Small Business SEO – Can You Really Compete with the Big Brands?

One of the most surprising things for any businesses embarking upon a SEO campaign can be the competitor analysis. It’s often the case that the companies you might traditionally consider your competition aren’t competing with you in SEO terms. In fact, it’s common to find that your biggest SEO competitors might even be companies you’ve never even heard of and that’s because any organisation of any size can very realistically stake a claim for a high ranking in the search engines with the right SEO campaign.

Can Small Businesses Really Compete with Big Brands in SEO?

Simply, yes! With the right SEO campaign, an effective strategy and the right keywords, small businesses (and companies with less of a brand awareness) can realistically compete with big, well known brands.

The Benefits Big Brands Have

Let’s be honest. Having a big nationally or even internationally recognised brand has its advantages. In SEO terms, it means a site will receive a lot of “brand traffic” from search engines. That is to say there will be a large number of people finding a big brand’s site having searched for the brand’s name in Google.

Additionally, big brands have a lot of potential to attract natural links, i.e. bloggers and webmasters may naturally link to these sites, which strengthens their site.

Effective Small Business SEO

With that said, as well as technical on-page features and diverse off-page elements, small business SEO strategy should incorporate:-

–                   Keyword research to identify keywords people search for in and around your own product or service offerings, balance the number of people who search it with the likelihood that people searching these terms will convert to a sale or lead.

–                   Fresh and frequently updated website content in order to ensure there’s enough new material on the site to potentially attract natural links too.