Small Business SEO – Understanding Keywords and What to Target

Identifying what keywords to target is the first step in starting to optimize our content. We want to find what keywords are likely to help us attract new business, so we’ll start looking at keywords from a marketing perspective.

You’ve probably heard of the “marketing funnel” – it’s a way to communicate how close to a buying decision someone is. The bottom of the funnel is close to action, where the top of the funnel is more awareness. Our initial focus will be on the bottom half of the funnel, specifically around Desire and Action. This is where our MVP (Minimum Viable Pages) will help us convert people who have a need and are ready to act.

SEO Funnel

Ideally, you can use a Keyword Tool to identify search volume and related keywords. A few good ones are Google Keyword Planner (if you have a Google Ads account), Keyword Finder, and Ahrefs Keyword Generator. If you don’t have access to a keyword research tool, you can follow some common keyword structures to get close to what you want to focus on for transactional and bottom-of-the-funnel keywords.

First, you have your top-level category keywords. If you are a local business, this can be as simple as <category> in <city> where you replace the tags with your category and city. Think of this as the top-level keyword, like “Attorney in Rochester, NY” or “Plumber in Montgomery”. These terms are typically transactional and have good search volume, but are often more competitive.

The second level of keywords is the service level or sub-category keywords. This may look like <service> in <city>. For example – this could be “Car accident attorney in Rochester, NY” or “Leak Repair in Montgomery”. You can see how the keywords are now more specific. These terms are a little further down the funnel and are likely to be searched for by someone with a specific need and intent to act on it.

The more specific your keywords, the more likely they are to convert when someone sees an answer to their issue. With our MVP content, we looked at creating content that defined the service, had examples of work, and some social proof of results. When someone can see themselves in the solution the likelihood of converting to a lead goes up.

Each page should have a main keyword and some close variations. Here is some guidance on how to begin optimizing a small business website with a keyword structure that make sense for both your potential customers and Google.

  • Homepage – This page should target your business name, your top-level category, and the area(s) you serve. The title of this page would be structured like <business name> – <top-level category> in <area>. Other elements on the page like the heading tags might include some variation of this to let users know who you are, what you do, and where you do it. Find a way to work these into some of the page content and the description of the page.
  • Service Pages – These pages should use the sub-level topic of each page, most likely the specific service. The title of these pages would be structured like <business name> – <service> in <area>. Just like the home page, you would find the other areas to highlight these terms and some close variants like “<area> <service>” or “local <service> in <area>” as a few options. Work these into headings, page content, and the description, keeping a focus on clarity and readability. Don’t overdo it or force keyword usage, but use them where it makes sense to you.
  • Location Pages – These pages may target a specific service area, and content would be tailored and customized for that market area. Take the same approach here as we did with the service pages and highlight the services in this area. Include <service> in <area> keywords in the title, heading, content, and description.

Tip: If you use WordPress, you’ll want to have an SEO Utility plugin to handle the SEO titles and metadata. A few options are Rank Math, All In One SEO, Yoast, and The SEO Framework. Any of these will do, and give you some functionality out of the box to help with optimizations.

Once you’ve added the keywords that make sense for each page, it’s usually helpful to take a look at the websites that are ranking for the terms you want to rank for. You can gain some insight into the content depth, keywords, images, video, etc that make a relevant page for your target keywords. Look at their titles and descriptions in the search results. What keywords and structure do you see? How often and where do keywords appear? Understanding what ranks ahead of you and why can give you some ideas as to how to improve your content to compete.

This is a good starting point for how to get your website content on the right track with relevance, and when paired with Google Business Listing optimization this may be enough to start getting some traction. Internally, SEOteric has a tool we built called “Intellicomp” where we can pull and analyze this data, and make improvements based on what Google wants from each keyword and query.

 

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