7 Top SEO Hurdles Small Business Owners Face (Helpful Tips)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way to improve a website so that it gets a higher ranking on the web. An SEO agency specializes in aiding businesses to best use SEO to improve their rankings, but small business owners often fail to turn to experienced providers.

Instead, though lacking real expertise, these businesses resort to DIY marketing campaigns, often with mediocre results. This guide focuses on the top five SEO hurdles that small businesses often face and provides corresponding tips.

• Having tough competition
• Lacking financial capabilities
• Considering technical SEO
• Having workforce limitations
• Lacking experience with SEO

Is your small business ready for SEO?

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Having Tough Market Competition

When it comes to SEO, the most common problem that small businesses face is dealing with tough competition, which could be anything from giant companies to popular brands. These entities are usually at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), so they are the biggest threat to your optimization campaigns.

The competition could be overwhelming and make you feel hopeless, but understanding it would help your SEO efforts. To improve your SEO campaigns, you must:

• Use your competition as inspiration. Find out what keywords they use to rank on SERPs and the type of content they prefer, and find areas of opportunity that you can explore for your business.
• Improve your keyword research. Find out the keywords that your competitors are using and their efforts to rank for these keywords. You can use tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool to search keywords and check the corresponding traffic.
• Create the most engaging content. Beat your competitors by creating the best content for your audience. Study your audience well, be clear about your marketing goals, and use your keywords.

Lacking Financial Capabilities

Money could be an issue, especially for small businesses. You may be keeping track of every penny while building your brand and wondering if you should prioritize marketing campaigns like SEO or if you can even afford them. At the moment, you might also be putting all your money into product or service development.

Indeed, SEO costs money given the applications or tools you need like customer relationship management, optimization tools, and other business software. It also takes months for results to show. And without experience in managing SEO, you could ultimately waste more money.

It is for these reasons that more and more small companies partner with an SEO agency; they are able to avoid costly mistakes. You can:

• Look for an SEO company that is familiar with your industry. Hiring an SEO partner with thorough business experience in your industry will be worth every dollar. Check recommendations or search online for good agencies.
• Conduct an SEO audit. Look for free SEO auditing tools online and review your site. Prioritize areas that need immediate update. An SEO partner helps you with an audit and identifies your priority areas.
• Use free SEO tools in the meantime. While you are still on the hunt for an SEO agency, you can start working on your campaign with free applications like keyword research tools, content creation tools, and more.

Considering Technical SEO Issues

Three building blocks of SEO to really focus on include:

• On-page SEO: Optimization strategies within your site
• Off-page SEO: Optimization strategies conducted outside your site
• Technical SEO: Techniques that help search engines crawl your site

These three elements work together to help your website rank higher in the SERPs. Even if you have good content and an up-to-date local listing, Google will not change your site's ranking if it cannot find its way around your pages.

You can focus on addressing technical SEO issues by:

• Improving site speed. Use a better, dedicated hosting service, reduce CSS and JavaScript files, and optimize image file sizes to improve site speeds.
• Removing duplicate content. Use canonical tags to direct search engines to your main page and move link equity to this page. A website developer helps you add a canonical link tag in your HTML.
• Adding an XML sitemap. This file lists the essential pages of your site to help Google locate and crawl through your pages. A web developer can also add an XML sitemap through your Google Search Console.
• Including a structured data markup. This code is added to your HTML to help search engines understand your content. Your web developer can include this code to improve your site's display and crawlability.

Having Workforce Limitations

Small businesses have a limited workforce and resources. With only a few people taking care of inventories, orders, shipment, and marketing, how can small businesses handle website optimization?

Because of their limited resources and workforce, small businesses typically wait until the company expands to hire more employees. Hopefully, they have an expert marketer who knows SEO to handle their online campaigns.

Small businesses with limited staff do not need to forego SEO. They can hire professional SEO firms to handle their optimization needs and improve their online presence. With an optimized site, small businesses can attract more customers, increase traffic, and eventually boost their revenue. Take note of the following strategies to overcome marketing limitations:

• Outsource your SEO to expert agencies. An expert SEO partner guarantees good results and is worth your budget.
• Take a short course on SEO for small businesses. Watch videos, read blogs, and keep updated on the latest industry news. With patience and time, anyone can learn SEO, and you can do this online.

Lacking SEO Experience

Small business owners may also hesitate to start SEO because they need to gain the skill, knowledge, and experience in site optimization. Because they are still new to SEO, they may be afraid to take chances, which can result in missed opportunities.

First-time business owners may not know much about SEO or may want to learn, but they need time, resources, and money. While needing to attend to so many other aspects of running a business, it can be difficult to devote much attention to SEO.  Some companies choose to hire SEO agencies and learn more on the process from the people they hire.  Some choose to teach themselves.  Whichever way you choose to go, remember that every SEO expert began with little experience but managed to learned the ropes.  Start learning by:

• Auditing another website's SEO. Put your SEO knowledge to the test and see if you can evaluate a site’s optimization strategies.
• Joining related Reddit communities. Expand your knowledge and experience with SEO by connecting with experts in the field.
• Checking out related subjects. SEO in your specific industry, like healthcare SEO and dental SEO, are just two examples. Find out what is happening in your industry and determine if these help you improve your small business marketing campaigns.

While small business owners can learn SEO, it is still best to work with an SEO agency. This ensures that they are working with experts who can improve your site SEO using the latest strategies. And by working with experts, business owners can focus more on running their companies.

Using SEO is worthwhile with people now using the internet more for their daily needs. As of April 2022, there were five billion internet users around the world. This is about 63% of the worldwide population.

Summing Up

SEO is crucial to small business marketing. But despite this, many small companies fail to use  it because of tough competition, financial limitations, technical SEO concerns, and a lack of SEO experience.

Optimization, whether done yourself or with the aid of an agency, can help you improve your site's capabilities. You will gain improved visibility, increased engagement, and better revenue. The fastest, and often the most economical, way to accomplish this is with an agency. To find out how SEO can help your small business reach its goals. contact Digital Authority Partners today.