Scaling Business Operation n SEO as an Entrepreneur
-
Hi! I'm a 1 man business operating in Singapore doing Delivery Service for Business. Right now my website is ranking at the 3rd page of google, www.vantagedelivery.com
The keywords that i'm looking to rank are delivery service, delivery service singapore.Being alone in the business, i struggle in doing the SEO aspect of the website on a consistent basis. Therefore i'm looking for a scale-able way for me to do SEO in my free-time, perhaps 2 hours a day?
Any recommendation especially with regards to the routine i should be looking at?
With regards blogpost, what are the recommended things to do especially when the crowd of the people who reads blogpost in my industry is close to none?Thanks!
-
Hi there,
May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks"
By this, I mean conducting a regular download from Open Site Explorer of your links and checking to see if they have increased or decreased in number, what the quality is like and which type of links you'd like to get more of. You can also download your links from your Google Webmaster Tools account, but it is good to have more than one source of backlink data because different services usually show a slightly different picture due to their crawling capabilities, etc. Other services that do this include Ahrefs and MajesticSEO.
I would say that if you are going to renew, definitely use a few hours of SEO time a week to get familiar with the toolset and what it can do for you. $99 a month can go a long way if you take advantage of what's on offer, but I agree that it is a waste if you don't use it. The good thing about learning to use the tools yourself is that you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on consulting if you can do a lot of this yourself. Understanding the tools and what they tell you also means that you will be better able to pick good external consultants in the future if you get to the stage where you can employ / contract someone to do SEO for you.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Jane
-
Right now, we don't have other plan options that are more inexpensive, but we do know people in your situation would benefit from this. I'll be sure to let the proper team know about your thread.
-
Hi Keri,
Thanks for your wise advice... I'll consider when looking at it... As it's quite tuff for me financially on my side as i'm still a One-man business.
Do you guys think you could have a smaller version plans for entrepreneurs like us who only manages their own website and SEO for their company?
-
I'm an employee at Moz, so I'm biased, but I do want to point out that this Q&A is also one of the benefits of being a Pro subscriber. People like Jane often charge over $100 an hour for consultations, and Q&A lets you get a whole month of advice from people in the field for that amount.
-
Hi Jane!
Wow this is a very comprehensive write-up and i fully appreciate the extra mile you go in clarifying all these things...
As a small biz owner, i don't think i have the resources to get so many stuff as i go along in SEO-ing my own business. For e.g. Moz, i don't think i'll renew it as it's really expensive for me considering, i seldom fully utilised it's tools.
May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks"? and what should we do about it ?
Thank you very much:)
-
With two hours a day, I would develop a weekly routine that involves some of the following, some on a daily basis and some once / twice per week depending on what sort of activity / results you are seeing:
- Daily check of Analytics and Webmaster Tools (404 errors, messages, crawl stats, etc.)
- Full set-up of Moz Analytics to take advantage of analysis and tracking here; daily / weekly checking of campaigns (Moz emails weekly updates, which are useful).
- Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks
- One or two content projects per week (more on this later)
- Regular site crawls with a tool like ScreamingFrog to complement what you're receiving through Moz, checking for on-page errors, redirects, etc.
- Short check of SEO news outlets like this one, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable to ensure you understand algo updates, interesting and relevant new ideas, and industry news, but perhaps without getting bogged down in blog posts / news that is not relevant to your business.
Regarding blog posts / content and low readership, think outside of your target market when it comes to readership. A good example of a company doing this recently was Aviva, a UK insurance company. They didn't optimise the potential links aspect of this, but they could have done so for a very good result.
They conducted a study on the over-spending of first-time parents, showing how much money is "wasted" on things parents / new babies don't really need. The mainstream press covered this pretty well: I actually read about the study in a hard-copy newspaper rather than online. Online, they did not conduct outreach well to take advantage of this study (lots of mentions from newspaper websites, etc. with no links), but the premise of the study was great.
Why was it great? Because insurance is pretty boring. But new babies are not boring to Aviva's target market, and they are not boring to a whole lot of other people besides. The baby industry is worth billions worldwide. They very effectively tapped into a subject that a lot of people would talk about, and that subject is at least somewhat related to what Aviva does (personal / family financial services).
So what about the delivery business?
Well, how about a study on the amount of money lost worldwide from delivery accidents, poor packaging and logistics, etc.? People tend to like stories about the wastage / saving of money at scale.
Or a study showing the average number of miles traveled by different types of products in international shipping, e.g. "the average piece of lamb from New Zealand travels X,000 miles from its farm to grocery stores, given that New Zealand ships lamb to Y countries worldwide. Z,000 tonnes of this is frozen whilst N,000 tonnes is chilled", etc. Tailor this to what you usually ship or leave it generic, focusing on logistics as a whole. As in the Aviva example, it doesn't have to be super tied to what you do - Aviva does not sell nor specifically insure baby products.
What you're looking to do is create content that is relevant to your potential customers and to other people besides, but is not necessarily about your subject matter if your subject matter is pretty boring. Your potential customers or "people in your industry" might not read or write a lot about the industry, but they are people with interests nonetheless, and you can tap into what DOES interest them.
-
You can check out all of the perks here, http://moz.com/perks
I would build everyone you can find that is relevant at first, then give the site a bit and see where you are sitting in the serps. Then you can start more external link building.
-
Hi!
I guess i'll try out the suggestion that you've suggested.
What's the moz perk for whitespark which you mentioned earlier?
What do you think can be next with regards to ranking higher?
Thanks!
-
Not really - the links you find that they have that are viable for you to pursue will be fairly obvious. Just be diligent. I do agree with Prestashop - because you are engaged in such a specific location citations will be very good for you.
-
Hi Billy,
I totally agree that i should work on my link building. But after much reading, it seems like content is placed on a high emphasis which i think i do not have much ideas for content.
Anything i should take note while doing competitive link analysis too?
Thanks!
-
Citations are links. They do improve the results with google places, but at the same time they also help with queries like "delivery in singapore" or things like "package delivery in singapore". Local citation sites generally have good rankings, so where they might have out ranked you in the past, your result might be the one that pops up, or if they pass link juice, it could be what it needs to drive your site up in the serps.
-
Citations will help you rank for location specific queries as well. Also - I do think you should work on your link building some more. Do a competitive link analysis - you have competitors with much stronger link profiles.
-
Hi!
Thanks for your fast response. But was just wondring:
Don't i need more links right now as most of my-page optimisation are quite ok already?
Isn't citation all about improving rankings over at Google Places? -
I do not know if you have already done it, but for a company like yours I would bang out as many local citations as I could. Singapore is supported by whitespark.ca, I would use them to find citations and fill them out. https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder I am pretty sure they have a Moz perk too. You could also get them to build them for you, their rates are pretty affordable.
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 Best Practice for Managing a Businesses NAP with Multiple Addresses
I have a client with multiple business addresses - 3 across 3 states, from an SEO perspective what would be the best approach for displaying a NAP on the website? So far I've read that its best: to get 3 GMB account to point to 3 location pages & use a local phone number as opposed to a 1300 number. Display all 3 locations in the footer, run of site
Local Website Optimization | | jasongmcmahon1 -
Raise in ranking but drop in visibility, also question about wordpress themed SEO
Hello,
Local Website Optimization | | SharonEKG
my first question is, i started working in August on a website for furniture repair and services that is a local business and who ever setup the website and did the SEO before me implanted the front page content and many other pages in the theme itself, we got Yoast premium and i mostly get bad rank of the page both from Yoast and Moz im guessing because it is simply cant find the links and content that is on the page since it is in the theme code. should i recommend the company to do a makeover and move everything to the actual wordpress page?
Also many changes has been made to the website, too many to track and i have seen in the past month an continues drop lower and lower of our visibility, but yet in the past week and half huge jump in some rankings. some of them are for hard to rank keywords, a jump of sometime 20/30+ up the ranks.
since i dont have a track of all the changes has been made, is there a way to know what cause it? Also one last question,
i have implemented google tag manager and been configuring it for the past month and now i have finally getting close to track all metrics we would like to track, i have removed all google analytics codes that i knew of and managed to find through search through the theme and plugins but yet when i fire up tag assistant it shows two codes the tag manager and analytics, i know it could interfear each other or give false/double readings. is there a way to track it and remove it? i have went through all theme files.. and cant find it.. Thanks!0 -
How many SEO clients do you handle?
I work in a small web & design agency who started offering SEO 2 yrs ago as it made sense due to them building websites. There have been 2 previous people to me and I now work there 3 days a week and they also have a junior who knew nothing before she started working for us. She mainly works for me. My question is, how many clients do you think would be reasonable to work on? We currently have around 55 and I have been working there for nearly 5 months now and haven't even got to half of the sites to do some work on. I've told them the client list is way too big and we should only have around 15 clients max. However they don't want to lose the money from the already paying clients so won't get rid of any and keep adding new ones Their systems were a mess and had no reporting or useful software so I had to investiagte and deploy that, along with project management software. Their analytics is also a mess and have employed a contractor to help sort that out too. It's like they were offering SEO services but had no idea or structure to what they did. Meta descriptions were cherry picked which ones to be done, so say 50/60 on a site not filled in. So it's not like I have 45 or so well maintained accounts. They're all a mess. Then the latest 10 new ones are all new sites so All need a lot of work. I'm starting to feel incredibly overwhelmed and oppressed by it all and wanted to see what other SEO professionals thought about it. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | hanamck0 -
Best SEO Option for Multi-site Set-up
Hi Guys, We have a Business to Business Software Website. We are Global business but mainly operate in Ireland, UK and USA. I would like your input on best practice for domain set-up for best SEO results in local markets. Currently we have: example.com (no market specified) and now we are creating: example.com/ie (Ireland) example.com/uk (united kingdom) example.com/us (united states) My question is mainly based on the example.com/us website - should we create example.com/us for the US market OR just use example.com for the US the market? If the decision is example.com/us should we build links to the directory or the main .com website. To summarize there is two questions: 1. Advise on domain set-up 2. Which site to build links to if example.com/us is the decision. Thank you in advance, Glen.
Local Website Optimization | | DigitalCRO0 -
Understand how site redesign impacts SEO
Hi everyone, I have, what I think, is kind of a specific question, but hoping you guys can help me figure out what to do. I have a client that recently changed their entire website (I started working with them after it happened, so I can't comment on what the site was like as far as content was before). I know they were using a service that I see a lot of in the service industry that aim to capitalize on local business (i.e. "leads nearby" or "nearby now") by creating pages for each targeted city and I believe collecting reviews for each city directly on the website. When they redesigned their website, they dropped that service and now all those pages that were ranking in SERPs are coming back as 404s because they are not included in the new site (I apologize if this is getting confusing!) The site that they moved to is a template site that they purchased the rights to from an already successful company in their same industry, so I do think the link structure probably changed, especially with all of the local pages that are no longer available on the site. Note: I want to use discretion in using company names, but happy to share more info in a private message if you'd like to see the sites I am talking about as I have a feeling that this is getting confusing 🙂 Has anyone had experience with something like this? I am concerned because even though I am targeting the keywords being used previously to direct content to the local pages to new existing pages, traffic to the website has dropped by nearly 60% and I know my clients are going to want answers-- and right now, I only have guesses. I am really looking forward to and so greatly appreciate any advice you might be able to share, I'm at a bit of a loss right now.
Local Website Optimization | | KaitlinNS0 -
2 websites, 1 business... How should I proceed?
Hi MOZ Folks, I am looking for SEO advices! I have my own business call : Tonikwebstudio.com... and recently, we bought a other company called Olawebstudio.com... So 2 websites for 1 business. How should I proceed to optimize my Local Seo? I think I have two choices... 1- I make referal links on Ola customer websites that redirect to Ola(+referal link) and then to Tonik. OR 2- I make referal links on Ola customer websites that redirect to Tonik directly... and then, I delete Ola web site... Any advices?
Local Website Optimization | | Gab-Tonik1 -
Yoast Local SEO Reviews/Would it work for me?
Hi everyone, I'm looking for some feedback on Yoast Local SEO, and if you think it'd work for our site. www.kempruge.com. Our site is a wordpress site, and there's nothing about it, off the top of my head, that makes me think it wouldn't work, but I've been wrong before. We do use All-In-One SEO, not the Yoast plugin, so I'm not sure if that's compatible.or would cause a problem? (The reason we use All-In-One and not Yoast is because that's what we had when I got here, and I'm worried what would happen if we switched). Also, we have three offices, and I need to be able to do local seo for all three. I know Yoast says it supports multiple offices, but I'd feel more comfortable if someone on here let me know from his/her experience that it did. Anything else you want to add about Yoast Local, I'm all ears! Thanks, Ruben
Local Website Optimization | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
How slow can a website be, but still be ok for visitors and seo?
Hello to all, my site http://www.allspecialtybuildings.com is a barn construction site. Our visitors are usually local. I am worried about page speed. I have been using Google Page Insight, and Gtmetrix. Although I cannot figure out browser leveraging, I have a 79 / 93 google score and for gtmetrix 98/87 score. Load times vary between 2.13 secs to 2.54 secs What is acceptable? I want to make sure I get Google love for a decent page speed, but for me these times are great. Bad times are like 7 seconds and higher. I have thought about a CDN, yet I have read horror stories too. I have ZERO idea of how to use a CDN, or if I need it. I just want a fast site that is both user and Google speed friendly. So my question is, what is a slow speed for a website? Is under 3 seconds considered ok? or bad for seo? But any advice is greatly appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | asbchris0