With such big players in your niche, and major media companies already present as big giants in your industry, how is it possible for your small business to compete against them!? seems almost impossible, isn’t it!? But, hold on! We have ways to help you know how you, as a small to medium business, can work up your SEO efforts to get into the limelight.
One of the fundamental advantages of internet marketing and SEO is that it gives the chance to every business, no matter the size, to compete against the rest. Let’s help you know how you can do so, while staying within your budget limitations.
Focusing on the basics and fundamentals
Small businesses may have limitations in terms of budget and resources, which may limit experimentation too. It is but important to place emphasis on the factors that impact SEO and website visitor success. This can be done by keeping some basics in check, such as –
- Making your content easy to find, read and understand
- Having your pages to load faster
- Including relevant images, graphs, infographics, and videos to your content
- Including all possible links, CTAs, and other signals on your pages
- Including every possible information about the topic on your page
- Making the navigation through your content and pages easy and accessible
- Making it easy for search engines to understand, index, and rank your content
Building credible content
Smaller businesses are likely to have a better understanding of their audience, as compared to larger companies. Combining this understanding with SEO and evidence-led mindset for content building, it can bring substantial marketing benefits. The content may be built through in-house resources, or by outsourcing the task to an agency, depending upon the resources and budget. The content to be created should be balanced between bringing value to the audience and commercial value to the business. The content must have –
- Tangible merit for the audience
- Layers of impact for multiple persona types
- Mixed substance to target various user preferences
- Well-promoted message that is easy to access and understand
- Data and insight closely matching your expertise and niche
- PR and media value
Becoming the expert voice in your industry
Smaller businesses are often seen to be closer to their audience, as compared to other larger enterprises. Using this to your advantage, you can identify, nurture, pivot, and share your offline ways of operating online to reap the best rewards. Getting into the details of the advantages that small businesses have over larger companies,
- Small businesses have lesser red tape and internal barriers to get access to the conversation sooner.
- Small businesses offer real opinion and opportunities for open commentary sharing.
- Small businesses have the agility to adapt to approaches, and take increased risks with data-supported trial and error.
- Small businesses have an authentic voice within the online community as compared to larger entities.
Building audience-aware, value-based support
Customers are always looking for businesses who can answer their questions, clear their doubts, and address their pain points. This makes prioritizing problem-solving (at the time when its needed the most) an important tactic if a business wants to come into the limelight. Answer every possible what, why, who, where, when, and how with your content and data. Then, identify any new terms and topic areas that your audience is seeking advice and opportunities for. This type of audience-aware content and value-based support can offer value to the business and impact its presence online. Some examples of rich content include –
- Creating a community hub that houses FAQ content
- Promoting and sharing content socially on external sites in snippets
- Consistently adding to the queries by completing competitor content gap analysis
Leveraging local SEO
You’d certainly be looking for every grain of value from the time you invest online. Local optimization can greatly help here by offering a chance to increase your return on investment. This becomes possible because local optimization can help target the local community, which means better visibility than other competing sites. You could hire an SEO company in Bangalore for the same, or include these few basic core activities –
- Creating location landing destination on the website, rich with local content
- Running location-based marketing programs and incentive schemes
- Claiming, maintaining, and sharing updates on your Google Business Profile
- Being active with local media and publications
- Being actively present in community websites and forums
- Sharing opinions and expertise on main social media channels
- Generating local reviews and testimonials
With all of the above in check, you can have better opportunities to stay ahead of the league, even against the large players in your industry!
