Small Business SEO

SEO is one of my favorite marketing methods because it levels the playing field between customers. Small business SEO can make a relatively small company look like a huge one online.

Level Playing Field

It was the winter of 2011 when we discovered just how level a playing field SEO creates. The news had to do with a rather large company – JC Penny. The retailer had been nabbed pursuing black hat methods to get rankings for its home and product pages. The scam had worked and the company had had a banner holiday shopping season online.

Competitors started wondering how it was JC Penny could do so incredibly well in the rankings and started an investigation. They soon hit upon the black hat methods being used and complained to Google. With metaphorical red cheeks, Google then turned around and penalized JC Penny in the rankings.

So, what does this have to do with small business SEO? Well, think about it for a second. JC Penny obviously has a huge budget for online marketing, but money alone could not get it the rankings it wanted. It literally had to cheat to defeat small businesses that outranked it. Can you imagine that being the case in the brick and mortar world? If you have a small t-shirt company and JC Penny opens a huge store next to you, it is pretty obvious you are going to go out of business.

Small Business SEO

Small business SEO is all about identifying the needs of your target customers. One then identifies the keywords that the customers use to find solutions to those needs. The keywords are then incorporated into your site and a link building program is set up to promote those pages in the search engines. Of course the trick is getting the correct type of links, but that’s a business secret on our part!

The overriding point to take from this is that it doesn’t matter if you are a small or big company. The search engines simply don’t care. The only time you would see a brand name matter is for a ranking for that brand. For instance, JC Penny will always appear at number 1 in Google, Yahoo and Bing when someone searches for “JC Penny”. Other than this one phrase, the competition to get ranked on other sites is wide open.

If you are looking for small business SEO services, contact us today for a free review of your site and to find out the options available. We look forward to chatting with you soon and helping you beat the JC Penny’s of the world in the rankings!

<< SEO Marketing