How to Build a Small Business SEO Content Marketing Strategy

When you’re a small business owner, you already have so much to do. You’re always working, and if you’re not working, you’re thinking about work. Even if you’d really rather focus on the cupcakes you’re baking for your kid’s birthday party, thank you very much.

I get it. I’ve been there. But if you want people to find you on Google, you need one more thing: an SEO blog and a solid SEO content marketing strategy to support it. 

Consistently blogging is one of the most important ways to spread the word about your brand. It helps your website rank higher, get organic traffic, and become a trusted source in your industry.

With this guide to building a content marketing SEO strategy, you’ll be able to start a blogging habit that connects you to your customers.

All without adding another hugely overwhelming task to your plate. 

I promise. 

Let’s get started. 

Your Simple but Mighty Content Strategy Guide 

Before we get started, a reminder: blogging is a long game. If you’re impatient (like, ahem, I am) it can be tempting to give up on a blog after a couple of months. Or even weeks. 

Don’t do this. Slow and steady wins the race here. 

Okay, let’s get to it!

1. Understand Your Audience

Before you write a single word, figure out exactly who you're speaking to. Otherwise, your content might as well get launched into a void. 

Will people read it? 

*Insert echoey voice here.* 

Who knows...who knows...who knows...

As a small business owner, you may already know who your ideal customer is. If so, that's who you're writing your blogs for! Feel free to skip to Step 2.

If you haven't quite figured that part out, no worries. Use market segmentation to organize information you already have about your audience—or what you think you know about them. 

Market segmentation uses four main segments to sort information about customers:

• Demographic: Their age, gender, income, career, family size, and education level

• Psychographic: Interests, lifestyle, beliefs, and values they hold

• Behavioral: How often they shop, what they usually buy, what they like to do 

• Geographic: What country, state, region, city, and climate they live in 

You can learn more about market segmentation from the Library of Congress Market Segments Resource Guide.

Now, if you’re a small business just starting out, you might have a teeny-tiny audience, or none at all. 

How do you fill in segmentation information when you have no customers?

Here’s a not-so-secret trick: look at your competitors. 

Pick 2-3 competitors who are rocking it with tons of followers. Visit their social media pages. Look at who’s liking and commenting on their posts. 

Their target audience is your target audience. 

Once you know who your target audience is and you’ve filled out the market segmentation info, identify two things:

• What your target audience wants or needs 

• How your SEO and content marketing strategy can deliver it 

Now you’re ready for the next step.

2. Set Clear Goals for Your Content Marketing Strategy

Before you dive into keyword research or start drafting blog posts, it’s important to know why you’re creating content in the first place.

When you have measurable goals in place, you can track how well your strategy for SEO content is working.

This makes it easy to adjust if things aren't going the way you want them to. Or to keep doing what you're doing if they are.

Your goals for your content marketing SEO strategy could be:

• Drive traffic: Attract more visitors to your website through organic search.

• Generate leads: Encourage readers to join your email list, book a call, or download a free resource.

• Increase conversions: Turn traffic into paying customers by guiding readers toward one of your products or services.

• Build authority: Grow trust and make a name for yourself in your niche through valuable, expertly written content.

Once your content is live, you'll be able to track your progress using your website's analytics feature or Google Analytics tools.

If your goal is to drive more traffic to your site, you can check to see if more people are visiting your site from search.

If your goal is more engagement, you should be able to check how much time people spend reading your content. Is it going up?

For a higher search visibility goal, you can check to see if your pages are showing up in search engine results pages for your target keywords. 

One of my SEO and content marketing strategy goals is to increase traffic and visibility to my site. 

I’ve been blogging since January of 2025. 

In March of 2025, I hit an exciting milestone: one of my blog posts landed on Page #1 of Google for the keyword “best free content optimization tool.”

It’s even the top choice Google’s AI overview pulls for that same keyword.

Since my goals are being met, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing: writing high-quality, informative blog posts that deliver value to my target audience. 😊

3. Create an SEO Content Calendar for Your Blog

Once you know who you're talking to and what you're trying to achieve, it's time to create a plan for your content marketing SEO strategy.

AKA, an SEO content calendar.

Your content marketing calendar will help you track three core things:

• What you're going to create

• When you'll publish it

• How it's performing post-publication

I use a simple Google Sheets spreadsheet to keep track of my content.

Here are the fields I use: 

• Blog title: The title of the blog, plus its CoSchedule Headline score

• Target keyword: Which keyword I want the blog post to rank for—I also include the user intent (I/C means informational/commercial), keyword difficulty (KD), traffic potential (TP), and value (V)

• Secondary keywords: Additional keywords I believe will be helpful for readers to find the blog post

• People Also Ask (FAQs): Pull 3-4 questions from Google’s People Also Ask section to use at the end of each article in an FAQ header

• What value does the reader get?: 1-3 concrete things readers will be able to take from the piece

• Upload date: The day I plan to/actually upload the content

• Monthly traffic: How many visitors the post gets each month

• When to update: What month and year to update the blog post

Want to use my content calendar for yourself? I’m happy to share! 

Here’s what to do:

• Grab my free SEO content marketing calendar template, no strings attached.

• Make a copy by clicking “File” and then “Make a Copy.”

• Give the copy a name, like Content Calendar for the Most Epic Small Business Ever. 💫

• Customize the template to fit your needs.

That’s all there is to it. 

Next, we’ll talk about how to get all that keyword information I just mentioned. Grab your copy of my content marketing calendar and get it ready to fill in with all the details. 

4. Do Your Keyword Research

This is one of my favorite parts of blogging. There’s something super satisfying about digging into keyword databases and learning why people search for them. I just love it. 

Now, there are all sorts of keyword research tools out there. Popular ones like Semrush are prohibitively expensive for small businesses. 

Ahrefs has a starter plan that costs $29 a month, but you only get 100 credits to use for keyword research, domain tracking, and other important SEO functions.

Or, you can use KeySearch, which offers a plan for $24 a month where you can run up to 200 keyword searches per day.  

Ahrefs’ free keyword generator is worth using when you’re just starting out. You only get up to 10 results for each keyword search—and limited data for each keyword—but it’s a good (and freeee!) starting point. 

As your content marketing SEO strategy expands, you’ll want to spring for at least a starter plan for keyword research, though. (See all my favorite free or low-cost SEO content optimization tools here.)

Here’s a quick guide to generating content ideas and doing keyword research for your blogs using Ahrefs’ free Keyword Generator tool: 

Find out what people are asking. Enter a simple keyword that describes your business into Ahrefs. If you sell rugs, beautiful trinkets for the home, and kitchen towels, for example, enter “home decor” into the keyword search box. Switch the toggle from “Phrase Match” to “Questions” to see what people are asking about.

• Pick an easy or medium keyword question to focus your blog on. “What is home decor” is a great starting point. If your blog is brand new, it can seem risky to go for a medium difficulty keyword. Especially one with a low search volume. But you can use easy secondary keywords to help round out your keyword difficulty and traffic potential.

• Choose 3-4 secondary keywords. Plug your target keyword in and see what secondary keywords pop up. When I put “what is home decor” into the free generator, there wasn’t much. So I switched over to my paid Ahrefs plan. I got a whole list of secondary keywords to click on.

With my paid plan, I viewed all 4,000+ keywords and picked these 4-5 with higher search volume and lower keyword difficulty for my pretend home decor blog post: 

• Decorations (Search Intent: Informational, Transactional, and Commercial, Keyword Difficulty 34, Search Volume 17K)

• Bohemian interior design (Informational, KD 16, SV 2.4K)

• Cottagecore living room (Informational, KD 0, SV 2.4K)

• Elegant living room (Informational, KD 27, SV 1.7K)

• Modern farmhouse interior design (Informational, KD 12, SV 1.7K)

• Unique home decor (Informational and Commercial, KD 31, SV 1.3K)

You can totally write a compelling blog post with these secondary keywords to guide you.

5. Create a Title and Add the Piece to Your Content Calendar

The next step in creating your content marketing SEO strategy? Refine your title with CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer tool. 

You can get up to 10 headline analyzer credits if you sign up for a free CoSchedule account. Use those credits to refine your headline into something with a strong score. 

I ended up liking the title, “What is Home Decor? The Best Trends and Styles of 2025.” 76 is a great overall score, and 68 is a decent SEO score.

Just make sure your title fits your target keywords. Your main keyword should appear in the title. In the case of my pretend blog, my main keyword—What is home decor—is right there at the beginning of the title. 

Now that you’ve got your keywords and title, plug them into your copy of my free content calendar template and pick an expected publication date. 

Give yourself at least a week to outline, draft, edit, polish, and publish each blog. 

For our pretend blog, I’ll pick April 7, 2025 as the publication date. Since I like to update content every year, I’ll put down the content update month as April of 2026.  

Now we only have two spaces left in the free content calendar template: the People Also Ask and What Value Does the Reader Get? sections. 

Filling in the People Also Ask section is easy. Head over to Google and type in your main keyword. 

Scroll down to the People Also Ask section. 

Pick 3-4 of these questions to use at the end of your post under an FAQ header. I usually use an H2 for FAQs and H3s for each individual question, with the response in normal text. 

Once you fill in the People Also Ask section of your free content calendar template, it’s time for the most important box of all: What Value Does the Reader Get?

If your post doesn’t match search intent and offer value to the reader, no one will read it. 

It’s that simple. 

Which is why this step is the most important when you’re building a content marketing SEO strategy.

The purpose of this question is to help you step into the perspective of your target audience. Ask yourself, “If I were reading this post, what main thing would I gain after reading it? How would it help me?” 

For our pretend blog on home decor, here’s what I’d say: 

• Information: The reader will come away with a full understanding of what home decor is and which types of decor are most popular in 2025.  

• Ideas: The reader will get concrete ideas for how to spruce up their space in a modern and fresh way.

• Tangibles: The post will include a free quiz to help readers understand their home decor style.

Good things come in threes, which is why I like to offer three value points in each piece. 

Now you can finish filling in your template.

Put Your Content Marketing Strategy to Work

Repeat steps 4 & 5 of this content strategy guide until you’ve mapped out several months’ worth of content. Choose whatever feels doable for you, whether that’s one blog post per month or three blog posts per month. 

Remember, quality and consistency matter more than quantity. 

If you’re anything like me, you have a million things on your to-do list at all times. Set reminders to check your content calendar at the beginning and middle of the month to make sure you’re on track with your content calendar. 

Only one step remains: write an outline, work on a draft, and then hit publish on your first blog.

Need help getting your SEO blog off the ground? I love writing content that’s optimized for search and packed with your brand’s personality. If you want me to take blogging off your plate, I’m just a message away. 😄

After learning more about your brand, I will set up an SEO content marketing strategy that’ll attract your target audience and deliver value, month after month. 

FAQs

How to make SEO content marketing strategy small business template?

Use a Google Sheets spreadsheet to create and organize your content marketing strategy in a way that’s visually appealing. Or, if you want a free content calendar template, I’ve got one for you! Just follow these steps: 

• Get my free content calendar template—no need to enter your email address or do anything but click the link.

• Make a copy by clicking “File” and then “Make a Copy.”

• Give your copy a name, like Content Calendar for the Snazziest Small Business Ever 💫

• Customize the template to fit your needs!

What is an SEO content strategy?

An SEO content strategy is a plan for creating blog posts and articles that help your website show up in search engine results. To create a good content strategy, it's important to:

• Understand your audience

• Choose the right keywords

• Offer value to your readers

• Publish high-quality content consistently

The goal is to drive organic traffic, build trust, and connect with your ideal customers over time.

What is an example of SEO marketing strategy?

An example of an SEO marketing strategy is creating a blog series that targets keywords your ideal customers are searching for. This could include topics like “best skincare routine for sensitive skin” if you're a skincare brand. 

You’d research related keywords, write helpful posts answering common questions, and optimize them with titles, metadata, and internal links. 

Over time, these posts help your website rank higher on Google and bring in organic traffic.