Can small business really compete with the fat cats with out a big budget?
-
Hello all Moz fans
I want to focus on and start getting clients locally for small to medium businesses and my ethos and vision is to help them compete with the big guys in there niche can this really be done with there small budget and if so how would you go about approaching it..?
-
I have not had clients for a long time... but if you want to get them in a small community build a small local website that achieves top rankings for some of the queries where you might obtain clients. Then you have something to point at when you call on them.
If you go see the autoglass guy, show him that you already have top rankings for "smalltown autoglass" and offer to give him an ad there.... rent him the page.... or help his website get ranked in the local map listings (if they appear for your community). In a small community a site that focuses on small service or retail business is still a viable way to do this. When you build that site and get it ranked you will get the experience and relationships needed to help your clients to success.
I would not offer to sell my services unless I already had some experience getting websites ranked in similar SERPs.
-
is smalltown auto glass one of your clients sites;) i agree i think the best option is focusing on the businesses that have a higher value of sale like dentist s and car smuchants and huilder and plumbers and cosmetics and lawyers at least if you get 1 sale it can pay for your work, but stay away from the restaurants and coffee shops and clothes stores and hairdressers would you agree? i don't have any clients at present and thinking of going door to door to local business have you tried this? just a quick hello if they are busy and dropping of a professional looking flyer? thanks for the comment
-
It's really easy for a person who knows a little about the web to get small business owners excited about tossing up a website and hauling in buckets of money on a tiny budget. Lots of the business owners think that all you need to do to make money from a website is toss something up and have somebody who knows the secrets about tweaking the code.
That might be possible for some local businesses like "smalltown auto glass" where potential competition is naive and limited to your immediate community...
However, if your potential small town client wants to expand his business by 50% selling in gift basket, digital camera, jewelry, coffee or many other niches which are highly competitive the story will be very different. Here competition is a "battle of resources" where impressive content libraries or enormous existing brand equity is needed - but does not guarantee success.
In that situation it is possible that the SEO will know exactly what to do to score high rankings but be far short of the resources needed to do it.
Even in the PPC niche, the small merchant may not have the wholesale price advantage, the shipping volume advantage, the conversion optimized website and PPC skills needed to compete with the big guns. It is awfully easy to lose a lot of money trying to win at PPC.
IMO the place where there is still hope for the small business on the web is niches like....
"smalltown auto glass" where potential competition is naive and limited to your immediate community..."
-
thank you so it is possible;) It would bring me great joy to do this for my local area and just focus on the companies in my area regarding high street stores would you stay away from them?
-
You might find this recent blog post helpful: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-shouldnt-ignore-longtail-clients
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
-
Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?
My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf0 -
How can such a small company out-rank the big players?
I'm really puzzled how for many keywords the company www.leathersofaworld.com, a retailer of sofas is able to out rank very large companies such as DFS.co.uk and IKEA. They rank 1st for the phrase 'black leather sofas' and have done for a long time. They currently rank 4th for 'leather sofas' and don't seem to move. Having looked at their back links, I can't see anything special and their domain authority is only 25 compared to DFS which is 45. Can anyone help me with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoMetrics0 -
Don't affiliate programs have an unfair impact on a company's ability to compete with bigger businesses?
So many coupon sites and other websites these days will only link to your website if you have a relationship with Commission Junction or one of the other large affiliate networks. It seems to me that links on these sites are really unfair as they allow businesses with deep pockets to acquire links unequitably. To me it seems like these are "paid links", as the average website cannot afford the cost of running an affiliate program. Even worse, the only reason why these businesses are earning a link is because they have an affiliate program; that to me should violate some sort of Google rule about types and values of links. The existence of an affiliate program as the only reason for earning a link is preposterous. It's just as bad as paid link directories that have no editorial standards. I realize the affiliate links are wrapped in CJ's code, so that mush diminish the value of the link, but there is still tons of good value in having the brand linked to from these high authority sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | williamelward0 -
Link Building on a small budget
Hi Folks I'm looking for recommendations from the community that can help me tic the requirements below; Looking for link-building services for a small start up. Prefer to work directly with the person doing the work. Prefer that they speak English 🙂 Have a small monthly budget so not looking for big organisations, rather a expert who is working on his/her own, and can have a phone conversation with me before engagement. Any-hoots I may be looking for a needle in a haystack here but any recommendations on people would be highly appreciated 🙂 PS: I know SEOmoz recommends some folks, but wow they are expensive ... can't afford that
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OMDAustralia0 -
Can Google read my backlink in Javascript??
Hi SeoMoz community! I have a software product, which our clients implement onto their websites. It is like a pop up box. I know that backlinks are very important for SEO ranking, and I really want to give our clients 2 options of product: 1. you can get the free/cheaper option if you use the code which has a keyworded backlink to our site on it 2. you can pay small fee if you don't want to use the version with a link to our site on it Now, the problem is that the product is written entirely in Javascript, and I don't think that Google crawls this, do they? Is there a way around this? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qdigi0 -
Help, really struggling with fixing mistakes post-Penguin
We had previously implemented a strategy of paying for lots of links and focusing on 3 or 4 keywords as our anchors, which used to REALLY work (I know, I know, bad black hat strategy - I have since learned my lesson). These keywords and others have since plummeted up to 100 spots since Panda 3.3 and Penguin. So I'm trying to go in and fix all our mistakes cuz our domain is too valuable to us just to start over from scratch. Yesterday I literally printed a 75 page document of all of our links according to Open Site Explorer. I have been going in and manually changing anchor text wherever I can, and taking down the very egregious links if possible.This has involved calling and emailing webmasters, digging up old accounts and passwords, and otherwise just trying to diversify our anchor text and remove bad links. I've also gone into our site and edited some internal links (also too weighty on certain keywords) and removed other links entirely. My rankings have gone DOWN more today. A lot. WTF does Google want? Is there something I'm doing wrong? Should we be deleted links from all private networks entirely or just trying to vary the anchor text? Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0 -
Can you pass social signals with a 301 re-direct?
Does a 301 re-direct pass social signals such as 'likes' 'tweets' and '+1s"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Whats your regular routine ? Can we learn new things from each other
I tend to work on the on page changes first of all following keyword research. Then take a look at some internal linking, Setup a wordpress blog on /blog or sub domain and get my copywriter to start adding regular content . Next stage is link building Old fashioned emails requests, blog comments taking a look through existing sites we own for relevant places. On going analysis once positions change.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect0