A challenge! What off-page strategies would you employ first when ranking a brand new small business website?
-
I'd love to hear what you guys do. I think the game has changed now in the era of Penguin. Gone are the days where you can build a few quick links and suddenly your new site is ranking fairly well.
Obviously, the first steps are to get the on page SEO right - titles, good keyword use, etc.
Eventually, the goal may be to build some content that will attract natural links. But, we all know that is going to take time.
So, here's the scenario:
You've got a new client with a website in a fairly non-competitive niche, say, a piano mover in Seattle. The site is indexed, with no external backlinks. You're happy with the current on page SEO. The site is currently ranking on page 3 for "Seattle Piano Mover". What would you do next?
-
I would also suggest claiming and tidying up the Google+ Local/Google Places entry for the business (or creating one if it does not exist) and ensure that the business is listed consistently in all the major directories in order that it is clear where they are and how to contact them.
Asking satisfied clients/customers for reviews or feedback, or pointing them in the general direction, can also help.
-
These are great! Thanks!
-
These might not work for piano movers but for small professional office here are some low-hanging fruits that I can think of for links.
- landlord (some brag about their tenants)
- chamber of commerce (often link to members, write blog post, become an officer for profile link)
- community directories (they feature local businesses, write blog post)
- professional associations (link to members, write blog post, become an officer for profile link)
- clients (write a blog post for them)
- suppliers (often link to local product vendors/customers or write blog post for them)
- professional schools (often link to successful grads, write blog post)
- license boards (link to licensees, write blog post)
- other local businesses with synergy (write blog post, become one of their "recommended")
- local newspapers (write article for online edition)
- local BBB (get in directory, write blog post)
- write for professional journal online edition
- local city government/organizations (directory, blogs, supporters, volunteers)
-
Good additional strategy is to purchase and 301 redirect an expired, aged domain (or several) that already has a few dozen authoritative domains linking to it, preferably a domain with history in the same niche.. this usually results in a nice boost - but it may take several weeks to take affect. Fire a few links at the expired domain to speed up the process.
-
He probably just needs a handful of links from local sources. Maybe local business associations, etc.
If it is very niche and local, you have very little work to do compared to a site that needs to rank for a competitive keyword nationally. But you already knew that!
-
Is this a test Marie .... or are you after advice
As for me, I'd kick back and pat myself on the back and say job done good ... Number 3 aint nowt to be sad about
I once did a site for a client, and offered basic SEO as part of the build, clearly stating that I would insure the site structure would be fine, proper use of heading tags, good meta description, the basic stuff.
Anyway, he said he would love to rank high for School Cleaning Ireland, the phrase itself was so niche, as soon as the new site was indexed, he ranked number 2 in Google.ie
The guy was over the moon with me ... Got three new jobs from referrals (just web build) ...
Anyway, the moral, I have not done a thing with his website in over 8 months, my job was just to build it for him, I have just checked Google.ie, and he now ranks number one for that very phrase, without an iota of content changing on his website, I know that for sure as it is a static HTML ...
Sometimes niche words need very little work at all
Regards
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking for a brand term with "&" (and) in the name?
Hello Moz community. We have a company that rebranded their name to "Bar & Cocoa" with the URL https://barandcocoa.com/. It's been about 3 months, and the website has yet to show up organically anywhere within the first 50 results foer their brand terms. It seems that Google pretty much ignores the "&" or "and" word when typing in bar & cocoa, or bar and cocoa in search. You'd think with that with the exact domain name, it would at least move the needle a bit, but it has not helped. Even being in Denver, I'm getting results for a "Bar Cocoa" business located in Charlotte, NC, and the secondary pages that belong to that business, and then a bunch of other companies, products and irrelevant search results (like a parked domain)! Any suggestions or ideas, please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | flowsimple1 -
How to speed indexing of web pages after website overhaul.
We have recently overhauled our website and that has meant new urls as we moved from asp to php. we also moved from http to https. The website (https://) has 694 urls submitted through site map with 679 indexed in sitemap of google search console. As we look through the google search console analytics we notice that google index section / index status it says: https://www.xyz.com version - index status 2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Direct_Ram
www.xyz.com version - index status 37
xyz.com version - index status 8 how can we get more pages to be indexed or found by google sooner rather than later as we have lost major traffic. thanks for your help in advance0 -
Website losing rank positions after https
Hi there.. we were having a good increase in rankings since using Moz and then we purchased an ssl certificate so our website would run under https... to make sure our website is only accessed through https, we have used a method on .htaccess (appache) to make sure the website is only reached through https, using: RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mszeer
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R,QSA] after doing this, from our last crawl perspective, we lost several positions that we were increasing.. what have we done wrong ? we have to fix this asap, please help us...0 -
Optimized pages ranking lower than homepage with keywords
Ok, I know this question has been out there before, but i don't know how fo search for it specifically enough. I have several keywords that rank higher on my home page. As you know MOZ assigns keywords to whichever page on your site popping up in search first. So even though i have A-grade optimized pages for a particular keyword, that page may not pop up BEFORE the homepage for instance, on searches. In many cases, the homepage is grade "F" for a particular keyword, yet its pulling up first for most of my keywords. I know that my homepage has more rank because it gets the most visits and i'm sure we can't really optimize the homepage for EVERY keyword. What is the best thing to do in this situation? Do i just need to wait for my optimized page to catch up in rank, or is there a trick to optimizing homepage to ALL key words at grade "A" level? Do i need to keep back-linking to my optimized page directly to get the juice up? I created all these great optimized pages for specific keywords, but my homepage which shows "F" grade is the one pulling up 4th or 5th on searches Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrMcCoy0 -
New indepth page for content marketing - feedback?
I finally figured out that to EARN quality links I need some great content that I can share. Content that is valuable to people. So I created a (indepth?) article with some pretty sweet infographics. This is NEW to me. So I was hoping I could get some feedback on this before I attempt to promote it to media and industry publishers. Here is the link: http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/jewelry-insurance-info.html Would love your feedback and suggestions! Thanks ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers2 -
Home page sudden drop in rank, but not others.
Over the weekend, I noticed "www.thematstore.com" drop out of the search results for "chair mats", where previously it was between 10-12 ranked. The other pages on the domain have remained the same in regards to rankings for their intended keywords. The only thing I changed (on Nov 29th) is the title tag from "Chair Mats - Commercial Quality Chair Mats, Custom Made", to "Chair Mats - Best Custom Chair Mats, Commercial Quality". I know there is a lot that needs to be done on the site, and the site architecture is a bit of a mess (I recommended building a new site)... but I was hoping to gradually fix these issues without gambling with a rank drop. Not sure why the home page all of the sudden dropped out, any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
On Page Rankings dropped without any changes
What could have factored into some of my key words dropping from an A to a C on my on page rankings. I am not sure how it happened because there were not any chages made. Thanks, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Manage Ranking for " Out of Stock" pages
Hi, I own an e-commerce marketplace where the products are sold by 3rd party sellers and purchased by end users. My problem is that whenever a new product is added the search engine crawls the website and it ranks the new page on 4th page. when I start optimizing it to gain better rankings in search engines the product goes out of stock and the rankings drop to below 100. To counter that I started showing other related products on the "Out of Stock" pages but even then the rankings are dropping. Can someone help me with this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0