It is fairly consistent in SEO that businesses learn the basics, find out about backlinks and decide, “We need that!”. The truth though is that in most cases you are actually in one of two places, 1. You just don’t need them at all OR 2. You aren’t ready yet for them.
That is somewhat contradictory to most of what we hear in the SEO world. Backlinks are the currency that makes the world go round.
I want to debunk that myth for you with a story.
Early on in our life, 5Tales worked with a small law practice that had just started and had very few clients. They had just created a website with a no content homepage, a contact page and an about us. Over the past month they had received only 12 calls total.
We were set to do SEO with them and had to decide exactly what keywords to go after and where we should start. Instead of taking on 200 keywords for this small businesses, we decided to track 21 non-branded keywords.
Now, picking a smaller number of keywords is not usually the tactic most businesses will take when preparing to target keywords. Our reasoning for doing this was that if we wanted to keep a small number of pages for now – due to the clients wishes to keep costs low – then this would allow for the most results.
It is important to remember that creating relevant content for 200 keywords can be challenging, whereas creating relevant content for 20 keywords – is something anyone can do.
After choosing this small number of keywords we split them across five different pages – four for services and one just explaining general legal terms. We made the content and posted it all.
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Our client thought SEO was going to take them months to reach the first page for some larger keywords. Well, in one week they had 4 first page keywords and the lowest was mid-way on the third page. Not bad for five pages. You can see the rankings here:
That following week after ranking, they received 71 calls from leads. 4 per week to 71 per week after only five pages. An investment of such a negligible cost, has changed that business almost overnight.
Why Does It Matter?
So why does that story matter exactly? Because on-page SEO is the starting point for ALL businesses. Only in very competitive markets is it necessary to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars on the biggest link building campaign.
Although backlinks are still very important, you can receive results that matter, without ever going near them. All it takes is to commit to your on-page SEO strategy.
Now that is all good and well for me to say that, but the reason backlinks are the thing everyone wants – is because they are easy to understand. One website building a pathway to another isn’t a complicated idea.
Whereas for on-page SEO, it can be hard to understand properly how to actually make the most of it. So here are the three key areas for on-page SEO that small businesses should be focusing on as well as the link to articles we have already made for all three.
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