The very first thing I would do if you called me on the phone to ask me to assist you with marketing is Google your business name and check your page rank. If your business is very common or your name is not particularly unique I would give you the benefit of the doubt and perhaps add your city name or your metro area name to my search to help you out.

For example my husband’s business is called “Jeff of All Trades”. He has a handyman services and he uses DoodleKit so for purposes of this exercise he is pretty similar to other small businesses. So if I Google “Jeff of All Trades” here is the screen shot of results:

When my husband started his business we knew the URL www.jeffofalltrades.com was taken so we added our metro city “Kansas City” to the end and made his URL www.jeffofalltradeskc.com which has given us a bit of a handicap and we knew it going in. Even with that clutter my husband’s business occupies both the 3 and 4 spots in results on Google without the “KC” in the search criteria. This is what you want! You want to be in the first 5 spots of any Google search that is in your “keywords” so that you are on only on the first page of Google but no scrolling is required to find you!

How do you know what your keywords are?

Keywords are words that potential customers would search for when looking for your site. If you have had a Doodlekit site for a while you can see what your past search terms have been in your admin section. For my site SavvyB2Bmarketing.com you can see the common search terms for the last week on the Doodlekit, Admin, Statistics, Search Terms below.

You want to make sure you pepper these common search terms through your website both in the copy, tags on blog posts, picture tags, etc. The worst thing you can do is just leave your tags on your blog posts blank. You write a blog provide valuable content so that the post itself will help your website get found among the clutter. If you are a handyman in Kansas City like my husband every blog post he writes should have “Kansas City Handyman” as tags on the post. Let me show you why next.

On generic terms like “handyman Kansas City” the results on Google are not as encouraging as typing just a business name like “Jeff of All Trades”. Take a look at the screen shot below:

There are lots of people buying Google Ads for the words “handyman Kansas City” plus Google uses the “places” information from online Yellow Page type listings which favors those with a physical office location / store front. As you can see looking at the ads they are actually for services like Handyman Connection and Service Magic which a referral services that professionals can join to steer business their way. If you are just getting started and find this issue in your area or with your key words you might want to consider whether joining such an organization or buying a Google Ad word spot yourself might be a good idea. Each company / location situation is unique so do your homework first and see what your situation is before you spend money you don’t need to.

Thankfully my husband’s business gets most of his clients from referral and not from Google search. We find most people who use Google to search him out are actually past clients who have misplaced his business card or phone number and just need to get back in touch. Again every business if different and depending on whether you are just starting out or have an establish customer base will determine how much potential business you can win or lose from Google search placement.

Finally I want to say a word about links and content freshness. I am by no means an expert of Google’s search algorithms. I know what strategies work on the content creation and placement side to help your site be found by Google but the actual science of how it works is beyond my grasp. So I am going to link to a couple of blog posts by other writers who can help you out at tackling those issues.

• From The Daily SEO Blog - Freshness Factor: 10 Illustrations on How Fresh Content Can Influence Rankings
• From Hubspot’s Blog – How Internal Linking helps your SEO
• From WebCentralMarketBlog - The Wrong Way to Build External Links for SEO

As a general rule links for your website and blog post should be just like referrals you would give to someone who shows up in your store or calls on the phone that you would refer a prospect to. For example my husband is frequently asked for the names of plumbers, electricians, general contractors who he knows and trusts. Since these are all associated businesses to his but not direct competitors he is always willing to give out the name of a trusted colleague. By the same token those are the businesses he should have on his blog role and listed in his resources section to build SEO.

Next month we will cover Landing Pages as a way to give key visitors a unique experience and thus improve their conversion!

About the Author: Heather Rubesch is currently the Director of Content for DemandCon, the only industry conference focused on accelerating the entire sales and marketing funnel. Her penchant for collaboration drew her 3 years ago to co-found the Savvy B2B Marketing blog with five of the most talented content marketers in the universe!