Competiting In the Small Business SEO Market
-
I deal with primarily small businesses in the construction and maintenance industries and I'm looking for some advice. Traditionally in these categories you find absolutely awful websites with the below attributes, all ranking 1-5 in the SERPs.
- Weak/Limited content
- No blog
- Awful title tags
- Minimal backlinks
- Poor on-site optimization
- Ect.
In most cases I am going to assume that these sites have been indexed for the last ten years, and that is why they are retaining such high rankings. My issue is trying to compete with them!
So far I have worked to have my client's website submitted to and accepted by all of their competitor's backlinking site (which didn't take as long as you might think). I've also listed my client in several of the top paying and free directories (dmoz, joe ant, ect.) and still I see limited results. Lastly and most annoyingly my clients website, according to SEOmoz is currently leading the domain authority race in every category.
Does anyone have a suggestion as to what is going on.
-
Depending on the type of listing, well optimised Places listings could help significantly, particularly if you can get your client to work with their clients to post reviews on the listings.
In almost all cases where we've actively engaged the client, more reviews and high rated reviews helps us easily outrank competitors - a single review where there was none before often gets our Places listing on the first page of serps for some of our target keywords.
-
Try these tips too:
-Ask for video testimonials from your client's customers
-Add industry trends, studies and analysis and make sure you email a relevant group of people letting them know that you have this study in place.
-Build twitter/facebook streams and invite your client's customers.
-Do some tight PPC based on exact matches and pin pointed geographical targeting. That will tell you what opprtunities you maybe missing
-
Do some more keyword research and also ask your friends for search suggestions by building user scenarios. Explain your client's product/service to them and get from them what they might be typing on Google/search engines. Do a research on whether your same set of competitors appear on that set and its related set of keywords or not.
-
Update your client's user base with newsletters which are actually useful to them.
-
-
Hi Saibose,
Thanks for your response! I thought I'd give you some more information as to what has worked and what hasn't.
- So far I've submitted to every niche directory that is available which quickly increased my websites domain authority (As I metioned in my last post it has given me the top domain authority vs my 5 main competitors)
- I've also submitted to my list of the top 10 Canadian directories, hotfrog is included in the mix.
- I've commented on industry specific blogs, although they tend to be few and far between. Also, all of them thus far have been nofollow.
- I've created a blog page, writing content with keyword rich title tags. This has been extremely effective for generating postitive search engine results.
- I've also personally emailed some of the authority websites in my clients industry which hasn't had much success.
I plan on writing a case study on this in the near future as I think it's an excellent example of feeding on the scraps.
Anyway thanks again for commenting, if you have anymore feedback I'm all ears.
-
If you are competing in the local space, you might consider enrolling into local directories, Google places and ask people to write reviews on them. Company directories like hotfrog could be beneficial to you as well.
Sadly, domain age is still a factor in ranking and age old websites tend to rank better due to ranking history in Google.
Construction agencies have mocks, build ups and all kinds of work models which they can showcase. That is something you can identify and do well on.
Also, construction niche is a very less explored niche where you do not find local blogs catering specifically to that niche. It would be a good idea to start a blog giving advice, tips and all.
At the end of the day its all about engagement and I am sure that one day, you will be able to make it through to the top.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
SEO traffic to the homepage is down across sites
Week over week, I've noticed that organic traffic (and oftentimes revenue) for the homepage are down across most of our sites compared to last year. Brand search interest is down for a number of the brands, but in a lot of these cases, it's not down so much that it would make sense for how much the homepage is down (for example: brand search interest was down 4% last week compared to last year, but the homepage traffic was down 32% in visits). What I've done is generate entry page reports (this year vs. last year) and then bucket the pages by homepage, category pages, and product pages. In most cases, category pages are up year over year for traffic and revenue. I'm concerned that the homepage being down is more than a brand heat issue, but I haven't come across anything out of the ordinary in Google Search Console and keywords are pretty consistent in performance for the most part. Branded keywords continue to rank at #1, too. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into?
Technical SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Youtube SEO Best Practices
Does anyone know where to find a list of SEO best practices for Youtube? Specifically...does anyone have thoughts on the SEO benefits of an @domain.com login vs @gmail.com login? Or is adding my url to the "Associated website" channel setting sufficient for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | brianvest0 -
SEO Redirect
If we have several hundred domain names currently using a park page, would we be better served having them redirect to our corporate homepage for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | mkessler0 -
Using RewriteRule - SEO Implications
Hi There, My client has a website (www.activeadventures.com) which they relaunched in April 2013. The company sells inbound tourism trips to New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. Previously, the websites for these destinations were on their own domains (activenewzealand.com, activehimalayas.com, activesouthamerica.com). With the launch of the new website those domains were all retired (but had 301 redirects put into place to the new site), and moved into sub directories of the activeadventures.com domain (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand). There has been no indication that this strategy has improved organic search results (based on analytics) and in my opinion I believe that having this structure has been detrimental to their results. My opinion is based off the following: Visitors to the websites are coming into the site with a specific destination in mind that they want to travel to. Thus... having the destination in the URL I believe provides more immediate relevancy and should result in a higher CTR. I also feel that having the sites on their own URL's will provide a more concentrated theme for the destination based search phrases. The new site is a custom Joomla build and I want to find the easiest way to keep the current Joomla set up AND move the country specific sections of the site back onto their original URL's. It seems on the face of it that the easiest way to get this done is to use the htaccess file and use "RewriteRule" to push all the relevant pages back onto their original domains. Obviously we will ensure we also cover off pointing the existing 301's from the new site and the old sites to this new structure. My question is, are their any potential negative SEO implications of using the RewriteRule in the htaccess file to achieve this? Many thanks in advance. Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | activenz
Conrad Cranfield0 -
Does Switching Web Hosts Hurt SEO?
A few months ago, my site was shut down by BlueHost because of performance issues, so I moved it to WP Engine, and cleaned up most of the plug-ins. Since then, my search engine traffic has decreased over 50%. Does switching web hosts hurt SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JodiFTM0 -
Managed DNS potential SEO problems
Hi All, We have a multinational client that would like servers in different country's with localised language.The DNS will determine what server in which country to serve from Is there any SEO implications based on content duplication? Thanks Chris Byrnes
Technical SEO | | SEOBrisbane900 -
SEO with duplicate content for 3 geographies
The client would like us to do seo for these 3 sites http://www.cablecalc.com/ http://www.solutionselectrical.com.au http://www.calculatecablesizes.co.uk/ The sites have to targetted in US, Australia, and UK resoectively .All the above sites have identical content. Will Google penalise the sites ? Shall we change the content completly ? How do we approach this issue ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Help with SEO
Hello, I am brand new to SEO and I'm learning on the go everyday. I am having issues with Google and getting any sort of ranking or analysis or even just traffic reports. I understand the site has never really been optimized so it might really not have any reports. So basically my real question is what helpful tricks or hints do you guys have that I can implement? Anything and everything helps. So far I have run the crawl diagnostics and I'm working on fixing the errors. Thanks fr your help.
Technical SEO | | Future130