All businesses should be looking to cut whatever costs possible and for many businesses, the SEO budget is the first place to take the hit. Whilst the effects of a great SEO strategy can often be misattributed to other things, it soon becomes clear what a great job the SEO was doing when the people making it happen are taken away. The good news is that a lot of SEO strategy is easy to learn yourself and if you’re marketing a small business then as long as you’re willing to put the hours in, you should see positive results. We’ll talk you through some of the SEO strategies that you can do entirely by yourself, leaving you with more budget to put towards other business endeavours.
Where Are You?
If you have a physical location, then the chances are you should be making the most of this. Being location specific is one of the simplest ways that you can cut through the noise of a busy marketplace. For this example, we’ll look at the betting market, a sector that is hugely saturated. Whilst many are trying to climb to the very top of the search results for sports betting and spending a fortune in the process, the clever competitors are aiming to be the biggest fish in the smaller pond. For example, instead of centring your SEO on ‘best betting site’ these companies have instead focused on being the best betting sites in Malaysia. As such, they’ve been picked up by a huge company called Sports Betting Online and will be able to reap the rewards of appearing on their site. They’ll not only be reviewed by experts for factors like the bonuses available, their payment methods and their customer service, but they’ll also reach whole new markets thanks to appearing on that site. Not to mention all of those clicks will strengthen their claim to actually being the most popular site in Malaysia, an incredible goal, but more easily achieved than being the most popular site in the world. Think of how you can apply this to your business. You might want to be the number one provider in your town or city, rather than your country. Tailor this tip to your own needs!
Narrow it Down
The location tip that we just covered is actually part of a bigger idea, but it will be easier to cover now that you’ve understood the basics. The reason that including your location is important is because it is a differentiator, but it isn’t the only one. You’ll probably have heard the phrase ‘long tail’ when referring to keywords or anchors. So, in the case of your personal training business, ‘personal trainer’ would be your short-tail keyword and ‘Ohio’ might be your long-tail keyword. Ohio is the thing that differentiates you and helps people in your area find you. Another differentiator, or long-tail keyword, in the personal trainer example, could be ‘weight lifting’ or ‘for over 50s’. These long tails are all the sorts of things that your client might type in when looking for you. So, make sure they appear in your URLs, slugs, tags and also backlinks. We’ll come onto these next.
Link, Link, Link
You’ll have to get your writing hat on for this one, but once it takes off you’ll see big results One of the hurdles that startups face is struggling to get enough backlinks to their site. When you’re paying a company to sort your SEO strategy for you, then they will already have a huge bank of websites that are willing to add backlinks for them and that catalogue will only be growing. As a startup, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll have the same access to sites that are willing to include links for you and that’s one of the places your SEO strategy can start to fall down. Links are super important as if your site is linked to in an informative manner from a well-ranked site, your own ranking will be boosted. A great way to get some backlinks of your own is to start guest blogging. You can approach blogs that are in a similar field to your business and ask if you could write something for them, explaining that you’ll be including a non-spammy, high quality link to your own site within your work. You’ll have to put a little time into researching and writing a blog post, but once you’ve collected a few dozen links, your site will start to climb the rankings, people will notice you and might even start linking to your company in their own work. This will create more backlinks for you, so keep up the work.
