Small businesses are booming in the USA. May alone saw an additional 500,000 business applications, according to the United States Census Bureau. Many of these businesses are single-person, single-site operations – or SSBs. For this type of business, the burden of every aspect of operation falls on the shoulders of the sole proprietor – including marketing, the crucial process of getting the word out about the service. For many businesses, digital marketing is going to constitute the norm, rather than any exception, and SEO forms the first key cornerstone of any digital marketing strategy.
SEO and Local Drive
The reason SEO is so important comes down to the sheer number of websites out there. Forbes highlights the fact that there are now 1.72 billion websites on the web – an absolutely colossal amount of data to move through in any search. Competing is important, and for small businesses, focusing on a local SEO strategy helps to achieve an important step immediately – cutting the chaff. Taking steps to enable searchers to focus on their local area and find your business name promoted right away will help you to optimize for crucial ‘near me’ searches. Ranking on Google can be a difficult process and narrowing down your field before you even start attempting to market your business can help tremendously. What’s more, this actually helps you to target your market more effectively.
Customer Data
Data is at the heart of any smart marketing operation. Having masses of unfiltered data, without any context, can be hampered to an SSB that only has limited time and prowess in looking through data. Using a data management platform to fine-tune what data you want from your customers, and presenting it in a way that’s beneficial to growth, is of massive benefit for the business. According to SemRush, customers will easily be influenced by the promotion of small businesses too: 46% are more willing to shop locally and use small businesses for higher quality services. Use your data to get a share of this market – look at who your consumers are, and tailor services to their demographics.
Achieving Automation
Even with all of the tools at hand, marketing can still be difficult for a single-person business. Putting a degree of automation into your marketing efforts can help this. Most marketing is actually achieved passively: if you put good data in, you’ll get good results out. Achieving this can be done by focusing on the basics. Make sure your address and contact data are accurate and of good quality; put proofread and high quality, keyword-focused content on your blog and webpage. By focusing on the principles of marketing rather than trying to alter your content after publishing, you’ll ensure that you’re always meeting the tick boxes of what the search engine values.
Through this, you can create focused local results and help your business to reach new heights. SSBs thrive on the local knowledge they have – putting it to work and making sure that knowledge is used requires some setup, but once you’re away, it’s just a matter of routine.
