5 costly SEO and Social Media Mistakes Made by Small Business Owners

Small businesses are very fragile in nature. They tend to fail at a much higher rate than bigger businesses.

Since online presence is important for the survival of home-based and small businesses, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media have become extremely significant for the success of small businesses. SEO and social media marketing are not free. They require an investment of time, money and effort to provide the results which ultimately translate into more revenue and profits.

To achieve this, small business owners need to avoid following mistakes:

1. Not paying attention to grammar

For good SEO, your content needs to be relevant and written in proper English. Google has become so smart that it favors content that contains correct grammar and well-written paragraphs. If you are hiring an SEO expert who is not a native speaker of English to optimize an English-language site, make sure you check the content and proofread it carefully.

If you cannot accurately proofread your content yourself, it is better to hire an SEO Company that can effectively handle your content strategy and ensure that everything on your website is written in perfect English. You therefore need to place more emphasis on writing in perfect English, and you need to stick with quality content.

2. Not understanding the changes made by Google

One of the key content strategy mistakes small business owners make is their lack of knowledge about how Google’s core algorithm works. Though the full algorithm may be too technical for an entrepreneur to understand completely, being aware of the basic principles is of critical importance to the success of any online business.

A good SEO strategy requires you to keep track of changes at Google that affect content. Otherwise, your money spent on SEO efforts can be wasted. Continue to read good blogs and talk with your local SEO service providers to learn more about what changes are coming up and what you can do to take advantage of them.

3. Not following and unfollowing fans

If you want to get a lot of followers on social media sites for free, the most effective method is to follow and unfollow people.

For a small business, a strong presence on social media is important. To get a lot of free fans on both Twitter and Instagram, a follow and unfollow strategy works great. Simply find the people you want to follow, i.e. followers of a top celebrity or big business in your local area, and start following them. The overall idea is that people tend to follow back those who follow them. Even if only 10% follow you back, this number would greatly add to your list of followers if you work on the strategy consistently.

Make sure you target the right type of audience before following them. You can do this in different ways on different platforms, as platforms like Instagram allow you to search for people by their geographical location. For Twitter, you can target the fans of local celebrities.

Once you reach a certain number of people you are following, start unfollowing them. Unfollowing people is a necessary step because following too many people, while your own account has few followers, can make your account look ordinary.

4. Not following local fans

Small businesses are always local, so they do not require a global audience to sell their products and services. To effectively utilize your budget for social media, always make sure to get local followers. There are a lot of service providers who will offer to get you ten thousand followers for few bucks, but they are useless if they are from some unknown country or do not matter for your business.

Almost all social media platforms, i.e. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, offer local targeting. When making your social media strategy, always narrow down your audience to get best results. It is always better to have few paying fans instead of lots of fans who simply like your posts and do not buy.

5. Not writing how-to guides

Having a blog is essential for the success of the business, and if the small business is selling a service or product, it is always great to share how-to guides. How-to guides are step-by-step instructions to perform certain tasks. Essentially, they add more value for your customer and help them understand the services or products sold on the website.

Writing how-to guides allows a lot of good content to be shared on a consistent basis. This practice certainly creates more value for customers. Small business owners must learn to invest in getting great content.

Above are some simple yet costly mistakes which must be avoided. Otherwise, all efforts to get an online footprint may simply be in vain.

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Source: Lifehack.org