Competiting In the Small Business SEO Market

[calin_daniel]

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.

[Brendo]

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.

[saibose]

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.

[calin_daniel]

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.

[saibose]

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.