Scaling Business Operation n SEO as an Entrepreneur
-
Hi! I'm a 1 man business operating in Singapore doing Delivery Service for Business. Right now my website is ranking at the 3rd page of google, www.vantagedelivery.com
The keywords that i'm looking to rank are delivery service, delivery service singapore.Being alone in the business, i struggle in doing the SEO aspect of the website on a consistent basis. Therefore i'm looking for a scale-able way for me to do SEO in my free-time, perhaps 2 hours a day?
Any recommendation especially with regards to the routine i should be looking at?
With regards blogpost, what are the recommended things to do especially when the crowd of the people who reads blogpost in my industry is close to none?Thanks!
-
Hi there,
May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks"
By this, I mean conducting a regular download from Open Site Explorer of your links and checking to see if they have increased or decreased in number, what the quality is like and which type of links you'd like to get more of. You can also download your links from your Google Webmaster Tools account, but it is good to have more than one source of backlink data because different services usually show a slightly different picture due to their crawling capabilities, etc. Other services that do this include Ahrefs and MajesticSEO.
I would say that if you are going to renew, definitely use a few hours of SEO time a week to get familiar with the toolset and what it can do for you. $99 a month can go a long way if you take advantage of what's on offer, but I agree that it is a waste if you don't use it. The good thing about learning to use the tools yourself is that you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on consulting if you can do a lot of this yourself. Understanding the tools and what they tell you also means that you will be better able to pick good external consultants in the future if you get to the stage where you can employ / contract someone to do SEO for you.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Jane
-
Right now, we don't have other plan options that are more inexpensive, but we do know people in your situation would benefit from this. I'll be sure to let the proper team know about your thread.
-
Hi Keri,
Thanks for your wise advice... I'll consider when looking at it... As it's quite tuff for me financially on my side as i'm still a One-man business.
Do you guys think you could have a smaller version plans for entrepreneurs like us who only manages their own website and SEO for their company?
-
I'm an employee at Moz, so I'm biased, but I do want to point out that this Q&A is also one of the benefits of being a Pro subscriber. People like Jane often charge over $100 an hour for consultations, and Q&A lets you get a whole month of advice from people in the field for that amount.
-
Hi Jane!
Wow this is a very comprehensive write-up and i fully appreciate the extra mile you go in clarifying all these things...
As a small biz owner, i don't think i have the resources to get so many stuff as i go along in SEO-ing my own business. For e.g. Moz, i don't think i'll renew it as it's really expensive for me considering, i seldom fully utilised it's tools.
May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks"? and what should we do about it ?
Thank you very much:)
-
With two hours a day, I would develop a weekly routine that involves some of the following, some on a daily basis and some once / twice per week depending on what sort of activity / results you are seeing:
- Daily check of Analytics and Webmaster Tools (404 errors, messages, crawl stats, etc.)
- Full set-up of Moz Analytics to take advantage of analysis and tracking here; daily / weekly checking of campaigns (Moz emails weekly updates, which are useful).
- Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks
- One or two content projects per week (more on this later)
- Regular site crawls with a tool like ScreamingFrog to complement what you're receiving through Moz, checking for on-page errors, redirects, etc.
- Short check of SEO news outlets like this one, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable to ensure you understand algo updates, interesting and relevant new ideas, and industry news, but perhaps without getting bogged down in blog posts / news that is not relevant to your business.
Regarding blog posts / content and low readership, think outside of your target market when it comes to readership. A good example of a company doing this recently was Aviva, a UK insurance company. They didn't optimise the potential links aspect of this, but they could have done so for a very good result.
They conducted a study on the over-spending of first-time parents, showing how much money is "wasted" on things parents / new babies don't really need. The mainstream press covered this pretty well: I actually read about the study in a hard-copy newspaper rather than online. Online, they did not conduct outreach well to take advantage of this study (lots of mentions from newspaper websites, etc. with no links), but the premise of the study was great.
Why was it great? Because insurance is pretty boring. But new babies are not boring to Aviva's target market, and they are not boring to a whole lot of other people besides. The baby industry is worth billions worldwide. They very effectively tapped into a subject that a lot of people would talk about, and that subject is at least somewhat related to what Aviva does (personal / family financial services).
So what about the delivery business?
Well, how about a study on the amount of money lost worldwide from delivery accidents, poor packaging and logistics, etc.? People tend to like stories about the wastage / saving of money at scale.
Or a study showing the average number of miles traveled by different types of products in international shipping, e.g. "the average piece of lamb from New Zealand travels X,000 miles from its farm to grocery stores, given that New Zealand ships lamb to Y countries worldwide. Z,000 tonnes of this is frozen whilst N,000 tonnes is chilled", etc. Tailor this to what you usually ship or leave it generic, focusing on logistics as a whole. As in the Aviva example, it doesn't have to be super tied to what you do - Aviva does not sell nor specifically insure baby products.
What you're looking to do is create content that is relevant to your potential customers and to other people besides, but is not necessarily about your subject matter if your subject matter is pretty boring. Your potential customers or "people in your industry" might not read or write a lot about the industry, but they are people with interests nonetheless, and you can tap into what DOES interest them.
-
You can check out all of the perks here, http://moz.com/perks
I would build everyone you can find that is relevant at first, then give the site a bit and see where you are sitting in the serps. Then you can start more external link building.
-
Hi!
I guess i'll try out the suggestion that you've suggested.
What's the moz perk for whitespark which you mentioned earlier?
What do you think can be next with regards to ranking higher?
Thanks!
-
Not really - the links you find that they have that are viable for you to pursue will be fairly obvious. Just be diligent. I do agree with Prestashop - because you are engaged in such a specific location citations will be very good for you.
-
Hi Billy,
I totally agree that i should work on my link building. But after much reading, it seems like content is placed on a high emphasis which i think i do not have much ideas for content.
Anything i should take note while doing competitive link analysis too?
Thanks!
-
Citations are links. They do improve the results with google places, but at the same time they also help with queries like "delivery in singapore" or things like "package delivery in singapore". Local citation sites generally have good rankings, so where they might have out ranked you in the past, your result might be the one that pops up, or if they pass link juice, it could be what it needs to drive your site up in the serps.
-
Citations will help you rank for location specific queries as well. Also - I do think you should work on your link building some more. Do a competitive link analysis - you have competitors with much stronger link profiles.
-
Hi!
Thanks for your fast response. But was just wondring:
Don't i need more links right now as most of my-page optimisation are quite ok already?
Isn't citation all about improving rankings over at Google Places? -
I do not know if you have already done it, but for a company like yours I would bang out as many local citations as I could. Singapore is supported by whitespark.ca, I would use them to find citations and fill them out. https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder I am pretty sure they have a Moz perk too. You could also get them to build them for you, their rates are pretty affordable.
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
-
Local SEO for Multiple Locations - Is this the best approach?
Hi everyone! I previously have worked with single-location companies, and am now working for a company that is continuously growing and adding new locations. We are a financial institution that currently has 12 locations, and we should have 15+ locations by year-end 2017. Seeing as we have all of these locations, I thought the following approach would be the best for increasing our presence in local search. Our primary keyword is "credit union in location". Our search traffic has increased heavily over last year, but is down from the beginning of the year. I've gone through and done the following: Freshened up the content on the main website Created pages for each of our locations around April-end Attributed these location page URLs to our Google My Business locations Verified each location Wrote unique content for each page Our primary keyword rankings seem to fluctuate weekly. My next steps are to get our web design company to add the following: Structured Data on all location pages The ability to change SEO title and meta descriptions on location pages Sitemap (there is none currently, and I've been fighting them to get one added because it isn't needed.) I also plan on utilizing Moz Local to manage our local listings. After this is done I plan on finding ways for us to build links for each location, like the chambers of commerce in each city and local partnerships. Is this the best approach for our overall goal, and should I continue? Is there anything I should change about our current approach? I appreciate the help!
Local Website Optimization | | PelicanStateCU0 -
Local SEO Best Practise?
We are planning to localize our website by launching CCTLD. But there is a little confusion about some aspects, which are: Should we track location and take our visitors to their native domain? Or do we need to take our visitors to .com domain and show a Popup, if they want to visit the native region website? What is the best case study for localization?
Local Website Optimization | | UmairGadit0 -
Best practices or tools for an SEO audit?
I would like to have an SEO audit of my site, and I'm looking for something beyond the basics. Prices for an audit seem to vary between free (for DIY tools) to over $3,000. That seems like an awfully big spread. What are the best practices I should be looking for or best tools to be looking at for a comprehensive SEO audit?
Local Website Optimization | | micromano0 -
SEO and Redirecting Site to a Different Firm's Domain while Maintaining Current Domain's Rankings
I am a plaintiffs' attorney with a website that ranks well for my major practice areas. I am considering taking a position with a new firm. As part of the discussion, the new firm would allow me to keep my current site so long as it redirects to my bio page on their firm's site. My goal is to keep my current site ranking well and continuously work on SEO efforts, in case I leave the new firm and want to rely on my current site in the future. My questions are: Is there a way to redirect my site every time it shows up in the listings (I have 1000+ indexed pages) without sacrificing its current rankings b/c of bounce rate issues, etc and 2) If I continue to add pages and work on SEO for my site while it redirects to another, will those efforts be worthwhile due to the redirect? I want to keep trying to build my site even though it redirects to a page on a different domain.
Local Website Optimization | | crpoll0 -
Local seo landing pages and proper keywords to optimize and showing up for generic keyword localized results
looking for advice. I have my site built into landing pages for each city I service. Would it effect my seo in a negative way if I built other landing pages with "keyword + zip code" as well as the city ones I already have or do you think it would make my city rankings worst? Also how do you get a seo city landing page to show up for the "keyword" or "keyword near me" in the city of interest? Is making landing pages with "keyword + city" sufficient way to accomplish this or is there a trick I am unaware of?
Local Website Optimization | | Spartan220 -
Client with business website as well as franchise site
I have a client who has created a Weebly web presence alongside his provided franchise website. What is my best strategy as he does not wish for the franchise site to out-perform his Weebly presence.
Local Website Optimization | | Sans_Terra0 -
Can to many 301 redirects damage my Ecommerce Site - SEO Issue
Hello All, I have an eCommerce website doing online hire. We operate from a large number of locations (100 approx) and my 100 or so categories have individual locations pages against them example - Carpet Cleaners (category) www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC12
carpet cleaner hire Manchester www.mysite/hire-carpetcleaners/Manchester
carpet cleaner hire london
carpet cleaner hire Liverpool patio heater (category)
patio heater hire Manchester
patio heater hire London
patio heater hire Liverpool And so on..... I have unique content for some of these pages but given that my site had 40,000 odd urls, I do have a large amount of thin/duplicate content and it's financially not possible to get unique
content written for every single page for all my locations and categories. Historically, I used to rank very well for these location pages although this year, things have dropped off and recently , I was hit with the Panda 4.0 update which i understand targets thin content. Therefore what I am int he process of doing is reducing the number of locations I want to rank for and have pages for thus allowing me to achieve both a higher percentage of unique content over duplicate/thin content on the whole site and only concerntrate on a handful of locations which I can realistically get unique content written for. My questions are as follows. By reducing the number of locations, my website will currently 301 redirect these location page i have been dropping back to it's parent category.
e.g carpet cleaner hire Liverpool page - Will redirect back to the parent Carpet cleaner hire Page. Given that I have nearly 100 categories to do , this will mean site will generate thousands of 301 redirects when I reduce down to a handful of locations per category. The alternative Is that I can 404 those pages ?... What do yout think I should do ?.. Will it harm me by having so many 301's . It's essentially the same page with a location name in it redirecting back to the parent. Some of these do have unqiue content but most dont ?. My other question is - On a some of these categories with location pages, I currently rank very well for locally although there is no real traffic for these location based keywords (using keyword planner). Shall I bin them or keep them? Lastly , Once I have reduced the number of location pages , I will still have thin content until , I can get the unique content written for them. Should I remove these pages until that point of leave them as it is? It will take a few months
to get all the site with unique content. Once complete, I should be able to reduce my site down from 40,000 odd pages to say 5,000 pages Any advice would be greatly appreciated thanks
Pete0 -
SEO for a homepage... What do you put? Focus on the brand or products?
Hi to all. Ok so I am curious how to format and seo a website homepage? This question is more in the way of dedicated towards how to rank locally if you have multiple services? See I have a construction website and we have many services. So do you try and format the homepage to promote the brand, or do you go after the services? Like would you say hey we are this company we serve here and here, and basically make it an about us page? or do you say hey this is who we are, but say we do this, that, and the other? I am afraid that although I have a webpage for each service, if the main url gets the link juice right now, how should a homepage be? Thank you for any tips or suggestions. Chris
Local Website Optimization | | asbchris0