Can small business really compete with the fat cats with out a big budget?
-
Hello all Moz fans
I want to focus on and start getting clients locally for small to medium businesses and my ethos and vision is to help them compete with the big guys in there niche can this really be done with there small budget and if so how would you go about approaching it..?
-
I have not had clients for a long time... but if you want to get them in a small community build a small local website that achieves top rankings for some of the queries where you might obtain clients. Then you have something to point at when you call on them.
If you go see the autoglass guy, show him that you already have top rankings for "smalltown autoglass" and offer to give him an ad there.... rent him the page.... or help his website get ranked in the local map listings (if they appear for your community). In a small community a site that focuses on small service or retail business is still a viable way to do this. When you build that site and get it ranked you will get the experience and relationships needed to help your clients to success.
I would not offer to sell my services unless I already had some experience getting websites ranked in similar SERPs.
-
is smalltown auto glass one of your clients sites;) i agree i think the best option is focusing on the businesses that have a higher value of sale like dentist s and car smuchants and huilder and plumbers and cosmetics and lawyers at least if you get 1 sale it can pay for your work, but stay away from the restaurants and coffee shops and clothes stores and hairdressers would you agree? i don't have any clients at present and thinking of going door to door to local business have you tried this? just a quick hello if they are busy and dropping of a professional looking flyer? thanks for the comment
-
It's really easy for a person who knows a little about the web to get small business owners excited about tossing up a website and hauling in buckets of money on a tiny budget. Lots of the business owners think that all you need to do to make money from a website is toss something up and have somebody who knows the secrets about tweaking the code.
That might be possible for some local businesses like "smalltown auto glass" where potential competition is naive and limited to your immediate community...
However, if your potential small town client wants to expand his business by 50% selling in gift basket, digital camera, jewelry, coffee or many other niches which are highly competitive the story will be very different. Here competition is a "battle of resources" where impressive content libraries or enormous existing brand equity is needed - but does not guarantee success.
In that situation it is possible that the SEO will know exactly what to do to score high rankings but be far short of the resources needed to do it.
Even in the PPC niche, the small merchant may not have the wholesale price advantage, the shipping volume advantage, the conversion optimized website and PPC skills needed to compete with the big guns. It is awfully easy to lose a lot of money trying to win at PPC.
IMO the place where there is still hope for the small business on the web is niches like....
"smalltown auto glass" where potential competition is naive and limited to your immediate community..."
-
thank you so it is possible;) It would bring me great joy to do this for my local area and just focus on the companies in my area regarding high street stores would you stay away from them?
-
You might find this recent blog post helpful: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-shouldnt-ignore-longtail-clients
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
-
Can I add FAQS schema on my homepage?
Hello, can we have the FAQ code on the homepage (staff time)? we have written some questions and answers in the drop-down list on the homepage, and also add the schema code script to one tag of the page, but it does not work!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fbowable0 -
Linking from purchased businesses to my own
Hi All, An SEO and Google guidelines question. We've recently purchased several local businesses that have websites. Legally, we've put a disclaimer saying we've purchased those businesses, the question is whether we should link from those sites to our main site. Will this bring a manual action from Google? It's legitimate that we'd like the visitors from those websites come to our main site because those business no longer named the way they were. So, is it OK to link from these sites to ours? Will this violate Google's guidelines regarding backlinking? Should we even link and if so add the rel:nofollow tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OrendaLtd2 -
Merging two sites to one Rel Can Question
Hi All, We have 2 brands (1 main 1 product as a satellite domain) that we're merging into our main brand. When doing a 301 redirect - should we redirect everypage of the product satellite to the new site or is 1 main redirect fine? I'm Confusing ....yep. Ill do an E.G www.nike.com & www.air-jordan.com we are now shutting down www.airjordan.com and will be migrating all the content to www.nike.com/air-jordan Just of course there will be other pages like air-jordan.com/order-now . Should i do a rel can from air-jordan.com/order-now to www.nike.com/air-jordan/order-now ? Or is simply a 301 from www.airjordan.com to www.nike.com/air-jordan sufficient? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU0 -
Can multiple redirects from old URLs hurt SEO?
We have a client that had an existing site with existing rankings. We rebuilt the site using DNN 7 and created/tested 301 redirects from all the Original URLs to the new DNN URLs which are nasty and have /tabid/1234 and will not allow for dashes (-)'s We have found a DNN module that will make the DNN 7 URLs search friendly. However, that will cause us to 301 the current DNN urls to the new URLs so in fact the original will redirect to the DNN and the DNN will redirect to the rewritten SEO friendly URLs. What should we know here before proceeding?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tjkirgin0 -
What can I do to put these pages back in the top results?
Hello here, here is an interesting question for you. The following 2 webpages from our website have been ranking well on Google (usually on the 1st or 2nd page) for the past 12 years. They are among our oldest, highly relevant product pages on our site: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Eliza.html And we could always find them with the keyword "moonlight sonata sheet music" or "fur elise sheet music". Now, since the last November these pages don't show up anymore despite they are still present in the index. It is pretty hard to understand why those pages don't show up in the search results for those keywords as they used to, above all if you consider that those are among our best, most popular and unique product pages! But instead to struggle to understand why we lost presence (Panda? Some unknown sort of penalization?), has anyone any suggestions to help us to have those pages back in the top results? What do you suggest to do in such kind of cases? Any ideas and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Can I redirect duplicate blogs to give credit to one?
I have two sites that have no duplicate content (yet). One ranks better than the other but has a crappy hyphenated domain name (Domain A), and the other one is the "brand site" with a better domain name (Domain B). I'm creating a blog with technical articles and corresponding videos. I want the videos to refer to the better domain name (Domain B) because I can't see referring people to a hyphenated domain (it would sound horrible). But, the hyphenated domain has a better chance of improving it's rankings (long story why). Can I duplicate the content and just use a canonical tag on Domain B to give the credit to Domain A? If I do that, is it done on each post? Or the blog's main page? What I think would happen is any links to Domain B would pass the juice to Domain A. Is that correct? I know Canonical's are tricky and I don't want to screw this up, so I'd greatly appreciate some advice from the experienced people on here. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PhoenixDev0 -
Really, is there much difference between an unnatural links warning and Penguin?
We know that the unnatural links warnings are manual and that Penguin is algorithmic. (I'm not talking about the latest round of confusing unnatural links warnings, but the ones sent out months ago that eventually resulted in a loss of rankings for those who didn't clean their link profiles up.) Is there much difference in the recovery process for either? From what I can see, both are about unnatural/spammy linking to your site. The only difference I can see is that once you feel you've cleaned up after getting an unnatural links warning you can file a reconsideration request. But, if you've cleaned up after a Penguin hit you need to wait for the next Penguin refresh in order to see if you've recovered. Are there other differences that I am not getting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Can I add NOFOLLOW or NOINDEX attribute for better organic ranking?
I am working on online retail store which is highly dedicated to Patio Umbrellas. My website is on 2nd page of Google web search for Patio Umbrellas keyword. I have one another internal page with Patio Umbrellas text link. http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/21/patio-umbrellas.html I assume that, Google have confusion to give rank for my keyword during Patio Umbrellas keyword. I want to set NOFOLLOW attribute or NOINDEX FOLLOW meta for this page. Will it help me to rank high for Patio Umbrellas keyword. My ultimate goal is to reduce confusion for Patio Umbrellas keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0