Optimization is a big deal on the web right now, and a lot of people are pushing for SEO techniques to be used in an effort to dominate their market. Not just the big companies and organizations, but the little guys – small businesses trying to dominate their local market. It’s no wonder when you consider that the web is like real estate when it comes to small business SEO. There are only so many key words to go around.
Imagine if you live in an area like Detroit, and you’re trying to sell tires. You might be targeting a phrase like “buy tires Detroit, MI”. There are probably a few other tire dealers in the Detroit area that want a piece of the optimization circuit and as time goes on the number of competition is going to grow.
Not in the sense that more businesses will pop up, but that the actual optimization competition will ignite and blossom. That competition is always there, it’s just a matter of whether or not those other companies are doing something about their presence online. If they aren’t now, they will be soon. And since only 1 website can have the number 1 spot in Google for any given keyword, that makes it pretty valuable from a real estate stand point.
Whether or not you take that number 1 spot comes down to how well you’re optimizing and marketing yourself online. Putting up a lot of spammy articles and cheap site pages laced with keywords might work for a little while, but it will serve you no good from a consumer stand point. People won’t find any value in your content and they’ll move on. What good is a first place spot in the search engine result pages when your small business SEO strategy sends people away?
You’ll gain more traction and far more leads & conversions by properly optimizing your site with good, solid content that people find informative. If your content can answer a question, solve a problem or fill a need then you’re on the right track.
Serving the customer with quality content is only a part of the equation though. You need to give your site everything you can (from a white hat small business SEO perspective of course) to make sure it gets picked up by the search engines as being relevant. Not just relevant to your niche either, but relevant to the keywords you want to rank for.
It’s good to have your keyword in the base URL for your domain, but if not that’s OK. Make sure that it’s included in page titles, in the meta description and certainly within the content. Google doesn’t put much weight on the Meta keywords tag anymore but figure that the title and description of a page are what appears in the SERPs, and that keywords listed in those get highlighted in bold – Google sees them. As long as your meta matches the actual content you’ll get a thumbs up for relevancy.
If you’ve got a blog, make sure that you’re using the keywords in placed where it counts the most. The base domain (again, if possible) the category that the blog is posted in, as well as the title of the blog post. Each blog post is a page by itself, so the URL for a blog post could potentially have up to 3 references to a targeted key phrase and its themed keywords if you’re structuring strategically.
From a small business SEO standpoint, you can quickly dominate your competition if you’re planning appropriately and posting content that not only resonates with users but also kicks the competition right to the wayside.
