You’ve decided to start a small business out of your backyard workshop, but just one problem — how the heck do you get the word out?
It’s a challenge, but one you can easily crack using backyard business SEO. Stay with me if you’re not sure what that is.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a series of strategies used to help your business website rank higher organically in the search engines.
That’s a mouthful right?
Basically it’s a way of trying to make your business the top result when someone types a search in Google. Easy? No, but there are some simple strategies you can use to make it happen.
When you consider that 87% of consumers use Google to check out local businesses when looking for products and services, it’s not something you can afford to ignore.
Here are 5 simple strategies you can use to crack the code of backyard business SEO.
Listen to this article:
5 Key Backyard Business SEO Tactics For Explosive Growth
1. For Better Small Business SEO First Define Your Target Market
It’s hard to develop a business strategy if you don’t have a solid understanding of your market. I know, I know, that’s business 101.
But hear me out.
Most business owners think they have a pretty good grasp of who their customers are, but ask them to describe a typical customer and many will scratch their head for a few seconds before offering a vague simplified answer.
It isn’t easy.
If you’re going to develop a winning online marketing strategy though it’s essential. Even effective SEO for solopreneurs requires extensive preparation.
So just how do you define your target market? That brings us to our next step.
2. Create A Customer Persona for Focused SEO
Remember when we talked about how hard it can be to describe an average customer for your business?
Well it’s much easier if you develop a customer persona and this is a big part of a successful local business SEO strategy.
Depending on the nature of your business you might even need several customer personas.
So what am I talking about?
A customer persona is a detailed profile of the characteristics you think an average customer of your business has.
For example, a 30 year old female who loves woodworking and likes to have all the latest tools for her craft is a basic customer persona. Most get into much more detail than that.
Before you even think about diving deep into SEO, you need to develop these personas. Don’t worry if you’re not sure where to start. Here’s a quick list of some of the best customer persona tools available:
- Hubspot’s Make My Persona
- Live Persona By Delve AI
- SEMrush’s Buyer Persona Template
- Up Close & Persona
- Userforge’s Persona Creator
3. Targeting Local SEO
Now that you’ve defined your target market and developed buyer persona’s for your customers you’re ready to dive in the deep end with local search marketing seo.
As a backyard entrepreneur, local SEO will be critical to your success. What does that look like?
Let’s break it down.
When a potential customer does a search for businesses in their area with the products or services they need they might type in something like this “landscaping businesses near me”.
This will bring up the top 3 results for that query in your local area, along with a map of each business location. It’s called the Google Local Pack.
How do you get to the top of this local search SEO for your market?
There are a number of things you can do, but the first one is to create a Google Business Profile. You’ll want to include the following key info in your Google my business optimization process:
- Your business location
- Business hours
- Phone number
- Other contact details
- A link to your website
While a business profile on Google is a great start, there’s still more you need to do if you want to be found in SEO local search.
Look for any local directories you can list your business in as well. Here are some of the top ones to get you started:
One other great method for targeting local SEO for small business in your area is to make sure you have a complete Facebook Business Page.
It’s similar to your Google Business Page in some respects, but you can actually turn it into a marketing hub for your business.
Post your latest blog articles, provide updates to customers about events you’re involved in and promote your latest products or services.
Don’t forget to add your business to other social media platforms as well. This isn’t directly related to developing your backyard business SEO, but it helps to build your brand and establish your online authority.
It all helps to rank you higher in Google and other popular search engines.
4. Conduct Keyword Research For Better Backyard Business SEO
If you’ve defined your target market, created customer persona’s and made all the right moves to rank in local SEO congrats!
There’s still more work to do though.
You don’t just want to be found in local searches do you?
Why not aim for the stars and get your home business to the top of Google for your products and services even when the search intent isn’t local.
For this to happen you’ll have to conduct keyword research and produce great content built on solid article outlines centered around those important keywords.
No idea where to start with this? Think about the different words and phrases you would type in Google if you wanted to see what your competitors where up to.
That should give you a great start.
With those initial keywords in hand it’s time to find more. You can do that using some of the many tools out there designed to help with keyword research.
The best part?
You don’t have to pay for these tools if you’re on a tight budget.
There are tons of free options available. Here’s our list of essential free keyword research tools you should be using to grow your home based business:
- My Google Search Console — provides a treasure trove of information for your site. Once you’re registered your website you can access crawl data, see a ton of information about keywords you’re ranking for on Google and learn who has backlinks to your site.
- Google Analytics 4 — allows you to measure and track engagement over time on your website. There’s a lot of information, but once you get the hang of this site, it can really help you figure out where your marketing effort is successful and where it needs more work.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner — this site is gold. You do have to sign up for an Ad Words account first, but you don’t have to pay for any ads if you choose not to. With it you can find tons of related keywords for your industry and find out what kind of search volume each term attracts each month.
- Google Trends — allows you to see what search terms are trending and popular. You can use it to created targeted content that’s highly relevant in today’s marketplace for your business.
- Bing Webmaster Tools — Bing may not have the reach of My Google Search Console, but it’s a similar tool for the Bing Search engine. It also has some bonus tools you won’t find on Google. Like a built-in Backlink research tool that allows you to compare your backlinks to your competitors so you can create an outreach campaign to target those links for your own site.
- Mozbar Chrome Extension — shows you the page authority and domain authority of your competitors pages in Google search. You can use this to find pages ranking on the first page of the search results with low authority and then create better content so you can outrank them and get your site visible on that first page.
- SEO Review Tools — this is another hidden gem that most small business owners are not familiar with. There are 67 free SEO tools on this site that can provide you with a wealth of information to crack the code of backyard business SEO.
Of course there are many great SEO tools you can use, some are free and others require a subscriptions like Ahrefs or SEMrush (both have some free tools as well).
The reason I suggest starting with the tools in the list above is because they are all completely free. No strings attached.
Running a business is expensive enough without extra costs you don’t need to pay. At least not when you’re first starting out with home business SEO.
5. Launch A Blog For Your Backyard Business
If you’re launching a home based woodworking business for example and all of your competitors are following the tactics we’ve covered above how do you stand out? You need a blog for your business.
Anyone can follow recommended SEO guidelines, but that doesn’t mean they can create great information that makes them the go-to expert in their field.
If you’re able to publish lots of well written, helpful continent through articles on your own blog you can create a dedicated audience.
There’s a good chance many in this audience will come to you for products and services when they need them because they trust your expertise.
If you’re not the best writer, you can outsource the writing, just be sure that you review all articles before they’re posted to make sure they’re consistent with your brand image.
If I’m in the market for a lawnmower I’d rather buy it from a supplier that I have a relationship with.
Build that online relationship and it will lead to sales. Backyard business SEO through a blog does take time, but it’s worth the effort for the long term growth of your business.
