How Your Small Business Can Improve SEO with Content Marketing

September 15, 2022

Do you want to create a content strategy that will help your small business succeed?

This guide covers how to make and give out successful content using ideas from professional research and opinions from people who expertly market content to small businesses.

This article provides tips on how to increase brand awareness for small businesses through organic measures such as content marketing.

Does Your Small Business Need Content Marketing?

It’s important to remember that high quality content and strong thought leadership can help make your business more visible.

According to Dale Bertrand, founder and president of Fire&Spark, content marketing can be a powerful tool for small businesses competing against larger businesses with bigger budgets for online advertising and PR. The key is to leverage your unique perspective on your industry to make yourself stand out.

This means that organic content is more effective at generating leads over a longer period of time than ads, which will stop attracting leads as soon as you deactivate them.

In addition to this, businesses that are not online can also benefit from content marketing. This may seem counterintuitive, but businesses that are not online can see the return on investment.

A study found that nearly all respondents in businesses not focused on the internet said that content marketing was at least somewhat successful for them, with almost a third saying it was ‘very successful.’

This means that content marketing is working well for most businesses, and that those who have a more developed content strategy are seeing even better results.

If you’re looking for a way to reach more customers and grow your business, you should consider content marketing. Content marketing can help you attract new customers and keep them engaged with your brand. Additionally, content marketing can help you build trust and credibility with your audience.

Get More Traffic

The number of potential customers for any product or service is limited.

Targeting people who are directly searching for your product will limit your traffic.

This may be only 1% of a companies total search traffic.

If a business focuses only on search traffic for its products or services, that business will likely not get an increased number of customers from the search engines..

By creating a lot of related content that ranks well on Google, this content can get a lot of search traffic too.

Improve Brand Awareness

So, most people don’t look for products or services, they look for solutions to problems or answers to questions.

Use content to address common problems and questions your potential customers have to introduce them to your brand. Knowing your brand puts you one step closer to converting prospects into customers.

Here’s an example of how our article can help increase your blog traffic. Billy Blogger starts a blog and is frustrated that his blog traffic isn’t increasing. He searches Google for “how to increase my blog traffic” and discovers our article. By following the tips in the article, his traffic should start to increase.

He learned that he could get more traffic by having many more articles on his website about topics with high search traffic potential, and that he could use our service to have that done for him every month.

By creating content and sharing it with Billy Blogger, we have increased brand awareness and turned him from someone who didn’t know we existed, to someone who does. If we keep this up, repeating the process with other bloggers, we can see how content marketing can have a real impact on awareness of our brand.

Reduce Your Marketing Costs

Content marketing can be cheaper over the long term.

If we were to pay for all the traffic that the Ahrefs blog gets from Google Ads, it would cost us an estimated $355,000 per month, or $4.2 million per year.

Although our content marketing team doesn’t make $4 million a year, it is still cheaper in the long run.

Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Business

There are clear benefits to content marketing for small businesses, including increased marketing efforts and breaking down complex subjects.

Differentiate your business. It can be hard to stand out online. But your content can take the lead by showing your brand values, giving your audience useful information, and building a community around your brand.
Develop a brand. Whether you’re providing a product or a service, it’s your brand that makes a lasting impression on your audience. With a strong social and organic presence, you can get people talking about your business.
Connect with customers. Your blog, social media, and newsletter campaigns provide multiple touchpoints for your audience and offer more opportunities to connect with your customers directly and generate leads.
Attract organic website visitors. Optimized website and blog content can bring in targeted, long-term organic traffic for years after publishing. Marketers can find themselves at the mercy of social media ad platforms and fluctuating prices. Get longer-term value from high-performing organic content and become less reliant on ads.

Sugar Geek Show is an excellent example of a platform that has successfully turned their free blog into their biggest revenue driver.

The blog’s focus on SEO and use of Semrush resulted in a 269% increase in organic traffic from 2019 to 2021. This increase in traffic resulted in an increase in revenue, with the blog generating 60% of Sugar Geek Show’s revenue in 2021.

When and How to Start with Content Marketing

According to Dale Bertrand, the best way to approach content marketing is to start immediately and build up a library of content that will attract organic traffic.

Dale is correct in saying that it is never too early, or too late to begin content marketing. If you have an upcoming company, it would be beneficial to start content marketing from the beginning.

Developing a reputation as a respected expert in your field is a great way to generate excitement and enter your industry.

Pratik Dholakiya, Founder of Growfusely, adds that consistency should be your key focus:

If small businesses want to be successful with content marketing, they need to be consistent with their plans and execution. It’s more important to focus on being consistent than on the size or scale of the campaign. Having consistency and long-term goals will help content marketing efforts be successful.

Questions to Ask Before Engaging in Content Marketing

Just because other companies are doing something doesn’t mean you have to as well. You can stand out by doing something different.

To find the right focus for your content marketing, you need to answer three core questions:
What is my key expertise? Sharing authentic content driven by real-life experience is one of the best ways to succeed in content marketing. Think about areas where you can provide unique opinions and advice.
How can I make my content interesting and useful for my target audience? Researching your target audience’s specific interests and preferences will help you understand their content needs. At the same time, competitive research will be useful to assess what’s trending in your sector.
On which channels will this content be most effective? Content will only bring you the desired results if you share it where your customers hang out. Make sure to run quantitative (e.g., surveys and website analytics) and qualitative (e.g., interviews) research to identify the most effective distribution channels.

Do not give up if you do not see results immediately, as content marketing takes time and effort.

Instead of focusing on how to get more customers, focus on making your effort consistent and creating a sustainable model for attracting customers organically.

Content Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Are you convinced that your business should be doing content marketing? If so, here are a few ideas you can consider implementing.

Answer Questions People Are Searching For

If you answer those questions, you’ll be the one they remember. Earlier, we determined that potential customers don’t search for your products specifically, but rather for questions they want answered. If you can answer those questions, you’ll be the one they remember.

The goal is to identify the questions people are asking and create content that answers them.

Create a Statistics Page

Publishers of data studies and original research aim to get their work mentioned and linked to by authoritative websites like journalist’s and bloggers in order to add credibility to their claims.

Although it may be challenging for small businesses to produce original research, one way to get around this is by curating data.

One website got a lot of backlinks from publishing a post on SEO statistics. So far, they have gotten 2,700 backlinks from 1,300 different websites.

Write for Other Sites in Your Industry

However, there are a few ways you can make it work. If you want to rank high on Google for important topics or questions, it can be difficult to compete as a small business. Other sites may seem to have endless budgets, but there are a few ways you can make it work.

You can use the authority of these sites to improve your own ranking.

Most big sites are always looking for new and interesting content to publish, so take advantage of that by creating a guest post for them. This will help you rank higher for the keyword you’re targeting.

For example, one website wrote a guest post for SmartBlogger a few years ago that still ranks #5 for the keyword “niche website” and generates around 250 monthly search visits.

Rewrite or Update Outdated Content on Other Websites

If you’re looking to get your work published on other people’s websites, consider pitching to update or rewrite an existing piece of content, rather than pitching an entirely new guest post. This could be a more effective use of your time, and the site owner may be more receptive to your pitch.

You can improve your product’s ranking by rewriting the article to naturally include your product, with permission from the editors. Additionally, you can “piggyback” on these sites to rank for the keywords you want.

Here’s how you can find authoritative sites that have outdated content you can offer to update:

Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
Search for a relevant topic
Check Exclude homepages
Check Exclude subdomains
Toggle Filter explicit results
Set the Language filter to English (or the language you write in)
Set the Published filter to an outdated period (e.g., 2010 – 2015)
Set the DR filter to something high, like 50

Update Your Content

Make sure to also update and rewrite your own website’s content as you’re working on other websites.

If some of your content does not rank well the first time, it is not a problem. You can just rewrite it and try again.

You can use a free WordPress SEO plugin to figure out which of your content needs rewriting.

Partner With Influencers to Create Content Around Your Brand

You don’t always have to create your content yourself to do content marketing. You can also partner with others who are influencers to create content for your brand.

For example, there are many ways you can get your restaurant featured on various social media platforms by partnering up with influencers. You can invite influencers to come to your restaurant for a tasting session.

If you’re not able to work with mega influencers, you can still connect with nano or micro-influencers to reach a larger audience at a lower cost.

Promote Your Content

If you want people to find your content, you have to promote it instead of expecting people to magically find it.

Here’s what Ahrefs does every time they publish a new piece of content:

They should post this on all their social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn).

Include it in their weekly Ahrefs’ Digest newsletter

The authors should share or create a Twitter thread about their book.

Run ads (Facebook, Quora, etc.)

To ensure your content is seen, you’ll need to do more than the bare minimum – especially if you’re a small site. I recommend using this checklist, which includes various content promotion strategies.

Final Thoughts

Over 97% of businesses are using content in their marketing strategy, so your company should jump on this trend. Focus on providing valuable and high-quality content, and document your strategy.

The Semrush Content Marketing Platform can help you improve your online visibility, reach new customers, and grow your business with content.

We put together a few tips to help you if you’re excited about content marketing but feeling overwhelmed.