Small Business SEO – The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

SEO is vital for your small business to have an impact online.

PPC and ads can have an impact short-term, but for lasting gains and visibility you need to invest in SEO.

Even if your company is just one person – YOU – this guide will help.

It demonstrates how simple it is to get your business noticed online, whether you’re supplementing your efforts with small business SEO services like fatjoe’s, or going it alone with your small business SEO.

Why SEO Matters For Small Businesses

SEO matters a lot for small businesses.

For many, it is the only viable strategy to gain new online clients. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads and other methods are simply too expensive.

It Boosts Visibility

First, SEO boosts visibility. Small businesses can set up their Google Business Profile (GBP) and start winning customers in Maps straightaway with local search.

Setting up your profile only takes a few days and generates instant interest in what you sell. People can explore your review scores, opening times, and even pricing, browse images of your business, and click a link to your contact info and website.

It Increases Credibility

Second, SEO boosts your credibility as a small business. Users see you at the top of the search engine page results (SERPS) and assume you must be good because of your high ranking.

Research backs this up: users trust organic results more than paid ads, and Google’s #1 result has on average a click-through-rate (CTR) of 27.6%, making it ten times more likely to receive a click than the top ad.

It Levels The Playing Field

SEO also matters for small businesses because it levels the playing field. Your startup or single-person enterprise can use it to compete with the big, established names.

Regular marketing options are like a big club you use to bludgeon your rivals into submission. But SEO is like a sharp, pointed stick that pushes the right buttons accurately. Instead of taking the scatter-gun approach, it lets you be more surgical.

Small business SEO works because it’s about being smart and finding a niche. Local businesses can always carve out a strategy using these tools, even when other methods are too expensive.

We’ll cover longtail keywords in more detail later, but for now just know you can carve out opportunities to stand out by targeting niche, but high intent, keywords the big players may have missed.

It Enhances Local Impact

Enhancing local impact is another benefit of small business SEO. You can reach nearby target audiences with ease.

Local SEO allows you to reach impulsive and regular buyers in the local community. For example, you could:

• Market your restaurant to visiting tourists nearby
• Highlight your car garage’s high review score to people who need vehicle servicing locally
• Raise awareness of your local accountancy practice

Because of this, SEO is almost heaven-sent for local businesses. It provides cheap access to all Google users, usually the surrounding market, while avoiding costly outreach.

It Reduces Costs

Finally, SEO matters for small businesses because it reduces marketing expenses. Average PPC costs for firms like yours are between $5,000 and $10,000 per month, whereas search engine optimization averages just $500 monthly for such brands.

SEO is the gift that keeps on giving. Early investments in content and link-building continue to provide ranking juice for months and years after their initial implementation, improving the strategy’s long-term cost-effectiveness.

Once you turn off ads they stop working – immediately.

Basics of SEO For Small Businesses

Link Building

Link building is central to SEO. It provides vital rank-boosting juice to your pages, enabling you to get out of page 3 hell.

This post discusses link-building and why it matters for SEO in detail. You can learn about the various types of links and the top link-building strategies available today.

We’ve also posted detailed content on how to build links in specific industries that often find SEO challenging, like iGaming, car dealerships, adult businesses, and even for dentists. These show how gaining links in these industries is still possible, despite search engine policies or simply high-competition that makes it more challenging.

Content Creation

Content creation is another critical element of SEO for small businesses. Understanding how it works and how to leverage it is vital for rising in the ranks.

Content matters for two reasons:

• It provides helpful information or enjoyable entertainment to audiences
• It lets Google know what your site is about

Content takes several forms:

• The on-page content detailing your products and services
• The blog content you create
• The meta or technical content on your site’s backend (like your meta title or alt image texts)

We’ve previously written posts on using content for link-building (by making it so interesting or original that other sites have to link to it).

We’ve also discussed how you can find gaps in existing content for your niche that you can exploit to differentiate yourself from industry rivals.

We’ve even covered how you can create enticing video scripts and create winning video marketing strategies for greater impact.

The bottom line? Once you understand content creation for SEO, the sky’s the limit. High-quality articles and videos continue to generate value over time, allowing you to dominate the competition.

There’s a lot of noise at the moment about the value of content in the face of AI, but if you take the time to create specialized content that is specific to your small business niche, with your industry expertise it’s more than worth it!

Local SEO

As a small business, local SEO also matters to you. It lets you target customers nearby.

This approach makes sense for many local enterprises. Usually, you sell to audiences in your area (not nationally or internationally), so focusing on them makes the most sense.

For example, a pizza shop in New York might target the following keywords:

• Pizza take-out in New York
• New York pizza delivery
• Spicy New York pizza joint

We’ve previously written about the value of local SEO for businesses with multiple locations. We’ve also discussed how to use local SEO to rank better and why it matters.

These articles teach you more about what local SEO is, how it is evolving, and how it works. You can learn about the “Map Pack” (where Google displays the three most prominent businesses for a specific keyword in a map-linked box in search results), knowledge panels, and even the role of AI snippets.

Reputation Management

Reputation management is also critical for small business SEO. Without thousands of reviews on Google and teams of influencers who love your brand on social media, even small complaints can be fatal.

Think of reputation management as protecting or repairing your image.

Businesses like yours can get things wrong (something we understand in gory detail!) But they can also fix problems, like negative reviews or harmful news stories.

We’ve written about the virtues of reputation management SEO on our blog. Guides teach you why it matters and how to respond when things go wrong. They also show you how to monitor your presence and nip problems in the bud before they damage your brand.

Authority-Building

Authority-building is another vital element of successful small enterprise SEO. Google measures this using its E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness) framework and whether it should promote your domain to its user base.

This element of SEO matters to all small firms but is essential for those selling nationally or internationally (like ecommerce retailers). Nailing it convinces Google that you offer original, high-quality, credible information, entertainment, products, and services to its audience.

Again, we’ve explored what makes an authoritative website, breaking down exactly how to create one. We’ve also discussed the tricky concept of ecommerce SEO in detail, including a guide to getting to #1 on Google and E-E-A-T as a concept. Reading these primers should help you understand how to build an authoritative online presence.

Keyword Discovery

Finding keywords to target is also critical for small businesses. You need to know the phrases your customers use when searching for your products and services (and which are the least competitive).

Ideally, you want local keywords used by your target audience with low competition and high volume. At fatjoe, we consider this combination the holy grail.

Of course, finding these keywords is challenging, but we’ve written posts on this too. For example, you can learn more about mastering long-tail keywords, understanding the value of keywords, and how to avoid pesky keyword cannibalization on our blog.

Once your small business masters keywords, Google will understand your site better. Slotting them in using tools like SurferSEO and Semrush can be highly valuable.

Technical SEO

Finally, technical SEO matters for small businesses. Ensuring Google is happy with your website backend is critical.

Google now prioritises PageSpeed Insights–essentially a list of requirements for top-ranking websites. However, meeting these often requires delving into your website’s bowels and fixing technical, behind-the-scenes issues.

Fortunately, we’ve covered the elements of this somewhat complicated process elsewhere. Read our guides for details on the best URL structures, monitoring broken backlinks, internal linking structures, rel tags, and SEO metrics.

Remember, you’re not just helping Google here – you’re also helping provide your users with a great user experience!

How fatjoe Helps Small Businesses With SEO

Reading all this, you may wonder how you can physically do everything small business SEO requires. After all, it’s a lot of work.

Fortunately, fatjoe is here to help.

Every year, we help hundreds of small businesses build content, generate links, and get their names on major news media publisher websites.

We even help SEO agencies that help small businesses – but don’t worry we’ll never reveal who works with our whitelabel SEO services for small businesses.

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Below, we introduce some of our small business SEO services. These give you a flavor for how working with us could transform your enterprise. Our team specializes in delivering bulk links and content that drives rankings for keywords and your domain, but our writers can also complete bespoke projects according to specific instructions.

How cool is that?

So, what do we offer?

Blogger Outreach

Blogger Outreach is the essential fatjoe link-building tool for small businesses. This service lets you secure links on relevant third-party blogs, bypassing the hassle of organic or conventional guest posting.

Pricing is simple, too. Simply tell us how many links you want and the required domain rating (DR) and we’ll handle the rest.

What’s nice about fatjoe’s guest posting (blogger outreach) service is our 100% genuine outreach. Our writers create unique, Copyscape and AI-free blogs by hand, using nothing but sheer human creativity. Posts engage audiences while remaining relevant to the host site (of which we work with many).

You get one anchor text with a link to your site, and when you order multiple links, we guarantee no duplicate domains. Every backlink will come from a different site in your niche, whether you sell washing machine parts or accounting services.

Blogger Outreach works because:

• You can build multiple links on high-DA sites without the hassle of building relationships with independent bloggers (fatjoe has already done that for you).
• You can get white-hat links that comply with Google’s guidelines (avoiding punishments and down-ranking).
• Benefit from additional do-follow links across the internet, people in your audience can click if they want to learn more about what you do, or explore further.
• You can scale the number of links your small business requires (services grow as your business expands).

Getting started with blogger outreach is simple. Provide us with the anchor text and the target URL, and our copywriting team will get to work, including backlinks naturally in the content. Then, you can see your placement live on your dashboard, including a snapshot of the project and full domain rating.

Don’t want to provide an anchor text? Don’t worry: Our writers can do that for you. Our editorial team weaves text naturally into the body content following Google’s guidelines.

Here’s an example of what content looks like when it appears on a blog:

Titles are engaging and relevant to your business and the blog’s audience, just like regular guest blog posts.

Digital PR

Related to reputation management is digital public relations, which we call “digital PR.”

These services determine how your audience perceives your brand online.

Digital PR involves spreading information about your business via a network of high-profile publishers, such as Business Insider, New York Post, and Daily Mail. Then, thousands (or perhaps millions) of people read the content online, with links pointing to your site.

At fatjoe we think digital PR is the most exciting thing to happen to SEO, link-building, and reputation management in years. Unlike conventional SEO, it’s a genuine shortcut that rockets your business to success.

Digital PR works for small business SEO because:

• It allows you to place links on the highest domain rating websites (DR 70+ in most cases)
• It lets you target publishers that your target audience reads
• You can design your campaigns around specific newsworthy stories related to your brand (including reaction pieces)
• You can get expert quote links and content syndication for ultimate coverage and engagement

Our PR Campaigns service has secured incredible coverage across the likes of these sites and more.

Here’s an example of a campaign we ran that got pickup in CNET (DR 92):

And here’s another campaign we ran on Yahoo!tech (DR72):

Digital PR stories all contain links that point to your business’s website. And because these are on newsworthy, trusted websites with high domain rating, they have an enormous impact. Google loves these posts and considers them entirely white hat and legitimate.

Digital PR can go viral with our approach. Our team creates dozens of high-profile links on top websites pointing to yours, allowing you to corner specific keywords and semantic associations in Google’s algorithm. With digital PR, you can become the big story in your niche–whatever you do.

Of course, this type of SEO is expensive. Fortunately, affordable options, like our Press Release Distribution Service, can also work. These provide one body link and one bio link with placements on some high-profile publishers (like Google News and Business Insider), acting similarly to digital PR campaigns, but with a narrower scope.

You can provide content for fatjoe to edit and release via its distribution network or get our professional writers to ideate and create copy from scratch. Again, it’s your choice.

Niche Edits

Small businesses can also benefit from niche edits. This affordable service involves adding links to existing blogger content.

This service rocks because the content is already highly ranked on Google. Writers add a new text snippet with the anchor and link to enhance the existing article.

Confused? Watch out primer:

Niche edits are a great SEO tool for small businesses because:

• They are more cost-effective than many other link-building options
• Bloggers can add them to existing posts quickly
• They can be generated faster than new content (often in minutes, not hours)
• They can target specific traffic
• Bloggers can add them to existing high-performing results in search for additional SEO juice.
• They can scale easily as small businesses grow or expand to new locations
• They can include regional identifiers (locations in the keyword) if part of travel-themed posts

Local Citation Building

fatjoe can also provide local citation building for small business SEO. These services place details about your company on relevant websites using 100% manual submission (no AI or software tools).

This approach works by building the number of times your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) are mentioned on relevant third-party directories, increasing Google’s confidence in your brand.

Here’s an example of a citation for fatjoe:

Local citation building is ideal for small businesses because:

• It improves local visibility on these third-party sites and overall Google rankings.
• It is cost-effective (prices with fatjoe are as low as $0.80 per citation.
• It drives targeted traffic to your website – people interested in buying from you.
• It enhances trust and builds customer confidence.
• It quickly amplifies your online presence and digital footprint (ideal for new businesses and startups).
• It’s quick to implement and can be done in hours.

fatjoe makes this service even better by targeting directories in specific countries for more impact (including the U.S., U.K., Spain, Mexico, etc). This supports greater local accuracy and provides Google search users with useful content relevant to their region.

fatjoe only uses trusted directories and guarantees complete accuracy (with manual checking) to prevent NAP inconsistencies.

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What if you want an all-in-one backlink, citation, and content package?

fatjoe can do that, too. We provide all your deliverables in a complete service called “Grow.” This option is ideal for small businesses that want to avoid admin and scale fast.

Delivery takes less than 28 days, and you can benefit from a dedicated concierge–a fatjoe team member who handles your anchor text optimization and URLs. It’s almost completely hands-off!

Keyword Research

Keyword research is another fatjoe SEO service for small businesses. It takes the guesswork out of the process, providing you with lists of up to 1,000 keywords per topic you can use.

The service starts with 5 topics up to 5,000 potential keywords ranked by difficulty, Adwords CPC, and search volume. You also receive your rank in Google for each keyword, letting you see where you are now and where you want to be.

Keyword research is effective for small business SEO because:

• It can inform your content strategy and ensure you choose the correct titles and keywords in the body text
• It improves return-on-investment by helping you find keywords with higher conversion rates
• It gives you a competitive edge over local rivals who may not be doing keyword research
• It boosts your local SEO by helping you target keywords for your location (e.g., pizza restaurant in New York)
• It lets Google send more commercially relevant traffic to your website
• You can insert new keywords into on-page content quickly

Here’s an example of what keyword research looks like in practice:

fatjoe lists relevant, manually researched keywords by volume, difficulty, and intent. Then, all you do is follow the recommendations on what to include on your site.

Content Planning

fatjoe can also help your small business SEO with content planning. Our team helps you decide on up to 100 topics to post on your blog or website.

Every content plan is SEO optimized and links to our content writing service, providing an end-to-end solution.

The Basic plan delivers a year’s worth of content with SEO-optimized titles, semantic secondary keywords, a content brief/structure, and a plan ready to go. Meanwhile, the Pro service comes with two years of content, SERP difficulty ratings, and £250 toward fatjoe’s content creation.

Content planning is useful for small business SEO because:

• It drives targeted traffic to your posts, blogs, and service pages.
• It enhances local SEO (e.g., “best pizza shop in Midtown”).
• It increases engagement with your audience and allows you to address their pain points.
• It is cost-effective and reduces the need for expensive ad campaigns (especially if you write the content yourself).
• You can build brand authority faster and create content around topics your audience cares about.

Content planning is always challenging, and most in-house digital marketing professionals run out of ideas after perhaps 100 posts. Many ideas aren’t relevant to audiences and get fewer clicks.

We’ve written several posts on popular blog topics and how to develop new content ideas. However, you can avoid this effort and get answers immediately with professional content planning.

Content Writing

Finally, fatjoe helps your business with content writing. Here, you choose your desired content and do whatever you want with it.

Content writing is valuable for small business SEO because it lets you:

• Add conversion-optimized content to your webpages that includes keywords
• Write product descriptions that encourage people to buy products
• Get articles written by blogging professionals discussing any topic related to your business
• Write SEO-focused posts for your website blog
• Create content for your website that Google can use to determine what you do

High-quality content is fundamental to SEO success for many small businesses. fatjoe can deliver magazine-quality content in UK or U.S. English in as little as 48 hours.

Plus, we offer a “Pro” version of all our content writing services, allowing you to access the top writers with the best communication and research skills for the ultimate posts.

Why fatjoe Is Awesome for Small Business SEO

Reading this, fatjoe’s expertise and suitability for small business SEO should be clear.

But, in case it’s not, here are more reasons why startups, solopreneurs, and small-scale enterprises love what we do.

No Retainers – Ever

fatjoe’s primary selling point is that we never charge retainers. Therefore, we don’t try to lock you into our business model.

Instead, you pay an upfront fee for your needs, and we get on with the work. As such, you only purchase services as required.

This feature of our service is of particular benefit to a small business. After all, how can you commit to an SEO agency for a year when you don’t know where you’ll be in one month? Our pay-per-use productized model does away with annoying and unethical contracts.

Completely Scalable Services

fatjoe also offers entirely scalable services. You decide how many links, citations, blogs, or articles you need.

fatjoe can offer this scalability because of our editorial team. Our writers adjust to workflows and can deliver projects urgently when required.

We offer flexibility that eliminates overcommitting.

Want to scale back? That’s fine by us.

Affordable And Transparent Pricing

Our small business SEO services also come with affordable and transparent pricing.

We aren’t pushy or secretive. What you see is what you pay.

This approach lets you plan your budget more easily. You know how much you spend, and there are no hidden fees or additional charges.

Proven Track Record

Finally, fatjoe has a proven track record for helping small businesses since 2012. We’re now a trusted partner for over 10,000 SEO agencies, offering a combination of high-quality links and scalable services.

Who can argue with that?

Now You Should Understand SEO For Small Businesses

Reading this, you should better understand how to use fatjoe for small business SEO.

What’s nice about our approach is that we just get on and do the job for you. It doesn’t matter what type of business you want to grow or maintain, our experienced team can help.

The price you see is the price you pay if you want to automate this part of your business. SEO is time-consuming when done in-house, but with fatjoe, you can reduce the effort and get incredible results at an affordable price.