Small Businesses Are a Great Place to Start Your Career

Does it seem like everyone is jockeying for a job with the Big Four? Or, maybe you've started working for one, and it's not going as well as you thought it would. Sure, you have a generous salary, but perhaps you're tired of working from a windowless cubicle or fighting heavy traffic every day.

If you're burned out by working for large corporations, a job with a small business could be a smart move—and one that could pay huge dividends for your career. Here's how.

What Is a Small Business?

A small business isn't just your local cupcake bakery with four employees. The Small Business Administration (SBA) defines a small business as a company with up to 1,500 employees that generates no more than $41.5 million in annual revenue. And small businesses employ more than 40% of working Americans.

The Advantages of Working for a Small Business

There are numerous benefits to working for a small business. Here are just a few reasons to consider a job with a small company for your next career move.

— Expand Your Skill Set

Employees who work for a small business may wear a lot of hats. You might be helping manage the ecommerce store in addition to updating social media and writing ad copy. Or, you might not only work as a UX Designer creating mock-ups of apps, but you could also be helping market the product.

Working for a small business, you'll get to try many new things to build your skill set for future opportunities.

— Enjoy More Flexibility

A large, widely-known Fortune 500 company may not be as willing to embrace remote or hybrid work, although many are shifting their views. Attempts to negotiate flexible work options can be difficult since there can be more red tape with corporate policy.

A small business has less bureaucracy, so it can be easier to negotiate the hybrid or remote work options you desire.

— Easily Access Leadership

At a large company, there's a slim chance you'll ever interact with senior leaders, like the CEO. However, at a small company, you might be meeting with the CEO regularly to provide updates as the sole marketer. Or, they may hold company town halls to discuss policy changes or goals for the upcoming quarter.

This access allows you to demonstrate your value to senior leadership, which means that working for a small business could provide opportunities to grow your career within the company.

Start Working for a Small Business Today

While a small business may not come with an internationally-known name or large salary, there can be numerous benefits to working for one. A small company can provide you the valuable opportunity to learn new skills, enjoy flexible working options, and meet with senior leadership.

Ready to enjoy the flexibility of working for a small business? Since 2007, FlexJobs has provided job seekers with access to a scam-free jobs board to help them land their next hybrid or remote role. Explore the benefits of a FlexJobs membership today!

Teacher Builds Better Balance for Fun in Retirement

Many people think of retirement as a period in life full of baking cookies, swinging on the porch, and golfing. But for many retirees, that routine might sound like a nice vacation for a little while but becomes tedious on a daily basis.

Karen J. was one of those retirees. She didn't want to settle quietly into her hobbies after she retired from teaching. The desire to fill up some of her time and satisfy her quest for continual learning took her back to the classroom part-time.

However, it didn't take long for her to realize a traditional teaching role in a classroom was no longer an ideal fit for her retirement years. "Being inside the school working with a very limited and tight schedule, I decided I wanted more flexibility," Karen says.

Seeking a Better Work-Life Balance in Retirement

Karen also needed a job that provided more consistent income to add to her savings and boost her hobby fund. "Not getting a salary when schools are closed, on holidays, during vacation weeks, or over the entire summer was a bit stressful!"

But Karen found that it was challenging to find a part-time job that matched her professional skills and experience on her own, which led her to FlexJobs.

Discovering New Options

Through FlexJobs, Karen was able to land not one but two part-time, flexible positions with TutorMe and Littera Education. And together, they fit her needs perfectly. Now, Karen is busy "enjoying more of life by having time for other pursuits, piano, crafts, church activities, or simply being with friends."

"I enjoy being at home because it is quiet. I can take breaks when needed, schedule work, and not feel rushed to get from one place to another by a certain time. Now, I can leave for appointments or just have additional time for my hobbies."

Beyond balancing her time, Karen enjoys staying relevant and learning new skills that align with her lifelong career. "These roles give me additional training since I am a lifelong learner and still would like to help students achieve success."

Advice to Anyone Considering a FlexJobs Membership

Like many retirees, Karen noted that it's a balancing act to fight against age bias and other stereotypes about retirees. She suggests that other retirees update their resumes strategically with a focus on communicating both their experience and desire to keep working.

And even though budgets can be tight in retirement, Karen thinks the paid membership is well worth it. She says, "Try it for three months and keep looking! FlexJobs has a LOT of jobs."

Create Your Own Retirement Rules

There is no standard blueprint for retirement anymore. As Karen discovered, you can create your work-life balance rules.

If you're ready to explore your flexible work options, FlexJobs can help. We post jobs daily in over 50 career categories, and we have an entire team of real people dedicated to verifying those jobs to ensure that our members only see legitimate opportunities. Take the tour and discover all of the ways FlexJobs can support you!

Balance and a Rewarding Career Using FlexJobs

For many, the United States Census Bureau study about commuting comes as no surprise. The Bureau's report shares that the average time spent commuting back and forth to work has grown to almost 30 minutes each way. And for most professionals who work in an office setting, giving up five hours of life each week for a commute is pretty standard.

But Sara S. struggled with a lengthy commute combined with long, draining hours. She realized that something had to change. Her work life was taking a toll on her family and personal commitments and pushing her to professional burnout. It was time to take back control of her life.

Committing to Pursuing Balance

Recognizing that she needed a change, Sara looked for remote roles independently. It was only a short time before she realized she was spending more time sourcing legitimate positions than she was applying for and following up on them.

"I had been looking for a remote position for a few months and wasted so much time and energy on fake job leads." Even with the many awareness campaigns, job seekers like Sara are often overwhelmed with the number of scams targeting job seekers. Fortunately, she found FlexJobs, and her job search became streamlined and productive.

Building a Rewarding Career

Sara knew that her next role needed to do more than create balance. She was also determined that it would be a quality position aligned with her career goals. "I didn't want to step backward in my career or be stuck in a position with no growth opportunities."

Fortunately, Sara remained focused on her goals and found a perfect fit in a fully remote role with UnitedHealth Group. Now, Sara can be more present for her family without having to put her career to the side. "I found an organization I can grow with, professionally and personally."

Thriving Throughout All Areas

If you ask Sara how working remotely has affected her life, she'll tell you she's enjoying building better balance in the larger, more apparent areas of her life. "I have more time for the things that are important to me—my kids, my education goals, and my health," she says.

But like most professionals new to remote work, Sara discovered that work flexibility has also enhanced her life in other areas. "I am saving on gas and auto expenses, eating healthier, and I can wear activewear to work, so I go for a jog or do Pilates on my breaks!"

Advocating for Work Flexibility

Now that Sara is thriving in a meaningful role supporting her work-life balance, she has become an advocate for others to make effective changes in their lives. "I have recommended FlexJobs to so many people. It was well worth purchasing the membership."

Her guidance to others looking for more work freedom? Your job search is much more than tailoring a resume and hitting "submit." Sara says, "Don't forget about the value of networking," also stating that, "A flawless resume is useless if no one ever reads it."

Create Your Own Success Story

We hear from job seekers like Sara every day, sharing the enormous impact that flexible work has made on their lives.

If you're ready to build a better work-life balance, take the tour and discover all of the resources that FlexJobs offers to support you in your job search.

SEO basics for Shopify

 Shopify is a great platform to host your online shop on, but there’s a lot you can do to make it perform even better. SEO can help you get your store noticed on Google and other platforms while making it more attractive for potential customers. In this ultimate guide to Shopify SEO, we’ll give you loads of tips — and a checklist — to make your ecommerce site successful!

Define who you are and what you stand for

To kick things off, we need you to think about who you are. Why does your business exist, and why do you need people to visit your store and buy your products? What makes you stand out from the competition? If everyone sells the same products, what would be your number one reason for people to come to you?

Define a mission for your store. A mission is an effective way of getting into words what you have in your head. It provides a line that you can connect to your values and principles. You can use your mission as input for the SEO and marketing strategy for your online store. We have a post explaining exactly what you need to do to define a good mission and what to do with it.

Start with keyword research for your store

SEO for your Shopify store must start with keyword research. Keyword research is the process you undertake to produce a list of terms you want your products, services, or store to be found for. Doing keyword research will give you insights into your audience, which words they use, with solutions they prefer, and how they behave. Do it well, and you get to fill in your SEO strategy for your Shopify site instantly.

There are various tools out there that can help you get those insights quickly. You could use Google Trends, Answer the Public, or more professional tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. Do thorough research and find out which terms are used most often. Find out what people usually search for, and which phrases have search volume that you might aim for. Keep in mind that trying to aim for the most popular head terms only might not make the most sense — try to aim for more long-tail keywords that still attract traffic.

You should also look at the different search intents around your products or services. No one is going from not needing something to buying it in the next second. The buyer journey goes through a whole number of steps. You need to provide content for those steps.

Does Shopify have good SEO?

 Shopify makes sure that you set up your store quickly and customers and search engines can reach it. Shopify already has some basic SEO features and you can use SEO apps such as Yoast SEO for Shopify for a lot of the other tasks. Of course, this being a closed platform, the control you have over SEO is limited to what the developers of Shopify allow.

For instance, you have to use the built-in URL structure and a system to manage your products in so-called collections, but these can be sub-optimal and might cause duplicate content issues. In the rest of this guide, we will go through the SEO basics you need to have covered and how Shopify and Yoast SEO for Shopify can help you.

What are the biggest SEO issues with Shopify?

Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms out there. It does most things reasonably well, and with a bit of finetuning and care, it’s a solid platform to build your online store on.

Most SEO issues with Shopify arise from its handling of different products and their variants. Shopify products can live in multiple places/URLs in your online store, and that can confuse search engines. Luckily, Shopify adds canonical URLs to signal to search engines that the one in the /products/ section is the canonical one. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about this but be aware of the limitations.

Another thing people have an issue with is Shopify’s rigid URL structure. It uses a system based on subfolders, and that makes for unnecessary long URLs. For instance, you can find the contact page on a regular site on example.com/contact/, but on a Shopify store, that’s always example.com/pages/contact. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about this.

Shopify is listening to its community and has begun to roll out several improvements that make it even more attractive as an ecommerce platform. Let’s hope they will keep their focus and help you get the best results with your store. In the meantime, Shopify SEO apps like Yoast SEO for Shopify and the tips and checklists in ultimate guides like the one you are reading now help alleviate the various issues.

What is the best SEO app for Shopify?

Shopify is extendable, and you can choose from a broad selection of apps that help you improve your store. There are apps to help with shipping your products, designing your store, and offering customer services. Too many to choose from! Of course, there are also some SEO apps to take note of.

Some apps help you optimize images, others help with Schema structured data, and there are all-in-one SEO suites. The best one? We’re a bit biased, but we think Yoast SEO for Shopify is the one that stands out from the competition.

Yoast SEO for Shopify: Your Shopify SEO expert

WordPress fans have enjoyed using Yoast SEO for more than a decade — it’s the most popular SEO plugin for a reason! Yoast SEO is for SEO experts by SEO experts. But we didn’t make it for experts only. We’ve made SEO accessible for all so that everyone working with WordPress can use Yoast SEO and get a fair chance in the search results. Over 12 million websites trust Yoast SEO and our WordPress app has over 25,000 five-star reviews on wordpress.org. Now, Yoast SEO comes to Shopify – ready to help shop owners get more out of their stores.

Yoast SEO for Shopify not only helps store owners improve their site in a technical sense, but it also comes with an advanced SEO and readability analysis. The app will help you enhance your product page descriptions by suggesting improvements to make. These suggestions help you make the best product descriptions.

In addition, these analyses also work on your Shopify blog. Content marketing plays a massive role in getting your store noticed on Google. The Yoast SEO for Shopify app helps you write high-quality, readable content that strikes a chord with potential customers.

Of course, that’s not all the SEO app does. Be sure to check out the product page for Yoast SEO for Shopify or the Shopify SEO app store listing to find out more. In addition to the app, our SEO content gives you all the knowledge, tips, and tricks you need to make the most out of your Shopify SEO.

Yoast SEO for Shopify gives you feedback on your product pages that help you to improve them

Read more: How to become a Shopify expert »

What is Shopify?

 Shopify is an online tool that helps you build and maintain an online store with ease. It is a managed platform, meaning that the software is hosted on their servers, so you won’t need separate hosting. Shopify will take care of all of this for you. You simply take out a subscription to use it to build your online shop. Currently, Shopify has several plans:

• The Basic Shopify plan starts at $29 per month.
• The Shopify plan is $79.
• While and the Advanced Shopify plan is $299.
• In addition, there’s also the enterprise-grade Shopify Plus plan.

The differences between the plans mainly consist of having more options or different discounts on various costs. For instance, you’ll get better shipping rates and lower payment costs. You can find the biggest difference in the selling internationally section: only the higher plans will let you set up an international domain and let you set up specific pricing for these countries. Also, the basic plan does not come with reporting options.

Get your store online in no time with Shopify and follow the SEO tips in this ultimate guide to get started

What is Shopify SEO?

While Shopify helps you set up everything correctly from the start, there are some things to be mindful of when thinking about SEO. As with all content management systems, you need to optimize your store to ensure it performs well for customers and search engines alike.

With Shopify SEO, you’re building a store that is technically sound and one that is tuned to what potential customers are looking for. You will use Shopify SEO in such a way that you build a much better solution than what your competitors are doing. You use research to find out what customers need, and you use the power of high-quality content to draw people in. The Shopify SEO tips also have to do with what you do to market your store in other places — both online and offline. At Yoast, we practice holistic SEO and we advise you to do the same — it’s the only way to get sustainable results.

Shopify SEO tips in a handy checklist

This is a pretty epic Shopify SEO article, and we can imagine it is hard to keep track of all the great tips. Luckily, we put all the main tips in a handy little Shopify SEO checklist. Download the pdf and get started on the SEO of your Shopify store!