This is a guest post from Farhad Divecha, Director at Accuracast
The importance of search engine optimisation is well known to most business owners. What is equally well known is the fact that good optimisation advice does not come cheap and bad advice comes cheap but costs a lot in the long run (think websites getting banned on Google).
While targeting the most popular keywords in competitive sectors might no longer be feasible for most new businesses on a tight budget, there are still numerous options available to such businesses.
A lot of the opportunities arise from Google’s Universal Search concept, where regular organic listings are mixed in with other search results such as images, videos, maps and so on.
Here are 5 alternative SEO strategies that can be implemented by small business owners themselves, without having to pay for expert SEO help:
1. Use Google Local Business Listings
Whether your business is bricks and mortar or online only, you will have a registered business address, which can be used to get your company listed on the Google Local Business Centre.
Once you’re verified, ensure that your most important target keyword is in your listing title and some associated keywords are used within the description.
Get your clients to share their feedback by leaving reviews on your local business listing in Google and get other sites, such as local business directories to link to this listing.
2. Get listed on Google Products
Create a simple product feed and add as much detail as you can, with information about the products you sell, their descriptions, prices, dimensions etc.
Ensure that main keywords such as the brand name and product name are included in the title of each product listing.
Try and get as many positive reviews as possible from customers who buy the products. You could even go so far as to provide discounts to everyone who provides a review.
3. Create “How To” Videos
Users often search for information. Creating videos that answer their informational queries is a great way to gain organic placement in such search results pages.
In order to ensure that your video ranks in the organic results, optimise the video title for the keywords you’re targeting, get lots of viewers to comment on, link to and mark your video as a favourite.
4. Build a social media presence
Real time search results are growing in importance. Trending topics make their way to the organic search results regularly. Establishing a steady flow of posts on sites like Twitter and Facebook will help drive a percentage of the traffic on these terms to your site.
5. Cover latest industry news
Ranking on Google News for trending topics is relatively easy. Ensure that your news article’s title contains your target keywords, and produce unique, good quality news stories that help your site get a number of other blogs and sites linking to it.
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