For small businesses, competing with large corporates was an unimaginable undertaking, and most small businesses openly admitted defeat and relinquished a huge part of their potential market without even putting up a fight.
Fast forward a few years and small businesses are giving the corporates a run for their money. Thanks to the SEO and online content marketing, these businesses are able to now compete on the same level depending on how well they are able to draw traffic information to their customers. The Internet is a virtual platform, and gives no preferences, so anyone who is well capable of optimizing content to match the needs of the clients gets the returns.
SEO can tilt the scales to the benefit your small business through simple and unique strategies. These strategies are;
Creating reputable links
Most of the SEO is based on building credible links whereby you use internal links to reference content that is within your website and external links referencing content in other websites, as well as having other websites referencing back to your content. A study in 2015, Search Engine Ranking Factors, places links as the main attribute for most SEO, and have a strong association with high rank by Google algorithm than any other optimization effort.
Many small businesses, however, are tempted to hack and fish for links and just put them in their websites. This practice will cost you dearly as search engines are always applying checks for any irregular link placements, paid anchoring, etc., and a site with such malpractice is lowly ranked or if it persists, it is dropped altogether.
Enhancing your social media growth
By growing your social media presence and creating huge and popular links, then your search engine ranking will go higher as you will be having more comments, links, following etc., which search engines regard highly.
Many large organizations usually lose on social media presence because they are not able to have a more personalized presence, unlike in small businesses that can give specialized and personalized attention to their links and thus stand to gain more following.
Enhance your presence on social review platforms
Whereas many organizations may fo
rego review sites because most of the reviews are by small or disgruntled clients, growing your small business’ profile on such sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, etc., can even give you more ranking that your sites will.
By engaging your customers, responding to their queries and concerns, and positive responses to their complaints, your business gains more appeal to the users on such sites and this grows your reviews.
Search engines like Google, through their Pigeon Algorithm update, rank such sites very highly.
Leverage locality and niche for optimization.
When targeting every category of customers all over the world, you are not able to customize your service offering to match and meet their needs. This leads to losing possible clients in the effort of reaching for the wider global market.
To counter this, you need to identify a niche (specific) market type that you will fully focus on satisfying, and if possible, a niche market that is in the locality that you are operating in. This will enable you to offer customized and satisfactory services to the niche, and even respond faster to inquiries.
It is important to know that SEO is not an event; rather it is a continuous process, where you have to keep on reviewing the benefits realized from every strategy used. You can contract a digital search engine optimization firm, which will be able to review your SEO efforts and those of the competitor to identify the strengths and weaknesses and guide you on how to go about implementing what your site is lacking. This is important in that by continuous reviews and analysis of the ranking parameters, you will always be in charge of the SEO and ranking of your website.
