7 SEO Tips For The New Business Owner

This past year has seen an overwhelming number of entrepreneurs launch new online businesses. The pandemic has made traditional brick and mortar businesses a risky venture, so now an increasing number of entrepreneurs are looking at click and mortar businesses as the best chance for long-term success. Just look at the record shattering year for VC Funding in the US in 2020 as proof that the pandemic has, if anything, accelerated the ascent of tech in business.

Whatever your business type, if your going to be making a big initial investment into your digital presence, your going to want to get it right the first time. It can end up costing you thousands of dollars to hire a good SEO agency to go back and fix a poorly optimized website. SEO does take time to build, but it will never get off the ground if the website isn’t setup for success from the start.

So here’s a list of 6 critical SEO tips for the new business owner:

1. SEO Is A Marathon Not A Sprint

It can take months, sometimes years, for good SEO to fully come to fruition. This is especially true when you have a brand new domain name and website. Google looks at domain age (the number of years the current domain owner has had the domain) as a big ranking factor, so if you have a domain name that you just bought, don’t expect that it will generate any meaningful organic traffic for at least 6 months.

2. Don’t Skip Your Keyword Research

This part is mission critical when it comes to having a good organic SEO plan. You must figure out how your customers find your business in search engines. This should be done before the pages are written, even before the site hierarchy is built.

Use Keyword Planner, a tool provided by Google Ads, to determine what keywords customers are searching in relation to your industry. They’ll even tell you how many times they searched each month.

Tools like SEMRush and ahrefs.com are great for finding keywords as well. Just type in a competitor’s domain into one of their search tools and you’ll be able to see which keywords are driving a majority of their traffic.

Be sure to research every product and service you offer, not just the main ones. Save all of these keywords to a spreadsheet along with their Monthly Search Volume.

3. Identify Your Honey & Money Keywords

Now that you have your list of keywords, you’ll need to categorize them into one of two groups: honey and money keywords. The difference between the two is based on searcher intent.

Your money keywords will be a list of transactional keywords, which are searches where the user intends to do a transaction at that moment or in the near future. Searches like ‘roof contractor near me’ or ‘dog leashes for sale online’ would suggest that the user is ready at that moment to hire a roofer or purchase a product. These would both be considered money keywords.

Your honey keywords will be a list of informational queries, where the searcher is looking up information related to your product or service. They suggest that the searcher is in the market for such services, but are still in the research gathering phase. Examples of honey keywords would be ‘best roofing materials’ or ‘dog leash product reviews’.

4. Build Your Page Hierarchy and Content Around Those Keywords

Once you’ve identified your keywords as rich like money, or sweet like honey, now you can layout your site hierarchy and content-keyword strategy. You’ll want to group your keywords into service categories, and this category hierarchy will ultimately define the page structure in your sitemap or site tree.

Make sure you have a page built for each product or service category. Ideally you’ll want 1 primary money keyword for each category page along with 2-4 secondary money keywords. If a particular category/page has over 5 money keywords, consider creating subcategory pages for better keyword optimization, and be sure to nest those pages underneath the main product/service category page in the site hierarchy.

Do not, I repeat, do not, optimize more than 1 page for any 1 keyword. This is called keyword cannabilization and it will negatively affect your SEO. Google will end up splitting your domain’s authority across 2 pages and you’ll end up with 2 poorly ranking pages for your target keyword instead of 1 strongly ranked page.

5. Product/Service Content vs. Blog Content

So what do we do with all those honey keywords? You have two options here, and which is best for you depends on your answer to this question: Are you going to have a blog on your site?

Posting blog content to your website consistently can have a number of game-changing SEO benefits. It helps with link building, it generates high quality traffic, and it establishes topical authority with Google within your industry. If you plan to blog like I highly recommend, you’ll want to create blog articles as direct answers to these honey keywords. Be sure to link these articles to your related product or service pages using your money keywords as the anchor text. You don’t want to skip that part!

If you don’t like great SEO and lots of organic traffic, and you opt not to go with a blog, you’ll need to incorporate these ‘honey’ keywords into your product or service pages. Ideally you’ll want to do this towards the bottom of the page, below the content where your actually selling the product or service. You can present these as an FAQ section or simply list the keyword as a subheading and provide the information within that section.

6. Your On-Page SEO Checklist

You’ll want to run through this checklist for each page on your site that is optimized for a target keyword. These are important elements of your webpage in regards to its code and content that influence your ranking for your target keywords. We’ve covered a few of the important aspects of your on-page SEO already, but here I’ll provide a definition for each along with some recommendations

• Keyword Implementation for SEO:
• Primary Keywords (big money) – primary keyword should be in the main heading, URL, SEO Title, Meta Description, image URL, image alt tag, and 2-3 times for every 300 words content.
• Secondary Keywords (money) – should be used 1-2 times each for every 300 words of content. If possible, try to incorporate a few of the more important secondary keywords into a few subheadings, image URLs & alt tags, and the SEO Title/Meta Description if character limit allows it.
• Long-Tail Keywords (honey) – informational keywords that should be used 1-2 times in the entire body of the content.



• SEO Title – This is what is used by Google for organic listing Title (the clickable link of a Google search result). Your SEO Title is the single most important on-page rank factor of any element on a web page. It should contain the primary keyword, your brand name, and an important secondary keyword or call to action. Consider including a special offer to improve click-through-rate. Limit each to 60 characters.
• Meta Description – This is the 155 character description underneath the SEO Title in the Google Search results page. Use Capitalization and sales-focused language to generate the best click through rates. This should really illustrate what makes you tangibly unique as a business so it stands out amongst the competition. Include keywords when you can, but keep it more call-to-action oriented than keyword-oriented.
• URL – This is the actual web address of your page. It should contain your primary keyword. Limit these to 15 characters for optimal SEO.
• Main Heading – Your page should contain 1 h1 tag/html tag used for the main heading of the page. This should contain the primary keyword for that page. Do not use more than 1 h1 tag per page.
• Subheadings – Your page should contain multiple subheadings to break apart content blocks. Incorporate your important secondary and long-tail keywords here.
• Images – all images should be resized to be no more than 1000px for full width images and 500px for half width images. This is a critical website speed factor that cannot be overlooked in on-page SEO. Images should be renamed to contain keywords in the file name/image URL.
• Alt Tags – these are image tags used by screen readers to help users with visual impairments. If the user can’t see the image, the screen reader will read the alt tag associated with that image so the user can have an understanding of what is on the page. Have alt tags for each image makes your website more accessible which Google favors, and these are good opportunities to insert secondary and long tail keywords into the page.
• Internal links – be sure to link to similar blog articles, resources, and/or product or service pages within your website. This helps improve page authority for your most important pages while making the site more easy to navigate.

7. Setting the Foundation For Link Building

One of the most important factors for good SEO is your domain authority. This is a cumulative assessments of your website’s backlink profile in relation to your competitors, and it’s a factor heavily weighted in Google’s rank algorithm. Bottom line is the businesses with the most and best backlinks rank highest in Google.

For new businesses, this presents a challenge to achieving good SEO when entering a market. Your competitors have (or haven’t) been acquiring links for years before you started your business, so your automatically starting the domain authority race behind. But don’t worry, there are several steps you can take in your first year improve your SEO velocity out of the gate.

• Press Releases – First thing is to plan out a series of press releases. You’ll write one for the launch of the business and several more on any newsworthy topics that you can foresee happening in your first year. This could be a launch of a new product, a strategic partnership, or even some local news regarding a scholarship your offering (also a great idea for generating SEO backlinks!) These will provide a fast injection of hundreds of backlinks at once, which is a must have for your websites first year.
• Directory Listings – There are hundreds of business directory sites that allow you to place a link over to your website for free. Especially for local businesses, this is one of the most heavily weighted factors in Google Map’s rank algorithm. Make sure you get your business name, address and phone number in all of the most important listings, and make sure the information that they all contain is identical and consistent.
• Local Organizations – See what types of local organizations you may be able to become affiliated with, as these organizations often have member directories listed online with link building opportunities. Local Chamber of Commerce and BBB offices are great for this, and can become an authoritative link that will help you establish street cred with Google.
• Blogging – I know I harped on this earlier, but I’m going to stress it some more. You will have a much easier time convincing other sites to link over to your website if you have smart and engaging content. It will position you as the expert in your industry, and people will want to link to your site just because it’s a good resource. Ok, I’m off my soap box, you get the point.

Of all the things you have to juggle when launching a business, your website may or may not be a big point of focus. The amount of organic traffic your going to get in a year from now may not seem important now, but if you neglect to get it right from the start, you most certainly will forgo that potential traffic down the road. But if you can implement these 7 action items when launching your site, you’ll be setup for SEO success for years to come, and all the ripe organic leads that come with it!