Houston is a booming city with a continuously growing population. As the number of residents climbs, the demand for more businesses to accommodate the growth increases as well. While having a variety of businesses at your fingertips is great for consumers, it poses a problem for business owners trying to stand out among their competitors.
Our full-service digital marketing team helps small and medium-sized businesses thrive, even in the most competitive industries. We understand how important brand awareness is when you are looking to stand out to potential customers. Our small business online marketing services include website design, social media marketing, content marketing, local SEO, pay-per-click advertisements, and more.
Our goal is to create customized marketing campaigns that help you to reach your specific goals without compromise. Our Houston SEO company works with a range of clients from medical groups and attorneys to major commercial HVAC and plumbing companies. We understand that marketing strategies must be adapted to fit the specific needs of our clients and are willing to work with you step by step to ensure results in your internet marketing, search engine optimization campaigns.
Other Houston SEO agencies fail to offer the comprehensive services that you get when you work with Houston Small Business Marketing. We are with you from the development of a logo, if needed, all the way to managing your Google Business Listing. If you are looking for the best SEO company in Houston, look no farther than HOUSBM.
Organic Search and Digital Marketing
It’s important to remember that your content provides a service. If you think of a search engine as the marketplace for that service, then ranking highly on their first page is a great way to market what you’ve got on offer.
Organic search marketing can take a bit of time to show results, and SEO is a process that evolves with your site, meaning that you need to stay on top of it to keep benefiting.
However, it’s worth the effort. All you have to do is make sure that you nurture your traffic through the marketing funnel to achieve this revenue. And to do that, you need to practice SEO and improve your SEO techniques.
How Can I Improve My Site’s SEO?
SEO isn’t something to feel daunted by. The most important aspects of SEO can be easy to change and modify within your site, especially when you’ve got the right tools.
Let’s go through some of the most important aspects of SEO and how you can strategize with them to improve your organic search rankings.
User Intent
The first step towards improving your SEO and gaining visibility online is understanding the intent of your users. Why are they using the search engine? What are they looking for?
User intent can be shown in a few ways, such as:
- Informational
- Transactional
- Navigational
SEO benefits for small businesses
For small businesses specifically, SEO can be a powerful tool. Here are recent statistics that highlight the benefits of SEO for small businesses:
- 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information. If you’re a small business trying to reach customers in your area, SEO is important because it enables them to find you first.
- 97% of people learn more about a local small business online than anywhere else. People are searching for your business (or products/services you sell), and your website is the place where they will look first. That’s why it’s important to show up on the terms they use.
- “Near me” type searches grew by more than 900% over two years. This is another important reason to optimize your local search efforts. People are looking for small businesses in the area.
- 75% of users never go beyond the first page of Google search results. Showing up on the first page is critical, but it also takes intentionality.
No matter what industry you’re in or what size your business is today, consumers are looking for brands like yours online every day. Search engines are one of the best ways to reach these potential customers.
SEO tips for small businesses
Now that you know what SEO can mean for the growth of your small business, what’s the first step you should take? SEO can seem overwhelming, but small businesses should consider these tips and principles.
- Build your website with SEO best practices
One reason small businesses struggle with SEO is because their website isn’t built with search in mind. Sure, your website might look good, but if it’s not structured correctly, you can lose out on a significant amount of search traffic.
When building your website, it’s important to create it with a solid website structure so search engines can properly crawl and index your web pages. If your website is already created, take time to look at your website with fresh eyes and make sure it has a logical structure. Start at your homepage and see if you can logically find — and navigate to — all your important pages quickly and easily.
Be sure to clean up any broken (404) pages that don’t work anymore. Such links are bad because they waste “link equity.“ That effectively means that votes (links) to your site aren’t counted because they lead to a dead end.
It’s also important to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Not only does a mobile-responsive website improve the user experience, but it also contributes to your SEO ranking.
- Prioritize keywords
Keyword research is the second most important key to creating an effective SEO content strategy. You want to make sure your website is ranking for the search phrases that people use. The higher your small business website ranks for relevant keywords and phrases, the more likely you are to be discovered by relevant customers searching for your products, services, or relevant topics on the search engines.
- Optimize the metadata for your pages
The next step for search engine optimization is to make sure all of your primary landing pages are optimized for the keywords you discovered. In other words, you must optimize your titles, meta descriptions, and body content for each page. Every page on your website needs a unique meta description and title. It’s also important that your metadata description doesn’t exceed the length at which Google begins to truncate them in the search results and entices users to click-through to your site.
- Create a calendar that helps you consistently share new content
Content is another important leg that keeps your SEO still standing. You can climb up with good SEO and content marketing, but it has to be consistent. You can’t just publish a blog post every once in a while and hope traffic pops up. You need to show Google you have authority in an area by publishing consistent content around a precise range of related keywords and topics. Before embarking on an SEO campaign, it’s important to spend time building out a calendar for at least six months worth of content.
- Build authority for your website by creating various backlinks
Backlinks are another important factor for SEO. Essentially, backlinks are other places that hyperlink back to your website. Within your website, you can leverage backlinks by hyperlinking back to a previous blog post or sharing links to specific products or services.
But the real value of backlinks come from outside sources. Local directories can be a great source of backlinks to your website—provided they’re also reputable directories. Events are another great way to link back to your website.
- Use your Google My Business page
Google My Business should be a focal point for any small business — especially if you want to maximize the power of search. It’s incredibly simple to set up your Google My Business page and it can make a big impact. As a small business, you should leverage every element of Google My Business pages to your advantage — images, videos, Q&A, reviews, and posts you publish.
Top Marketing Company in Houston Area
If you are not making efforts to optimize your website, you are falling behind because your competitors already have begun implementing SEO design strategies to their websites. As the gap grows between how much effort your competition is putting into their online marketing and how little work you are putting into your website, the more difficult it will become to engage with customers online. The team at Houston Small Business Marketing works hard to help your business stay relevant in this online-focused world by tracking the latest strategies in online marketing for businesses.
Stop missing out on potential customers and become a force within your industry! From excellent web design to social media management, the team at Houston Small Business Marketing is here to help you broaden your reach and grow your audience! If you are tired of giving away potential customers to your competition, contact us today!
Houston Small Business Marketing
713-492-0025
1415 North Loop West #950
Houston, TX 77008
Google Business Listing
