Here is How Small Businesses Can Compete with Giants in SEO

When it concerns Search Engine Optimization (SEO), small businesses can have a tough time competing with their established and significantly large competitors. Spending large sums of money in trying to mimic their marketing strategies blindly can prove to be disastrous, and far from productive. Small businesses need to consider how they can use their limited resources in the smartest way possible, and beat their larger competitors in the online forum. Here are a few suggestions.

Small businesses: How to compete with giants in SEO

• Focusing on a niche – A great way to compete with your competitors is to focus on a niche. While one may rationalize that specializing on a wide range of areas can help target more keywords, and thus gain more business, that may actually not work well. On the contrary, focusing on a niche business area will help you offer the best solutions for that particular service and therefore make your brand name the best in that category of service. This may offer you less number of keywords to target, but it will make you a specialist in a particular category. For example, if you’re into home improvement, rather than focusing on plumbing, cooling, heating, roofing, etc. focusing on only plumbing or cooling can make you a specialist in it and help you compete with your bigger competitors.
• Opting for long tail keywords – A common misconception among small businesses is that targeting the short, most popular keywords can help them gain the traffic that’s needed to succeed. However, the competition on these short tail keywords being immensely high, ranking on them eventually becomes tough and doesn’t get businesses much value. Instead, focusing on smaller number of long tail keywords can help small businesses rank easily and get them visibility and traffic from them faster. As a matter of fact, Google too suggests focusing on long tail keywords, rather than short ones. So essentially, the focus of small businesses should be on sacrificing more number of short keywords with less ranking potential for less number of long tail keywords with high ranking potential.
• Local SEO – Continuing with the same example as above, consider the following situation – is it better to be the best plumber in Houston or to be an okay plumber in US. Optimizing websites for local searches is a great way to beat competition, for small businesses. Targeting the local audience can help small businesses gain a stronghold in the local market, which can be tough when they’re trying to gather national-level eyeballs. This will also help small business edge out competition in at least one niche area.

These 3 ways can help small businesses beat their larger competitors in search ranking in a big way. Having established a strong foothold in the local market, businesses can then consider expanding their horizons for increased market share.

What are your suggestions for small business SEO? Share them with us in the comments below. Visit us at https://www.seotuners.com for SEO services for small businesses, and to find out how we can help you beat your competitors through our highly customized SEO services.