to write about on their blog.  Make sure clients blog about what their customers are interested in.

  • Blog about things that interest customers
  • Blog about local topics and issues
  • Put a local area in your blog category name

9) Link Building

  • Get back link data, then put in screaming from, then find it.
  • Find and fix orphaned links, you may be surprised with what you find

 10) Combine existing pages

If your client’s site has a lot of pages with thin content, put it all on one page.

11) Easy Wins

Ask the client everyone who they know that has their own website.  Do not expect to get a link for free, give them something for it.  Give them advice for their website for example. Alternatively, run an orphaned link check on their site, then tell them what it is and how to fix the links.

12) Outreach

For small business SEO, outreach is seen as too expensive, however Ade has now streamlined the process.

Finding link prospects does take a lot of time and can be difficulty.  Now Teapot SEO has created their own finding link prospect tool (this needs to be hosted on another server)

www.teapotseo.co.uk/prospector-tool

The tool scrapes google for link prospects based on the search query eg in the simple mode  the query is “how to plan vegetables intitle:”write for us”. There is also a guest post split mode.  This really helps with blogger outreach.  The tool helps to find all the sites that link to these results. Create a project, give it a name.  Choose which version want to run. Sign up to the free SEOMoz API before you use the tool.

Go through the list, pull out DA 30 – 60 as higher than this hard to get a link from them.  Cherry pick the prospects from this.  The longer you spend doing this, the better success rate your have.

Ade Lewis - Conclusion

Outsourcing

Matt Beswick has provided some great tips on his blog about outsourcing which Ade has found very useful www.mattbeswick.co.uk/outsourcing-guide

  • BuzzStream

This is a really useful software to manage the blogger outreach. Ade suggests to  pre pitch ideas to bloggers before they are written.  Ade’s company sends out 20 – 35 emails a month with the intention of getting 5 links. They send out the batches of 10 and this is all for £350.  A site does not need a lot of links to rank.  It does not take many links from DA 60 to have an impact.

  • Content Creation

TeapotSEO uses text broker to write the content, but use it right.  Can get 600 word post done for £8.30. Always go for 4 start quality. There is a limit to number of

Conclusion:

There are many ways to do SEO for small business.  There are just a few tips on what you can do for your client:

  • Link Building
  • Orphan links
  • Leveraging existing links
  • Easy links
  • Our awesome prospecting tool
  • Blogger outreach
  • Infographics
  • Niche directories – just one or two links
  • Being Successful
  • Know your client’s business
  • Be realistic
  • Define the marketing goals
  • Be an asset to your business
  • Educate your client
  • Be creative

One of the most important  elements on how to do SEO for small business, is to say yes to opportunities.  You never know what this may lead to, it could even result in you winning a new client.

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Written By
Jo Juliana Turnbull is the organiser of Search London and the founder of SEO Jo Blogs, which provides practical advice and tips for those in SEO.
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