Online search is growing continuously and as a result search marketing is also growing. Online search has evolved a lot and has taken a special place in our lives. It will not be an exaggeration to say that today every business in the world regardless of size and industry has web presence in one way or the other and they are competing to be displayed on search engine result pages. (SERPs). Many large companies appear in top search results because they have many inbound links, content worth of decades and many customers visits them on daily basis. No matter your business there will always be one presence on web which is above you because they allocated more budget and resources.
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But the good news is that SEO is not only about volume alone neither about who has been around longest. It has changed a lot since its birth. Today, it is all about which page is most relevant to the searcher. Since, the fundamental principle of SEO has changed it is now possible for smaller business to compete with the larger business.
For small business the first advice is to master their niche. You may be thinking about covering as many areas as possible for better visibility. For example, if you deal in home improvement topics then you may think of the following keywords:
Heating
Cooling
Plumbing
Construction
Maintenance
Roofing
And many others
The strategy is simple here; you want to appear on search engines when there is any query related to those keywords.
But if you are trying to take down your biggest competitor then it is better to focus on a particular niche. Instead of focusing on large number of keywords focus on handful of them and put your rest of the effort in achieving higher visibility.
Long keywords will try to accomplish the same strategy which is mentioned above. The strategy here is to sacrifice the minimal reference for large number of topics in order to gain the maximum reference for smaller volume of topics.
Long keywords are actually extended phrases which Google looks for. For example, “buying Honda car not more than 2 years old”. Ranking higher for long keywords is much easier than ranking higher for short keywords. Long keywords bring less traffic but they can highly valuable to the small business and optimizing long keywords is relatively easy.
One other strategy which small businesses can use to step up is to maintain a strong personal factor in brand strategy. Large businesses are too busy to personalize their presence which small businesses can take care of. They can easily provide their followers with more humble and personalize experience. By maintain the follower on social media they can attract more posts, shares and likes which will help them in ranking higher in Google’s search result.
Regular and quality content publishing is at the heart of building loyalty, trust and brand awareness. For this you can either choose to post blogs on your own website or can mass distribute eBooks, webinars, videos and podcasts though many channels. Quality and consistency are two ways to build a brand through content publishing strategy.
In this competitive market there are no shortcuts to higher search engine rankings but with little consistency and strategy any one can rise to the top by overcoming all the abstacles.
