Mumbai Business Owners – It’s time to get serious!
5 Ways to Use SEO to Compete With Established Businesses
Online searchers have become a staple of our lives. Every company that is serious about their business, regardless of their size, has a website and a social medial page. But there’s only so much room on page 1. So, if you don’t have the multimillion dollar budget of corporate giants, how can you get your website to rank well in the search engines?
Thankfully, SEO can no longer be brute forced. Search engines are beginning to care less about the number of backlinks, age of the domain and the size of the website. New search engine algorithms focus on one thing – providing the user with the most relevant information according to their search queries. So, let’s take a look at how you can compete with the big boys if you’re starting out with SEO.
- Narrow your focus.
One of the most common mistakes small businesses make is spreading themselves too thin. They try to cover too many keywords or topics at once, and end up getting mediocre rankings for all of them. This is a waste of time and money.
If you’re looking to go up against established websites, you have to pick a niche and establish your authority within that niche. If you direct your efforts into ranking for a small number of keywords or topics, you will have a much greater chance of success.
- Look for long-tail keywords.
Long tail keywords are another way of narrowing the scope of your website. When you pick longer keywords, you give yourself a better chance of ranking for a smaller, but more specialized set of queries. In time, you can focus on slightly more generic keywords.
If you’re in the fitness market, for example, instead of targeting the phrase “lose weight”, you can target “how to lose weight after your first baby”. You’ll get more targeted traffic and increase your conversion rates.
- Target your local audience.
Local searches are gaining popularity as search engines focus on personalizing the experience for each user. For example, if you’re a real estate developer, ranking for searches in your vicinity is more important for your business than ranking for generic keywords related to your line of work.
Even if you have multiple areas of operation across the country, you should still start by focusing your SEO efforts on one area at a time. Get in touch with local market influencers and businesses. Talk to the community about the issues that are specific to their vicinity. Once you’ve gotten a good handle on the pulse of the area, you can start creating content that is specific to that particular location. Yelp reviews can also get your business a big boost in local rankings.