Posts Tagged ‘Search Trafficker’

Seo small business. Tips for success

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

The first tip for seo small business is to figure out what you want to achieve. Small business websites can serve a number of purposes. The most obvious is probably as an ecommerce site. However, sites that provide information or access to a sign up page can also be valuable. A good example of an information page for a small business is for an electrician. The service cannot be sold online however; the contact details can be provided to the customer. A sign up site is a very valuable asset and can be integrated on both ecommerce and information site. A sign up page’s purpose is to create a mailing list of people who are already interested in your product or service. This means you can develop a more focused email marketing campaign, to accompany your seo for small business.

This affects tip two, which is selecting the right keywords. Seo small business varies in this respect from the campaigns for larger companies. This is because the use of long tail opportunities opens less competitive markets. Going back to the electrician example, the term “electrician” generated 823,000 searches on www.google.co.uk. However, if you lengthen the keyword it dramatically reduces the searches. For example “electrician uk” only produces 8100 searches and even more localised ie “electrician ulverston” produces even less competition. The less competition there is equals a more cost effective way to a page one ranking. However, if there isn’t any traffic in the first place, then no one will see your site. This is why the careful selection of keywords is of vital importance for seo small business campaigns.

The next tip is focused on content, specifically in relation to your keywords. Google assesses thousands of sites every day, including both new and old sites. Understandably, this requires a large amount of time and to optimise this process, google allocates sites a crawl depth allowance. A large crawl depth is best as it caches sites more quickly and thoroughly. To this end google like to see new and relevant content. For example, if our electrician has only one page which features a logo, a address and a telephone number, it is less likely to rank compared to a site with all the above detail but with a detailed description of the services offered.  In this description the keyword that is being optimised would have to be present as much as possible, without compromising the validity of the text. At heart google just wants to produce the most accurate search results for the user. So creating content that is illegible from “keyword stuffing” will ultimately not produce positive results for your seo small business campaign. The catch here is that good content takes time to write, time which many small business cannot afford. Many companies small and large say that they can produce their own content, focusing on the short term saving. However, they then generally fail to maintain the content creation rate, undermining the whole seo campaign. It is arguably a better long-term plan to invest in good quality content from a specialist provider from the onset. Good content is invaluable for achieving higher positions in search engines. Better positions in the search engines, unquestionably lead to increased sales. Therefore, the return of investment is higher for professionally written content.  The issue of content is no less important when considering Seo for small business.

The next step in seo small business is link building into your website. Google is looking for a positive role in the link building community. This means having links not just going in but also well placed outbound links. For example, if our electrician linked to the Electrical safety council (ESC) it would show that he is in the same community as the well-established and relevant site. This should not be overplayed, as linking to too many sites (however, well established) will lead to page rank being leaked from your site. Creating links to your site can be difficult for small businesses, as they don’t have access to a very large Internet community. Professional search marketing companies spend time developing contacts and as such have access to vast online communities from which to create links.

In conclusion, seo small business is as valuable as seo for large companies. Especially in the current economic climate, where people generally turn to the Internet to gather information on most purchases.

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Long tail solutions for small businesses.

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

For small businesses the benefits of optimising long tail key terms can be vast. Firstly, it helps to understand that the long tail of search gets its name from a graphical express of an area of search. At the start of the curve, there are fewer terms that produce higher traffic, but lower conversions. As the terms in a keyword group continue, this is where the tail comes in – there are hundreds of terms that get less traffic per term, but contain more targeted purchase-minded prospects.
So if the general short tail term is “football”, the long tail terms would be those that contain the word “football”. In general, the longer the phrase, the farther it is into the long tail, and the more likely it is to bring you buying traffic.
You see, the term “football” might have had 30,000 visitors per day searching for it, but it is inadvisable to optimise it. This is because it is too broad as a term; it will pick up competition from a wide range of sites including the multinational corporations. A long Tail could be “football equipment”, this would begin to limit the traffic to those interested in football products rather than the sport itself. However, this would still be a very competitive term and have many large businesses optimising for it. For a small sports outlet in Keswick, a good long tail term could be “football equipment Keswick” as this will be less competitive but is highly specific.
Terms such as this are less difficult to obtain, more likely to convert leads, and harder for your competition to discover. Although they are difficult to predict and target, they can exponentially increase your ROI if you find them.
Whereas a very competitive (short tail) term might generate 10,000 visitors with low conversion, a long tail term may generate only 2,000 visitors yet offer much higher conversion rates. People searching in the long tail know what they want and are much closer in their buying process. As a result, marketers are better off targeting these types of terms for keyword phrases. Long tail terms are fast becoming the preference for experienced search marketing professionals.
In short, Long tail is potentially the most cost effective route for creating conversion driven traffic onto a small business site. As opposed to spending more money on generating large amounts of traffic, that is more likely to result in a higher bounce rate for the site.
For an example of a page optimised with a long tail term for a small business visit Restaurant in ulverston. At the time of publishing this Search Trafficker was ranked number 6 on google.co.uk for the term Restaurant in ulverston. The business advertising is Naaz, a local Indian restaurant in the small town of Ulverston, Cumbria, which demonstrates the potential of long tail terms for small businesses. While the term may not have a massive traffic volume, it is more than likely to be what someone would type to find somewhere to eat in Ulverston.

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