There is no greater reality for a business regardless of whether it is big or small than its ability to get prospects to visit its website or e-commerce platform for conversions. Among the most widely used method of driving traffic to the website organically is search engine optimization or SEO as it is commonly known. It is essentially a set of techniques that makes websites more attractive to the search engines so that they boost it to the top of their page rankings when users fire queries with relevant keywords or phrases. Typically, SEO requires a lot of time and effort to implement but also a lot of money, which gives a big advantage to businesses with deep pockets. However, with the right tactics, even small businesses can compete with their much larger competitors even without spending more than them. Let us find out how.
Use Speed to Your Advantage
Most people agree that big companies can get things, including SEO, done better because they have more firepower in the form of spending ability. However, what most people also dont appreciate that to get the same results; big companies typically spend far more than small businesses. This is because large companies have numerous layers of management and far too many employees to allow the business to be agile and move fast. When everything moves slowly, most managements try to speed up things by spending more money, however that does not necessarily work most of the time. When your competitors move sluggishly, it is of great advantage to a small business because you can get things done faster and at far less cost.
Leverage the Power of Contributors
In its essence, SEO Sydney comprises of quality content, SEO-friendly code, outstanding user experience and the magnet power of authority backlinks. All of these come together to boost page rankings! While Google is said to consider over 200 ranking factors in its algorithm, it is these few factors that have the most weight. The assumption that most people make that you need to spend good money to publish quality content or to build links is, however, not necessarily true. Many online businesses have used the power of strategic partnerships with content authors to publish high-quality content that will make your traffic go through the roof. You can either seek out people who can author outstanding content by paying them or get them to contribute the content for free for the pleasure of it or to get some inexpensive freebies. When you are starting, this can be somewhat difficult, however, as you build up an online presence in channels that matter, including social media, your brand awareness will grow and people will be more willing to respond to your invitations to contribute useful content.
Quick Wins That Fall under the Radar of Most Big Businesses
Some smart SEO tactics can give you very good results very quickly. Though these quick wins are nothing new, very strangely most SEO practitioners simply seem to ignore them. What is also advantageous for you is that invariably the big companies also dont focus on them leaving you to rack up a lead over them without much effort.
Focus on your top-performing web pages: Even though most people believe that the volume of website traffic is linked to the amount of content created, nothing could be further from the truth. Content marketing has undergone a paradigm shift because of the huge volumes of content being published today giving Google the luxury of choice of deciding the content to rank and the content it can leave out. If you look at the analytics, it is quite likely that the top 10 pages of your site will be contributing over 40% of the traffic or even more, so it makes sense to try to boost the volume of traffic to those pages instead of spending time to write new content. By tweaking your SEO, you will easily be able to boost the traffic to those pages.
Optimize for revenue, not website traffic: Because most people assume sales revenues to be directly proportional to the volume of website traffic, they end up focusing their SEO efforts only on generating traffic. Unfortunately, even as the volume of traffic grows exponentially, the revenue growth does not keep pace. While SEO can make your site rank higher, there is little point if the revenues do not increase. To get the best results, you should identify the pages that yield the maximum revenues and optimize them so that they rank better on Google. An easy way of doing is setting up the goal tracking feature in Google Analytics. According to http://www.canirank.com, it is more productive to pursue keywords that offer a more realistic chance of success than highly competitive keywords.
Focus on boosting CTR not page rankings: Google tracks the number of visitors that a website has and uses the data to decide the page ranking. Therefore, it is more important to increase the number of click-through than continually attempt to boost your ranking. A neat way of encouraging more people to click on your link on the search page is to optimize the title tag as well as the Meta description.
Refresh existing content: Page rankings continually change not because Google imposes penalties but more because Google keeps on trying to deliver what it thinks to be the most relevant and up-to-date information to its users. It is usually due to competitive pressure that your ranking drops; other sites are continually posting new content that may be better than yours so they tend to rank higher. The best way of fixing this is to publish new content and also update your existing content so that Google can discover more value in them.
Conclusion
More than the restrictions imposed by your budget, the main reason why you are not being able to beat your competition is the limitation of your strategic imagination. If you can change your mind-set about what SEO can or cannot do, you can very easily shoot to the top of the page rankings without having to invest much money at all.
