How can a small business compete with a larger business?
-
I work for a web and graphic design company. We're not a huge shop but we do fairly well. We're starting to dig into SEO, especially for ourselves. Our biggest problem is our backlinks and competition. We need to be able to rank for keywords like "web design boston" and "graphic design boston". Yet our competition has those locked down and only because of their backlinks. Normally I would say well okay lets look at what they're doing and do it better. The problem is most of their backlinks come from their clients websites that they themselves have designed and put a link on the footer of each page. We do that too but because we're smaller we don't have anywhere near as many clients as they do.
I know I can try and rank for more "niche" keywords. But I want to know in all honesty what my options are for these same keywords. What realistic methods can I use to achieve the same kind of rankings they are?
-
How much of webdesigners business is from people seeing them linked on a website they made I don’t know. If you know then you might be able to decide if my following advice is useful.
Find a website with poor design that has been around since the internet was born, has good backlinks, a load of traffic, and offer to make them a website free of charge and get yourself on their footer.
Maybe a silly idea, if I missed something I wouldn’t know. One site like this I am looking at with really amateur design has 96,724 per month SE traffic for google US according to SEM rush. Often sites like this use ads to make a bit of money, so that might make them more likely to say “yes” if it increases direct and referral traffic, and ad revenue.
-
Sitewide footer links are not valued that highly by Google, so your competitor may not be as strong as you think. If you can get links within the content of a post or the about pages of your clients, that may carry more weight than a sitewide footer.
If you are looking for link building ideas, here is a good list:
http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
Link building isn't about money, although money can help. It's about being creative, standing out from the crowd, and doing the outreach necessary to get people to link to you.
-
Hey Steve
You state that your biggest problem is backlinks but that probably is not what you want here. Search results are becoming ever more localised so if you are based in Boston and target Boston customers you will be able to gain more visibility by focusing on local SEO strategies and the GetListed.org site is as good a place as any to start.
I am in the UK but we are seeing more and more 7 packs of local results above the organic results for localised search queries and for specific service based queries (plumber, web design) where the user is in the location they are looking for.
If we search for graphic design boston or web design boston I am seeing some localised results and yelp listings but if I search for "graphic design in boston" and "web design in boston" then there are even more so.
This is what i would do.
1. Survey the landscape - search for your key terms: web design, website designer, graphic design, graphic designer + then localise them and then localise them including 'in'. Look for localised results in the organic listings and look for results pulled from Google maps. Make yourself a little spreadsheet and keep note of localised results and 7 packs.
2. Ensure your pages targeting graphic design and web design are localised and have the location you are targeting in the page title.
Graphic Design Company in Boston - YourBrand.com
Web Design Company in Boston - YourBrand.com3. Look at Local SEO and make sure you have that sown up.
- Ensure your name, address and phone number is standardised (NAP)
- Optimise your site and use schema markup on the contact page
- Add your NAP to the footer of every page
- Start looking at building high quality citations
- Optimise your Google+ Local listing (fill it in)
- Start building reviews and create a review policy
- Try to build co occurrence of your keywords in your citations
- Get creative with your citations and make sure the big social platforms are utilised (get your address in your Facebook about us section, get your city, postcode and phone number in your twitter bio etc).
- Try to build some local links from important Boston sites and directories
- Look at industry vertical directories
- review top competitor citations and get them yourself
There is plenty of info out there about Local SEO and https://getlisted.org/ is a good starting point. In my experience, most companies that do link building are lazy when it comes to local so the door really is wide open. You need a policy to build reviews and gradually add citations but there are plenty of
Some good tools
Some More Reading
- http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/name-address-phone-number/
- http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/quality-not-quantity-citations-for-seo/
- http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/find-your-competitors-best-citations/
Steve - I did some quick searches and most of the top 7 from the local results have no Google+ reviews which is likely a good sign that this is not mega competative and with a bit of work you can easily compete. This is real small business SEO that we do every day at BowlerHat.co.uk for UK folks and there is some serious David and Goliath fun to be had here.
Hope this helps!
Marcus -
You can actually use the competitor ranking to your advantage. By forcing you to focus on more long tail keywords further down the purchase cycle, you can actually end up generating better leads than focusing on those broad keywords such as "web design boston." Find the niche you can fit into and exploit it.
-
Have you tried any paid search traffic? That could have you ranking #1 by the end of the day. If you know of some niche keywords you think would work well for you, you might try some paid search out first and see if the traffic converts well before embarking on an SEO campaign to rank for those terms.
-
Most of those backlinks are probably not that valuable (especially if they are not contextual relevant and/or non-authoritative).
The bests solution is to create unique, compelling and valuable content for you visitors and to use as link-bait. Do your keyword research and focus on kw/topics that will give you an opportunity for rankings They obviously have a start on you, so it's going to be difficult.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can Google bypass an AJAX link?
On my company's events calendar page when you click an event, it populates and overlay using AJAX, and then the link that is populated in that overlay then takes you to the actual events page. I see this as a problem with Google because it can't follow the AJAX link to the true event page, so right now nothing on those pages is getting indexed and we can't utilize our schema to get events to populate in the Google rich snippets or the knowledge graph. Possible solutions I considered: 1. Remove the AJAX overlay and allow the link from the events calendar to go directly to the individual event. 2. Leave the AJAX overlay and try to get the individual event pages directly indexed in Google. Thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Nothing I Know About SEO can Explain these Rankings?
Hi all, I have a client who wants to rank more prominently for "plastic surgeon jupiter fl", a key term in his niche that attracts 11-50 searches per month (but these are potentially big ticket clients). If you look at the first page of results for that term, I can't make any sense of them. I've checked page speed, Google listing optimization, on-page SEO, link metrics etc. and there seems to be no correlation with good on-page SEO, quality links (or volume of links). Any thoughts?? I literally cannot explain why the #1 site shows 2 inbound links via Moz OSE and almost no on-page SEO to speak of while sites ranking page 2 have better on-page SEO, more links, higher quality links (from what I can tell) etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
OK to have multiple local business structured data on one website?
Hello there, I'm working on implementing local business structured data for a website but we have multiple offices. Is it okay from a Google perspective to add different local business data on different pages of the website, or can I only use one set of local business data site wide? Many thanks, Gill.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cannetastic0 -
Can I have multiple 301's when switching to https version
Hello, our programmer recently updated our http version website to https. Does it matter if we have TWO 301 redirects? Here is an example: http://www.colocationamerica.com/dedicated_servers/linux-dedicated.htm 301 https://www.colocationamerica.com/dedicated_servers/linux-dedicated.htm 301 https://www.colocationamerica.com/linux-dedicated-server We're getting pulled in two different directions. I read https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo and don't know if 2 301's suffice. Please let me know. Greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
How can I target more similar keywords in the most effective way?
Hello Community In my niche there are many keywords that are similar and Im not sure how to go about targeting them. Quick example: buy domain name register domain name register domain and hosting For these 3 keywords I have 1 article that ranks first for the first keyword and 5 and 8 for the other two. If I want to have higher chances of landing a first position for the other 2 keywords, should I write an article for each of them? A specific piece of content designed around each single keyword? My niche is in Italy so don't bother checking on Google 🙂 Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_IT0 -
Can videos be considered duplicate content?
I have a page that ranks 5 and to get a rich snippet I'm thinking of adding a relevant video to the page. Thing is, the video is already on another page which ranks for this keyword... but only at position 20. As it happens the page the video is on is the more important page for other keywords, so I won't remove it. Will having the same video on two pages be considered a duplicate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
Googlebot Can't Access My Sites After I Repair My Robots File
Hello Mozzers, A colleague and I have been collectively managing about 12 brands for the past several months and we have recently received a number of messages in the sites' webmaster tools instructing us that 'Googlebot was not able to access our site due to some errors with our robots.txt file' My colleague and I, in turn, created new robots.txt files with the intention of preventing the spider from crawling our 'cgi-bin' directory as follows: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ After creating the robots and manually re-submitting it in Webmaster Tools (and receiving the green checkbox), I received the same message about Googlebot not being able to access the site, only difference being that this time it was for a different site that I manage. I repeated the process and everything, aesthetically looked correct, however, I continued receiving these messages for each of the other sites I manage on a daily-basis for roughly a 10-day period. Do any of you know why I may be receiving this error? is it not possible for me to block the Googlebot from crawling the 'cgi-bin'? Any and all advice/insight is very much welcome, I hope I'm being descriptive enough!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith1 -
Can you spot the reasons for our site dropping in rankings so significantly?
We've been racking our brains over this since the recent search engine changes (the notorious and non-cuddley Google Panda update) and have, within reason, corrected as many of the problems that we possibly can yet still our traffic drops further. http://www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com used to rank fairly equally with it's competitors however since the update (and a number of suggestions from another SEO company), the traffic has dropped by about 90% and it's dropped almost completely from the search results (unlike the competitors who are breaking many faux-pars yet remain well ranked). I don't think we're seeing the wood from the trees anymore so I'd be grateful if someone could take a look and see if we've missed anything glaringly obvious? Any thoughts welcome. Thanks Tim Big changes around the same time/since that might be worth noting: Setup a canonical domain name of www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com and (using IIS7) 301 redirect all other traffic over. Setup canonical URL meta tag for all results pages so they point to a single page Moved the redirect page (the one which sends users to the B&B's site) to another subdomain. Redesigned the URLs where possible to use "friendlier" and more keyword rich urls and 301 redirecting for the old urls Added XML sitemaps to the various tools (we found out they weren't there before) Added a robots.txt file Lowercased all urls Where possible removed duplicate results pages and pointed them at a single page Restructured the page titles to be more relevant Setup nofollow on the external urls
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimGaunt0