As a small business owner, it’s tough facing competition as fierce as the big corporations who have deep pockets helping them keep their strong influence in your market. Both online and offline.
You have the quality products and great service, and you know many customers can benefit from you more than the other companies they keep going to. ..So naturally you start thinking of more effective ways of reaching them.
And enhancing your websites SEO comes to mind. Problem is, since you’re mostly investing in your growth right now, you don’t have a big budget for marketing.
Well if you’re a small business owner and this sounds like you, then the tips below can help you get more of those customers you deserve – regardless of how big your competitors are.
But first you’ve got to know the most powerful weapon you can have in your arsenal. . .
Personalization
One main philosophy you can adopt to all your online marketing goals to beat the bigger companies is personalization.
Why?
Because this is the biggest weakness huge companies have as a natural consequence of their size. The bigger they get the less individual attention they can give to each customer.
And remember, customers are people i.e. social creatures; our ancestors grew up in tight-knit communities with lots of personal contact and our brains are still wired for this.
So keep personalization in mind as we go through the following steps:
- Hands on SEO
Before anything else you must first get your website architecture right. All your competitors are doing this already so you don’t want to be left behind by neglecting this.
You do this by
- Ensuring you have a simple, easy-to-navigate website
- Optimizing your the URL’s of your web pages to have hyphens (-) separating the words; and
- Editing the page titles, descriptions, headings, and content of your articles with matching keywords to give the search engines a more accurate picture of what your pages are about. Make sure that your keyword-to-content ratio doesn’t exceed 2-3% of your total word count. You don’t want to be stuffing the page. That doesn’t work anymore and you could be tempting the search engine “gods” to hit you with an algorithmic penalty.
Doing this will help you with the next step of leveraging your content.
- Boost Your Local SEO Rank and Become a Local Authority
With the foundations set in place, you can create a blog page to write about solutions and ideas relevant to your target audience – but instead of it being any random content; you can gear it towards what’s happening locally.
Why? Because we’re leveraging personalization.
Between a website with posts on something broad and national and something closer to home, which do you think will grab your audience’s attention? The latter of course.
Some further action you can take is going to industry events. You’ll have fresh ideas to blog about and, if you also get to speak at them you’ll have links to big websites which interested prospects can visit you through.
Doing this consistently gives you a double benefit: you become an industry expert and Google boosts your ranking for local searches.
- Use Social Media and Get Busy Locally
Most people forget that the main aim of search engines is to give people the most relevant results to their searches. There are many variables to this, and one of the main ones is social media:
This is where you can get more ‘touch points’ with your audience and spread your blog posts while interacting with them through multiple social media channels by replying to their comments. Be sure to choose the few that your audience uses to avoid spreading yourself thin.
In Closing
There are numerous other steps to online marketing, but if your aim is to get started right away, you can use these ideas to get going and have those targeted customers marching to your website in a very short time.
Business & Finance Articles on Business 2 Community(9)
