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A How-To Guide For Small Businesses

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A How-To Guide For Small Businesses

In the U.S., only 49% of small businesses invest in search engine optimization (SEO). That means more than half of them are leaving traffic, customers, and revenue on the table by not improving their organic position on Google.

When you run a small business, especially one that’s brick and mortar, it can be hard to conceptualize the buyer’s journey to your business. Although word-of-mouth is still a popular form of marketing, it’s not the only way customers will find you. More often than not, they’re using Google searches to research the businesses they plan to buy from long before they make it into a store or the checkout page on a website.

This is why it’s important to improve your organic position on Google with SEO. The concept of SEO can sound scary, and there are a lot of opinions out there about whether it’s worth the effort. However, when you think about SEO as a way to help your customers before they make a purchase, you’ll see that the value pays dividends in the long run.

How to Improve Google Positioning

1. Update your Google Business Profile.

Google Business Profile is a free tool that helps customers find businesses online. This tool works for normal Google searches but it also integrates with Google Maps so customers can find businesses while they’re en route to a destination.

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By verifying and updating your Google Business Profile, you can help your business stand out on the search engine results page (SERP) and garner more traffic to your website or your physical store. Here are the most important updates to make on your profile:

  • Add the correct address, phone number, and store hours
  • Add your website URL
  • Include your social media profiles
  • Update images with new offerings, promotions, and products
  • Add a photo of your physical business location and building

Each of these points helps a potential customer make a decision about your business. They’ll know how far they need to travel (if at all), where they can find more information about your business, what your products and services look like, and they’ll have information about your latest promotions and sales.

Here’s an example of a Google Business Profile:Googly Business Profile of Chef Oya's The Trap in Indianapolis, IN

2. Get acquainted with ranking factors.

Google has identified four factors that its search algorithm takes into consideration when ranking content. These include:

  • The words in the query
  • The relevance and usability of the pages
  • The expertise of the source
  • The location and settings of a searcher’s Google account

Although some of these factors are out of your control as a business owner, you can create content with most of them in mind.

3. Optimize your existing content.

Optimizing existing content is typically a faster, more efficient way to target new customers without investing in brand new content. If your business’s website includes a blog or even a simple landing page, you can update these pages to appeal to people who are looking for the products and services you sell.

Well, how do you find those people? And how do you know what they’re searching for?

While it’s impossible to control the exact search terms a potential customer will type into the Google search bar, you can get an understanding of what users have searched for in the past and see predictions of what they’ll search for in the future.

To target specific words in a searcher’s query, you’ll first want to do keyword research on your business, industry, products, and services. You can use HubSpot’s Content Strategy Tool or paid tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush for detailed, granular keyword data. There are also free tools like Google Keyword Planner. To predict future search demand, you can use the free tool Google Trends.

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SEO and Content Strategy

4. Identify content gaps.

A content gap is twofold. It may appear as a topic that is under explored or unexplored in your industry or niche, or it may be a stage in your customer’s journey that isn’t yet covered by content in your existing library.

Both types of content gaps are exciting opportunities to create new content that resonates with your audience and has the potential to generate revenue.

By using some of the same tools in the tip above, you can run a content audit to identify keywords that correspond to content gaps. This makes it simple to see them at a glance and incorporate them into your next blog post, product page, or even on your home page.

5. Include image alt text.

Whether they’re on your website, social media profiles, or Google Business Profile, images are a critical part of improving your organic position on Google. Why? Because of a simple (and often overlooked) field called alt text.

To understand why alt text is so important, we have to think like a search engine. Search engines can’t “see” images the way humans do, so they need another way to process them. Alt-text is a text-based description of an image that lets the search engine know what the image is about and how closely related it is to the topic or keyword it’s associated with on the page.

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Example of alt text on IKEA image pack for pillow covers

Without alt text, it’s almost impossible for search engines like Google to effectively recognize and rank your images. As a result, you could miss out on additional traffic and customers who may have found your website through an image pack or an image search.

6. Answer frequently asked questions.

If you have an FAQ section on your website, you’re already making strides to improve your Google ranking. To make it even better, take a look at your FAQ page and search for the same questions on Google. What do you see?

If you own a local hair salon and one of your FAQs is “What’s the difference between balayage and ombre?” you may see this box appear in the SERP:

Example of a people also ask box

The “People Also Ask” box is a great way to see additional questions your customers may be curious about. You can add similar questions to your FAQs page which gives you even more opportunities to increase your Google ranking.

7. Take a peek at your competitors.

The final tip we have for improving your organic position on Google is to take a peek at your competitors. We don’t recommend you copy your competitors, though. The point of looking at their keyword strategy with tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush is to understand their content gaps (remember those from earlier?)

By understanding the topics your customers are looking for that your competitors aren’t covering, you can fill the void with your own content that takes ranking factors and keyword research into account.

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Rank Higher in the Google SERP

As a small business, you’ve got to wear many hats, and Google guru is one of them if you want to drive more traffic to your website and more business to your stores. Luckily, you don’t have to know everything about how search engines work to see your business higher page 1 of Google. These tips are tried and true SEO basics that can help your business get more visibility from customers who are looking specifically for you.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2006 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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