How can your small business compete in Google search results against brands, large media businesses and other major players?
Don’t be discouraged! One of the main benefits of internet marketing and SEO, in particular, is that it allows businesses of all sizes to compete more effectively, reducing the impact of budget differences.
Furthermore, SMBs should strive to obtain a competitive advantage over larger competitors in the same digital area. Moreover, they should also maximise the opportunities of being a smaller entity online.
Here are some practical SEO tips for small businesses to rise above their competitors.
1. Establish yourself as an expert in your field
As a small business, you have an ideal opportunity to place your expertise at the forefront of your business through yourself and other essential employees.
You can present a credible, trustworthy and real-world face to an often colder perceived online approach of many larger brands within the internet community.
Smaller businesses are often perceived as being closer to their customers. This means when SMB can pivot, identify, nurture and share their offline ways of doing business online, the benefits can be enormous.
An SMB has a number of advantages over a larger company, including:
- Less red tape and internal barriers to obtaining access to the conversation sooner.
- Established people-orientated ways of working often demand smaller businesses to function.
- Sincere offline experience inside the community can be adapted for online gains.
- Real opinion and opportunity for open commentary discussion.
- SMB has the agility to adjust strategies and taking larger risks is possible with data-supported trial and error.
Larger companies find it quite difficult to have an authentic voice in the online community, thus this gives a terrific path to market for SMBs.
2. Get the basics right
We understand the term “basics” can have a variety of meanings. However, keep the focus on the basics for success when it comes to small business SEO.
Moreover, time, resources and budget are limited for experiments. So focus on the known aspects that influence SEO and the success of your website visitors.
Forget about vanity metrics or success measurements that prohibit you from investing those gains into more SEO and digital marketing.
There are a lot of basics to prioritise and they will vary depending on your SEO starting point. But keep it simple and consider these:
- Access to key content. How easy is it for visitors to locate, understand and convert from your content cornerstones?
- User Experience. How quickly does your content load and are there any distracting elements that hinder the user from moving forward?
- Technical barriers. Do you make it easy for search engines to understand, index and rank your content?
- Understanding the page. How can you reinforce the content’s theme and improve the signals you’re providing to search engines based on headers, URLs, internal links and other elements on the page?
- Hierarchy of content. How intuitive and easy can someone navigate to your most essential pages using your website navigation and supporting content access elements (sub-navigation, footer, etc.)?
- Mixed content types. Do you make it simple for your content to rank for a variety of different sorts of relevant search results (pictures, video, etc)?
- Comprehensive content coverage. Is it possible for someone to obtain a deep and complete understanding of a topic without leaving your page? Are there any better instances of content that logically should outperform yours?
- The local advantage: Can you use your location to boost your claim to SEO success greater than other national, regional or global brands?
3. Build authority by creating credible content
SMBs tend to have a better knowledge of their audience. When this is combined with SEO and a data-driven approach to content creation, it can result in significant marketing benefits.
The production of high-performing digital content does not have to be entirely dependent on the business or only available through outsourcing to an agency.
Often there are combinations of both to explore to give optimum capture of the moment without overstretching resources or budget while maximising both.
Once you’ve committed to a content strategy, focus on the value to your audience vs the commercial value to your business. Adapt your course as needed to strike the correct balance.
Credible authoritative content will typically:
- Include inherent and tangible value for the audience.
- Serve a unique function and is more useful above competing examples.
- Have opinions, data and unique insights that are relevant to your expertise and specialisation.
- Have value in terms of public relations and media, particularly for local publications.
- Have authorship that can be trusted when it comes to content creation and ideation.
- Have layers of impact for multiple persona types.
- Repurpose mixed material to appeal to a variety of user preferences.
- Have a message that is simple to understand, absorb and promote.
To begin, it’s better if you produce your first key content elements based on the areas of your company specialty where you are most known.
Consider the variables that demand the most of your company’s service or product. Don’t forget about why customers will choose you over the competitors.
From here, you can take advantage of this significant differentiation to turn many of your lessons and advice into a genuinely useful content asset that will work hard for your link-building and authority-building efforts.
Great content needs expertise, energy and ongoing effort to generate the optimum potential from it.
4. Take advantage of local optimisation
To outperform your competitors in SEO, you must get each value out of the time you spend online.
Local optimisation for small businesses will always provide an opportunity to improve your ROI.
The reason for this is that, regardless of scale, you have a valid claim to your local community. And in many cases, you have a more genuine claim to this exposure than other competing sites.
You won’t find an SEO post for small businesses that don’t include local SEO. That’s because it works.
There are a few key activities you can apply to improve your SMB’s local SEO. Those are:
- Optimise Google Business Profile (previously Google My Business) by claiming, maintaining and sharing updates.
- Create a location landing destination on your website that is full of local content.
- Local updates and related information are seeded into your services (where relevant).
- Participate in local media and publications.
- Organise and implement location-based marketing and incentive schemes.
- Generate local testimonials, case studies and reviews.
- Actively be present in community websites, forums and question-and-answer sources.
- Share your expertise and opinions on major social media platforms.
- Use relevant local business schemes.
Here’s a comprehensive local SEO checklist to help you vary and focus your efforts.
5. Answer questions and become the problem solver
The necessity for individuals to have their queries answered and their pain points handled is something that exists across all industries.
Prioritising problem-solving is a frequent strategy for getting a business in front of their audience online when they are most needed.
Take a look at your Google Search Console data on a monthly (better weekly) basis and discover all the phrases that include who, what, why, where, when and how.
Then consider comparable pain point questions such as issue, problem and other terms.
Then you can add location triggers, cost/price and other areas like evaluation and comparison type terms to this list.
You’ll likely learn a lot of new terms and topics about which your audience is looking for answers and opportunities to position your SMB in front of audiences.
This kind of audience-aware content creation and value-based support can add levels of value and commercial effect online.
Many of the rich content you create using this strategy will have several layers of potential. For instances:
- To house FAQ content, you can build a community hub.
- You can use this hub to create destinations or content that appeals to a wider audience, drives traffic and conversions to your site.
- To help address frequent audience inquiries and build fresh links to your content, you can promote and share this content in snippets on social media and on other sites.
- The content can be repurposed into different forms of content, including video and picture content, allowing for increased ranking and SEO in new search verticals.
- As your exposure increases, you’ll get a lot of new and unanswered questions, which will keep the cycle going.
- You can always add to the inquiries by completing a competitor content gap. Analyse their question and answer visibility as well as using free tools like Answerthepublic.
Conclusion
Small businesses have a great opportunity to rise above their competition in online marketing. SEO can grow your small or medium business into a success in a meaningful and value-based way if you concentrate on those 5 major areas. Furthermore, you can even raise your SEO game if you continue working on the suggested strategies that follow each point.
Small businesses like yours must have the ability to perform SEO well and frequently connect with your audience through multiple platforms, social media and local business platforms alike. It’s a lot so why not hire a digital marketing expert to handle it all? Top4 Marketing is a digital marketing agency that focuses on building strong brands that generate lasting revenue and customer loyalty with more than 20 years of experience. That way, you can focus on your business. We’ve worked with some of Australia’s and Indonesia’s most successful companies to help them grow their businesses.
Ready to get your small business to rank higher in search results? Contact our web experts to talk about how we can help your small business grow with our professional digital marketing. Get in touch with us today!
To find out how we can help you with your Website + Marketing, using our unique location marketing platform called Top4, get in touch today at www.top4marketing.com
Looking to build customer loyalty through social media? Don’t forget to add your business to Top4.com.au
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