Home business owners are used to doing a lot of things for ourselves: regimenting our own time, organizing our own office spaces, filing our own tax returns and, of course, promoting our own brand. But whether you’re starting a catering company out of your kitchen or designing a clothing line from your bedroom, it can be tough to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace. As more and more people make the move into full-time entrepreneurship, the competition grows and grows.
At UENI, we’ve helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs improve their online presence with our full website building and optimization process. Working with over 300,000 small businesses across seven countries means we’ve learned a thing or two about how to help home-based business owners improve their digital footprint. As more and more entrepreneurs make the leap to opening their own home-based operations, learning the basics of SEO has never been more advantageous. In what follows, we outline some of the things you can do to make sure your home business stands out from the crowd.
Local search is a gamechanger
If you can buy it, people will search for it. Google processes an astronomical 3.5 billion searches per day. As a smaller operation, you need to know how to tap into this vast search market. Even in a crowded marketplace, home business owners looking for new customers have one distinct advantage: they are normally less dispersed than their larger counterparts, situated in one main location. This means they’re well-placed to circumvent bigger brands in the search rankings by working on their local search ranking.
In the space of just over a decade, local search has completely altered the way consumers connect with businesses. The number of “local” and “near me” searches has seen an exponential increase in recent years with searches for “local shops” also hitting an all-time high last year. This makes a happy hunting ground for home business owners.
Google My Business is the bedrock of home business SEO
Google My Business (GMB) is the bread and butter of local search. Once we’ve built our clients their free website, establishing a comprehensive GMB profile is our first step to optimize its search performance. This means their listing will be displayed on Google Maps and enables them to rank for location-based searches. Here’s our full guide to setting up Google My Business.
Surprisingly, as many as 56% of local retailers have not claimed their GMB page. If that’s you, this is easily rectified: register for your page and fill it out with the relevant NAP (name, address, and phone number information). Your Google My Business listing is what online shoppers use to determine whether or not they choose to spend money with you, so make sure it’s appealing and informative. Photos are a great way of showcasing what you have to offer. Don’t worry if you don’t have an appealing shopfront; keep it simple with some high-quality images of your products and services.
A final piece of advice is to regularly update your GMB listing. Generating a steady stream of positive home business reviews will both improve your search ranking by showing Google your business is relevant and getting customers, which will help you land more new customers in the future. Better still, interact with reviewers to tell customers you’re listening and show Google your listing is alive and kicking. Creating your own regular posts to advertise new products, services and discounts will also help Google’s search crawlers to see that you’re open for business.
Collect citations
These days, it’s a baseline SEO requirement to list your home business in the various online local search directories. In America, there are over 50 important listing sites where you should register a home business. Some of the bigger names are: Yelp, Foursquare, Bing Places, Yahoo! Local. These listings often feed through into Google local search, so it’s crucial to list here to maximize your chances of being found.
These citations need to include your NAP (name, address, phone number) information in the same format as your GMB listing and your website’s Contact Us page. When creating listings, make sure you stick to the reputable sites and always ask yourself if your customers are likely to visit the directory. If the answer is no, don’t bother!
A final word of advice: remember to list your business in the relevant verticals. These location- and industry-specific directories can be great sources of traffic for your business, also helping your long-term search ranking, especially as Google looks to buy them up to maintain its massive market share. If you were in the restaurant trade, you might want to list on vegan vertical directory Happy Cow, for instance.
Target long tail home business keywords with interesting content
Long-tail keywords are the search phrases of three or four more words that people use to look for more specific products and services. They’re the terms searchers use when they have a clear idea of what they’re looking for, or more importantly, when they’re closing in on a purchase. At the start of their buying process, a consumer might simply input a search for “washing machine”, whereas after conducting some product research, they’ll likely opt for a more specific search term like “BOSCH Series 4 WAN28280GB”.
Long-tail keywords may drive less overall search traffic (more people search for “washing machine” than a specific model) but people using long tail keywords are more likely to become customers. An important aim for any home business owner is to identify some long- tail phrases. Look for a combination of low competition and the highest possible search frequency. You can do this via keyword research tools like SEMrush.
Once you’ve identified the words you need to use in order to target these searches, you need to feed them back into your on-site content. As a starting point, make sure they appear on your “About Us” pages and product descriptions. Not every home entrepreneur will be able to muster a full editorial operation but chances are you’ll know a bit about your chosen industry. Starting a blog is another great excuse to target keywords and get more attention for your business.
Keep up-to-date with the latest search trends
Home entrepreneurs with the time, energy and inclination can get the basics of SEO pretty quickly: focusing on local search terms, creating a GMB listing, getting their website onto the directories, doing the relevant keyword research and creating solid content that reflects their findings. But all these things are an ongoing process. To really make sure your home business stands out from all the rest, you need to consistently measure your website’s search performance for any drop-offs and work out how you can create new streams of site traffic. Put differently, for optimal SEO, you need to be prepared to keep up with the latest search trends and updates to the Google search algorithm.
