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 Google Bot View Links on a Wix Page?
Hi, The way Wix is configured you can't see any of the on-page links within the source code. Does anyone know if Google Bots still count the links on this page? Here is the page in question: https://www.ncresourcecenter.org/business-directory If you do think Google counts these links, can you please send me URL fetcher to prove that the links are crawlable? Thank you SO much for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fiyyazp0 -
Local business with two separate websites...what to do?
Hey Mozzers! I have a client that I'm helping with some online ad campaigns for lead generation, but they recently had an SEO issue pop up I'm looking into for them. For whatever reason, they have 2 websites. Those are: http://www.healthsourceofroyalpalmbeach.com/ (newer site) http://www.healthsourcedecompression.com/ (older site) Their local listing is connected to the older site (above) and that's where they have all of their reviews. I know the BEST solution is probably to nix one of the sites and setup proper redirects, but how can they keep BOTH sites without damaging their SEO efforts? Currently, BOTH sites rank on page one for their primary kw target "chiropractors royal palm beach fl" Appreciate the help! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Can I have my blog on http and the rest of the site on https?
I have an ecommerce site that is on https. We have a Wordpress blog for blogging, but we also have our help section located on it. I used a plugin to switch the blog to https but now have a few problems. 1. My sitemap generator still shows the blog as http and Google gives me a warning for the redirect. 2. When trying to use the Moz page grader I was told that I was in a redirect loop. 3. The pages do not seem to be getting indexed. It is a blog so there is never any information exchanged that is private. Would I be ok with just switching it to http? Or would Google see that as two different sites even though they have the same domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Can I add Title/Description tags to site map
I have started working on a website that it written in JAVA. It has 26 URL's But because of the way it is written it is all shown on the home page code and does not have the ability to add unique title and description tags. Is there a work around for SEO on websites like this aside from adding content? I was wondering if there is a way to submit a sitemat with title and description tags. Any advice? Chris.K
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CKerr0 -
Brand in Title Tag - a Ranking Factor for Scaling Big Websites?
I'm in the middle of redesigning title tags on a large ecommerce site - approximately 9000 product pages. The old structure was -(product name/description) | (Website/Brand) So an example would be - Big League Chew - 13 oz. | Target - With 'Target' Being the site's brand and appearing on each. With Google's new Title Tag display, our title tags are too long now. Unfortunately, our Brand/Website is HUGE - over 18 characters. My question is two fold - 1. Is it OK to remove brand from the title tags of some particularly long names? Will this impact ranking? 2. Does Google look for brand in these title tags, and more specifically: brand consistency in title tags? I'd love to cut the brand out of some as the product name is the biggest click-through element by far - but I don't want to affect rankings. My 'gut' says that I should focus on clickthrough rate with title tags and cut brand where necessary. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blenny0 -
Been away for a while is SEO really dead ? I don't think so...
I have been struggling with the google updates but recently we started a new project and by using guest blog posts we were able to achieve a top 3 ranking. It delivered traffic and sales so SEO still works. This is my understanding of the current situation - 1. Generic Keywords (forget it) 2. Go niche and long tail (but thats been the case for a while right) 3. Using related searches 4. Incoming links using brands and a wider range of phrases and urls. 5. Content thats sharable 6. Google plus buttons etc This is my current understanding I would love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Can URLs blocked with robots.txt hurt your site?
We have about 20 testing environments blocked by robots.txt, and these environments contain duplicates of our indexed content. These environments are all blocked by robots.txt, and appearing in google's index as blocked by robots.txt--can they still count against us or hurt us? I know the best practice to permanently remove these would be to use the noindex tag, but I'm wondering if we leave them they way they are if they can still hurt us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How 'Off Topic' can I go - site wide?
Hello, I am currently number 1 for a competitive keyword - so don't want to push the wrong button and self destruct! My site is highly focused on one relatively narrow niche with about 50-60 pages of content bang on topic. I was wondering if Google will discredit my site in any way if I start adding pages that are** 'loosely related' **to the overall theme of my niche. Some of them are what you might call sister concepts with maybe one mention of my target keyword in the body..... Does the algo value what percentage of the whole site's content is on/ off topic? If so how important is this as a factor? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | philipjterry0