As a small business competing in a crowded market, getting that extra marketing edge could mean a lot. The internet is your friend when it comes to marketing your products and services to segmented markets, and with over 60% of traffic coming from search engines, SEO is definitely the internet marketing instrument to use. If you are just getting started with SEO, here are a few things you can do to jumpstart your campaign.
The Contents That Work
A lot of SEO experts will advise you to produce more contents for your site in order to attract more traffic, but this doesn’t have to be the only way to go. If you already have popular articles generating a lot of search engine traffic, optimizing them – and of course updating them to meet the current needs – is also a good idea.
New contents are great for keeping your site up to date. In fact, they are necessary to keep your site’s overall SEO performance high. Search engines will mark sites that don’t get updated regularly down, so be sure to add new articles and other contents to the site.
However, adding new content frequently is not the same as adding them regularly. On top of that, optimizing the articles that are already bringing in a lot of inbound search traffic is also far more effective. The key is to find balance between these two elements.
Going Local with Business Pages
I can’t stress enough how important it is to do local search engine optimization in today’s market. Instead of competing with other companies across the globe, you can focus on a very specific market segment and potential customers near you by doing local SEO. The first thing to do when you want to target these local market segments? Set up business pages for your brand.
Google, Bing, Yahoo and a lot of other websites now allow business owners to set up their own business pages. You can add your address and other details to these business pages, along with a link to your website and social media profiles. These business pages bring a lot of benefits SEO-wise.
For starters, having an address listed will help your site rank higher when the search is done by a user near you. When users in Toronto – or other cities you are based in – search for a home improvement contractor, for instance, your site (and your business) will be prioritized by search engines. As a result, you can appear on the first page, if not the top, of search results more often, increasing the amount of search engine traffic your site can gain substantially.
Last but certainly not least, make sure you also add local details into elements of your site. Adding the name of the city you are based in to the title of the page, the description and important tags such as H1 and H2 could really boost the site’s SEO performance quite substantially. You can also add your full address to the footer of the site so that it appears on every page.
