Engage in a long-tail keyword strategy.
Most often single keyword searches or short-tail keywords are overly saturated and very competitive. However, long-tail keyword strategies can accomplish the same thing, but do it better for small businesses. In niche specializations, you will be looking for a smaller volume of topics so you can have maximum relevance in that target of topics. With long-tail keywords, you won’t be competing with highly popular (competitive) keywords, in order to have high ranking with less popular keywords.
Specialize in a niche.
Niche focus can be a small businesses’ best friend. This can be the opposite of what you might think. Most would think the best method would be to cast a wide net with many areas of expertise. If you focus on keywords such as heating, cooling, construction, roofing, and a dozen other home improvement topics, you’ll be able to be found in searches with any of those words.
However, if you have big competition, use the niche strategy to take them on, and win. The key is to specialize in just one or even a small handful of keywords, to achieve much higher visibility, than having many areas of specialization.
For example, in the construction industry, specializing in indoor plumbing as your niche will give your greater success rather than having 5 different areas you try to specialize in the industry.
Personalize your social engagement.
Personalizing your brand strategy can help you step up your game to overcome steep competition, besides using local search optimization. It’s tough for larger businesses to keep their personality once they focus on hitting a certain growth number, but there is a huge advantage for small businesses being small yet nimble, by giving each follower a more human and personalized experience.
Become an authoritative, and recognized content publisher.
In order to establish and maintain brand awareness, trust, credibility and loyalty you must frequently publish quality content. You can choose for your small business to distribute podscasts, videos, ebooks, webinars and other forms of content through various other channels, while some may choose to do an on-site blog to publish their content.
Leverage locality for optimization.
There is now a way to beat out your competition, and it is by tapping into an increasing demand for local businesses. More and more these days local search is becoming more relevant and important, so with the current trend, being the best restoration company in Atlanta is way better than being an OK competitor on the national scale.
With this trend, even if you are a national or even an international business, you still can tap in to capture a niche market share in order to edge out your competition in at least one key area through optimizing for a specific local area. Let’s start to discuss a handful of specific strategies you can use to build your reputation and relevance in your targeted city.
First off is increasing your relevance in event attendance and community building. Getting your name out there by getting involved in the community can be cost effective and fun. Make yourself present whenever there are local or even major events such as community gatherings, fairs, and festivals. There are two opportunities you can take hold of: you will have an opportunity to offer discounts or promotions to increase your business with event attendees. But also and most importantly (for SEO specifically), you can increase awareness with your new customers about your online presence and how they can participate.
You can use a two approach attack through syndicating press with a press release about the event opportunity (in order to get some high-authority and local-specific inbound links), as well as posting excellent content on your website, through local-specific keywords, about your attendance in the event.
Another key to gaining local advantage over your competition is through directories such as Yelp or TripAdvisor, and using local reviews on these sites to increase you SEO. With some of Google’s more recent updates (algorithms), Yelp and similar sites have received a huge boost in weight towards ranking your businesses website on top of page one. There are now even examples where a company’s Yelp profiles are actually ranking higher than their official webpages.
What a great opportunity for small businesses to be able to jump into the competition of rankings without having to worry about producing content or building links. Your focus instead should be on growing strong reviews from your customer base.
There are a few simple rules you cannot violate using Yelp (compensating for reviews, or asking for reviews directly), however you still can guide customers for more reviews through Yelp stickers and occasional call-outs with social-media profiles.
Lastly, there is hyper-local content, with search getting more local every day you should take advantage of the trend, and capitalize on beating out your competition, especially if that competitor operates in the same city as you.
Google is making more efforts and succeeding at identifying and categorizing neighborhoods within broader cities, so take this as a cue from them and take local search a step further by using neighborhood-specific keywords instead of city and state names. This is an area for even furthering your potential success, so do some research about your neighborhood boundaries and Googles view of them.
My team and I would be glad to help you utilize SEO in creating high conversion strategies with maximum ROI for your business.
Call or email Sonny at sonny@sonnyahuja.com for pricing.