How local businesses can compete on-line

Many businesses, from small medium enterprises to big industry, have a website. As search marketing, mainly on Google, grows in popularity, more businesses compete for the top spots. These, really are only a handful positions at the top of search engine results pages or SERPs.

Competing with the big guys!

How do you compete with large corporate websites like Tesco, Currys or B&Q? 
After all they have been around for years, established popular web presences supported by numerous inbound links. Not forgetting, constant recurring daily visitors with millions to spend for on-line marketing. So it’s no wonder they appear in the top ranking positions.

Whatever industry you’re in, you’ll always have competitors on-line. They have probably been around longer and have more budget and resources to build their on-line visibility.

So how can you compete with limited resources?

The little guy is fighting back

Search-engine optimisation (SEO) used to be about volume. How many inbound links you have, how long you’ve been online, how much content you have. Not any more, it’s about relevant content to the searcher.

Knowing that there are several strategies you can implement that can give you the edge over the competition. We’ve summarised the strategies into 3 top ideas for improving and competing with your competition. They are all based around Google’s requirement for relevant content.

4 Top Tips to Beat the Giants in SEO

1. Less is more – niche longer keywords

Level the playing field, focus your efforts on marketing one thing well and be more niche. After all spreading your efforts across all your products and services may help you define what you do but for search engines such as Google, it’s whole load of keyword information that it has to process – basically it makes you less relevant and ranked lower.

By focusing your efforts into one or two keywords, you’ll make your website content relevant and more likely to achieve a much higher visibility.

For example, if you provide food ingredients and sell on-line, rather than just promote every product which eCommerce websites tend to do well anyway, you could focus on relevant content for searchers, such as –

1. Chef’s may be looking vegan ingredients.
2. Articles about the special ingredients and modern gastronomy.
3. Relevant videos and menu ideas for niche specialised ingredients like sodium alginate or ultratex.

This helps you to build relevant and helpful content for the searchers which in turn improves the search engines understanding of your contextual keywords. Creating an article driven website, blogs or microsite for promoting a few specific keywords with relevant content, can work well if your company website structure is not suitable. 

2. What are Long-tail keywords?

Rather than use the keyword just ‘modern gastronomy‘ we could promote the long-tail keyword ‘molecular gastronomy chef kits‘. Small businesses can rank highly for long-tail keywords and it’s much easier than ranking high for shorter keywords – even though they are less popular, they’re more valuable for small niche businesses as they are more relevant to their customers.

3. Target local audience and use social media

Google likes locally relevant content, even if you are a national business, you can at least tie up the local traffic for your website before branching out – low hanging fruit. Here’s a few pointers how you can do this –

Local search is getting more local, as Google is getting better at identifying areas within a city, so you can take local search a step further by using area-specific keywords instead of just city and regions. 

damp proofing Cardiff rather than damp proofing south Wales

Social media – make it more personal. By promoting the personal factor, big business struggle to compete. You’re small and nimble and can engage and nurture each follower – saying thanks! goes a long way. You’ll rank in Google, the bigger and more active your social-media presence is.

4. Relevant content is the key

To build your brand, create awareness, loyalty and trust you need to engage with your customers and be credible so you’ll need credible and relevant content. Blogs, eBooks, videos, microsites and other content channels are used to publish this quality content.

• Make your content relevant
• Ensure your content is quality and consistent
• Maximise your content output, blogs, articles, social media, video..