How do you outrank a monster corporation on Google when you’re a small business?
You don’t. If you’re a small business, you’ll never be able to go head to head with a company that spends more on marketing in one month than you might make in revenue during the course of a year.
Sorry to shatter your dreams of ranking No. 1 for your key term. But, I do have good news for you. There are SEO strategies that work for business-to-business (B2B) small businesses, enabling you to attract inbound traffic and convert leads into customers. And that’s what it’s all about, right?
At my agency, we’ve successfully employed the following three strategies for several small businesses we work with.
Local Landing Pages
This tactic is so simple, yet so effective. First, identify all the major cities your business can serve. Then, create a landing page that lists the “top” businesses offering your services in each area. The end result is a directory-style landing page that attracts searchers in that area who are interested in utilizing the services you offer.
For example, let’s say that you have a software development business that is location agnostic, meaning that you serve several different areas without physically being in any one of them. You would develop a landing page with a list of five to 10 of the “top” software development businesses in a specific city -- and include your company on the list.
There are a couple of things you must to be comfortable with when employing this strategy. One, you’ll need to provide transparency by noting that your business isn’t actually located in the city, but has the ability to provide services to clients in that city. Nothing is worse than getting calls from someone in Tampa Bay, Florida, who wants to meet for coffee to discuss your business.
The second is that you’ll need to be comfortable listing and linking to your competitors. Some companies are not cool with this. My thought is this: Would you rather list and link out to your competitors while controlling the traffic on your website? Or would you rather not have the traffic at all?
These local landing pages won’t attract an extremely high volume of inbound traffic month over month, but they will certainly help in attracting high-quality traffic that is eager to learn more.
Long-Tail Services Landing Pages
As a small business, it’s important to understand a couple of things about your competitors’ online marketing strategies. You won’t outrank large competitors for the keyword that best describes your service (i.e., “software development company”). And your large competitors are too complacent to develop landing pages that describe the services within a service (i.e., “software development services for automotive applications”) because they already receive enough traffic and inquiries by ranking for their core keywords.
Long-tail services landing pages address a specific customer need and bypass the search competition.
Let’s use the example above. You’re a software development company, and you’ve had a couple of clients in the past in the automotive industry. This is a perfect opportunity to develop a landing page that speaks directly to those customers in the automotive industry who are looking for custom software development.
On the landing page, you can optimize the content for your long-tail keyword (“software development services for automotive applications”), speak about your service and share your experience in that particular space.
Not many companies get this granular with their service offering online. By investing in custom landing pages around each of your best services, you’ll be able to attract more low-volume, high-quality traffic that your larger competitors don’t have the time to target.
Customer FAQs
The landing page strategies above attract low volumes of traffic with high intention to convert. But how does a small business attract higher volumes of search traffic? The answer is by answering customers’ frequently asked questions.
Think about it. Do your customers frequently ask you questions like, “What’s the best CRM that syncs with MailChimp?” or “How often should we be posting on our social media accounts?” These questions are opportunities to attract more customers who have the same questions. If you can provide the answers, you can position your company as the expert and invite potential clients to ask deeper questions over the phone or during a consultation.
I love this strategy. Developing blog posts around customer questions not only attracts like-minded traffic, but it develops a knowledge base that reduces the amount of time you spend answering these questions -- you can simply share the article link with the customer.
That’s it! The beans have been spilled. These three hyper-specific SEO strategies have the potential to turn your marketing department into a content development machine, and they will help turn your website into a lead generator to fuel the growth of your business.
If you’re going to proceed with these tactics, just be sure to employ a three-step approach. Identify the right keywords through your SEO content strategy, build the content and then market that content to improve your search rankings.
