When trying to establish your business online, there’s no better way to improve your ranking than to narrow your focus and localize your online marketing strategy. This means taking a niche part of your business and using it to become the focus of your internet visibility. Even if you have products or services that span a wide range of offerings, you can’t create a presence on search engines for all of them. Your biggest competitors have all the common keywords and queries locked-up.
By taking a niche approach and optimizing your small business branding to target an area that your competitors haven’t and probably won’t ever rank high for, you won’t be burning through your advertising budget.
Hone your Keyword Strategy
Choosing target niche keywords and long-tail keyword phrases over a bunch of words or categories that describe your business is akin to carving a statue out of marble to place in a town plaza over tossing a few rocks around the entrance. Visitors aren’t going to notice anything different with the latter, while the former is hard to miss.
Long-tail keywords differ from regular ones because they are tailored for people’s search behaviors and the types of questions often asked. While there will be a much lower volume of these searches, your website will be much likely to be seen and clicked, as the vast majority of web searches begin and end with the first page results. By including long-tail keywords naturally in your web content, your small business can and will outrank the big business websites often.
Get Local
Niche topics and long-tail keywords aren’t the only tools at your disposal for marketing as a small business online. Taking advantage of location keywords narrows your competition even further. Chances are even higher that local business websites won’t have as much invested in their SEO marketing. Even if you don’t have a local business location or even do business locally, you can still take advantage of search engine rankings to draw in traffic from those who find your business with local searches.
Get Active in the Community
By optimizing some of your content for community events and giving press releases, you can build up your authority ranking online. You’ll want to do this as soon as possible from the time you launch your website, as this can give you a boost from inbound links coming from higher authority and local websites. Try not to get caught in the trend of going viral online, though. It is much harder to go viral as a new business with limited resources, a sort of internet lottery so-to-speak.
Some easy examples of strong local back-linking you can do for your websites are places like Yelp, Google Local, and TripAdvisor. By diverting resources towards gaining positive reviews on these pages, you can reach the point where Yelp pages start outranking big businesses. No big ad budget is needed if you run a smart, efficient internet marketing strategy. Couple this with active social media accounts, and you’ll start seeing your visitor traffic multiply every month, if not every week.
