6 Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

During the last few years, and especially throughout 2020-21, there has been an exponential rise in small businesses. Many are turning to home-based businesses, including online services, marketplaces and content creation.

While the phrase digital marketing sounds like something reserved for larger businesses, these tactics can boost even the smallest business.

Below are some simple digital marketing strategies that even the smallest business can employ.

1. Streamline Your Website

Meta Description

When you search for your exact website, you should come up in the first few results. But aside from your website’s title, what other information comes up? A short description, called a meta description, should come up under your title to tell the user briefly what the site is about. Your site and all its pages should have meta descriptions that will bring traffic.

Load Speed

Load speeds of over 2 seconds are too slow for most people, and they are likely to leave before the page is even finished loading. Some causes of slow load speed include too much code such as JavaScript, non-optimized images, too many ads and bulky photos or videos. If you click on your site on Google, or even type it into an address bar and it’s taking a long time to load, then you have site optimization issues.

URLs

Complicated and messy URLs can be a problem both for the bots that figure out what your site is about and when to bring it up for specific searches, and for the user looking at possible search results. Legible URLs that tell you exactly what to expect appear safer, so users are more likely to click them. Search engine bots will also look out for any keywords in your URLs that they can index your site for.

2. Pump Up the Alt-Text

If you are running an e-commerce site, odds are you are hosting a lot of images. To make these searchable, you need to include alt-text. This is simply a short line of descriptive text or keywords that make your image searchable.
So, for example, if you are selling soap, you might include the following alt-text on an image of a bar of soap:
Organic handmade vanilla scented soap

This allows search engines to pick up this image whenever someone searches for those keywords.

3. Add Social Sharing

Everything is social these days. While you probably already have social media pages for your business, social sharing goes both ways. Give your website’s visitors the option of easily sharing your content with their social circle through the inclusion of social media links. This can give your traffic a boost and create a larger customer base.

4 . Collaborate with Likeminded Businesses

Depending on your business, it’s likely that there are collaboration opportunities out there just waiting for you. For those in e-commerce, influencer marketing is one way of getting your name and product out there for the masses. For those providing a service, guest posting on a related blog, featuring in a YouTube video, or speaking on podcast can boost your traffic and your reach. Look for businesses or entities that can benefit from your collaboration.

5. Create Valuable Content

No matter what services or products your business offers, there are people searching for them. Creating useful content related to these services and products gives you the opportunity to increase the amount of traffic to your site. Good content will naturally contain keywords that your prospective customers are searching for. By adding this to your site, people looking to read blogs, articles, FAQs or other content will be directed to the services you offer. This may result in a new customer, or perhaps a social share or a backlink from another site. Just remember that your content should be your own, it should be well researched and useful to your customers, and it should contain keywords relevant to your site.

6. Tap the Services of a Professional

Professional SEO services are available for businesses of all sizes. Even someone running a business from their home can benefit from the efficiency and expertise of an SEO expert. These professionals will be able to optimize your site, add metadata such as meta tags, meta descriptions and alt-text, help you connect with other sites for link building, and even create content specifically for your site. Look for SEO companies that specifically-market to small businesses and entrepreneurs and then compare their services and fees. A good SEO company will take the size of your business into account and only offer you services you can actually afford.