SEO and What You Need to Know
In this digital age, every business has an online presence and competes with each other for top positions on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Big brands who have more budgets and resources seem to be dominating the game. How can a small business with limited experience and resources survive and thrive?
Thankfully, search engine optimization (SEO) is not all about size. Search engines use their algorithms to bring searchers the most relevant results. Therefore, as a small business, you can implement several smart strategies to get an edge over bigger competitors and gain organic traffic and leads.
Why is SEO leveling the game?
Search engine optimization (SEO) has an important role in businesses. Your wonderful business means nothing if your target customers cannot find you when they enter some related keywords on Google search bar. With proper SEO strategies, your amazing products and services become visible. By implementing smart SEO tactics, you can drive massive traffic to your website and convert potential prospects into real customers.
These days, giant corporations spend millions of dollars each year on promoting their brands and products. Rapid rising in advertising costs is preventing your growing business from keeping up with big competitors.
Rather than search engine marketing (SEM) or other paid channels, SEO seems to be the most appropriate way for you to compete with big players. Although you have to invest much time and effort into it, you can gain long-term results.
Big names can throw money to buy a lot of exposure on Google, Bing, and search engines. However, people still love organic results. 70-80% of users ignore paid results and focus on organic ones.
Big firms may own higher authority domains and more mentions in the press; then, they can get more top ranks for competitive keywords. But they cannot cover all niches. There are spaces where small companies like yours can stand out.
How to compete against big brands using SEO
Specialize in your niche
There is a common misconception that many small businesses run into is to try to target as many keywords as possible. However, regardless of the industry that you are operating in, you have to fight at least one giant. And larger companies are likely to have covered most general keywords.
Even though your business is offering a wide range of products and services, you should never target all key relevant phrases. You have to determine and specialize in some narrow niches. Put all effort into focusing them, and you can drive much higher online visibility and break through the eCommerce space. By contrast, if you cover too many areas, you are likely to achieve nothing.
Target long-tail keywords
Instead of trying in vain to compete against big brands on high search volume keywords, you should focus on longer, more highly specific search phrases. Targeting long-tail keywords allows you to get higher visibility and a greater possibility of converting.
You have to determine specific aspects of your business, such as your unique selling points, locations, or special offerings. Then you need to identify search terms that big competitors are unable or unwilling to target, but your potential customers are likely to use them.
To optimize the long-tail keywords strategy, you should publish high-quality original content in which longer phrases can appear naturally and design pages that specifically support long-tail keywords with significant conversion elements.
Provide more value with content
In its early ages, SEO used to be about stuffing keywords and accruing plenty of backlinks to manipulate search results. No longer are these techniques useful. Comprehensive algorithms have been added and updated. Meanwhile, high-quality content is still the king.
Google rewards sites that publish the most valuable, informative, and original content. A bright and efficient content strategy that emphasizes quality and consistency gives you an advantage over other big competitors.
High-quality content educates and entertains your target audience, provides them more value and encourages them to share it on social platforms. To produce high-quality content, you have to carry out research and analysis to understand your customer insights first.
Optimize technical opportunities
Besides focusing on keywords and content, you have to pay close attention to technical aspects. Any technical problems exert negative effects on your rankings and traffic.
Your website performance must be optimized by improving loading speed, avoiding duplicate content and broken links, removing improper canonical link elements or adding alt tags to images, etc. It is a waste of time and effort on content optimization if search engines cannot crawl and index your web pages properly.
Catching up with current trends such as Voice Searches, Mobile User Experience, Featured Snippets, etc., and utilizing advanced SEO tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster to make use of any opportunities.
Become a reliable brand an authoritative content publisher
As a small business, you create your own content to share your own knowledge and expertise and bring valuable insights to your target audience. You can utilize an on-site blog, ebooks, videos, podcasts, webinars, to distribute content. Use your unique strengths to become recognized as a reliable brand and an authoritative content creator.
Besides, on a smaller scale, you can gain benefits by collaborating with other growing companies. Collaboration can be in the form of guest blogging, linking to useful external content.
Frequent and high-quality content can effectively raise brand awareness, generate love, trust, and perfect customer loyalty. While large organizations spend a vast amount of money and resources, executing big marketing campaigns, growing businesses can leverage content to present brands’ unique traits and add more value to the brands in the long-run.
Final thoughts
Running a small business, you have to be proactive in the competition with more prominent brands. A well-planned SEO strategy can help you gain a competitive advantage and grow your business eventually.
Jasmine Nguyen is a content creator at Avada Commerce. Having experienced in SEO and Marketing, she loves to share about eCommerce solutions that help small businesses thrive in this competitive market.
SEO stock photo by Drozd Irina/Shutterstock
