How do I outrank my competitors?
Answer:
Become a Local Authority Site
This blogs basic premise is that it’s too difficult for the average marketer to compete on a national or world wide scale.
Small businesses are marketers even if they don’t think of themselves as such. Too often small business owners have blinders on, they’re so wrapped up in the day to day operation of their business they don’t see the world changing around them.
In their parents day, businesses advertised in conventional fashion:
Yellow Page Listing
Newspaper Advertising
Television Advertising was the brass ring… and too expensive to consider.
The advent of local google advertising has changed all that, businesses that wake up and smell the coffee are going to steam roller right over those that are conservative and stodgy in their advertising approach.
When we talk about Internet advertising we are in reality talking about Google advertising. Google is the size of all it’s competitors combined by a wide margin.
If your business is not in Google, you simply do not exist.
What does marketing in Google mean exactly?
Here’s the skinny on Google advertising:
There are 10 results in the main body of a Google search result page.
There are a few on the right hand column, those are paid ads.
Sometimes there are as many as 3 listings above the main body of search results, those are paid ads.
The 10 results in the main body of search results are known in the SEO industry as “organic listings“, sometimes called “natural listings”
People tend to trust the veracity of listings found there because no one likes to be sold to… not when they’re expectations are to search in a democratic, independent medium. The organic search results amount to ‘Consumer Reports’ style listings.
It’s thought (by the searcher) that Google thinks it’s important so it must be important.
Any attempt to sell products, services and information worldwide and nationwide involves getting your website to rank high in Google.
How does Google decide who gets to be in the top spot is a tightly kept secret within Google, but there are many specific things one can do to improve ones ranking in Google. Some of those techniques produce temporary improvements in ranking, this blog post is dedicated to talking about the permanent ranking improvement strategies.
How do you improve a small business ranking in Google Permanently?
You add content to your site that is on a theme, that theme being the local area you compete in.
Let’s take the second largest city in Maryland: Frederick Maryland.
If you want to rank high in Local Google Listings, you’re going to have to get Google to think of your site as a “Hub for”, a “Portal for”, everything Frederick. We want Google to “associate” your site with your locality.
The term for this is “Authority Site”.
We want Google to think of your site as an “Authority on Frederick”
If you want Google to think of your site as an authority site, you’re going to have to add page after page of content relating to your locality…even though the content is not about your product or service.
This is the sticking point for almost every independent small business. They’re only concerned with offering their product/ service/ widget to the public.
If Google doesn’t rank you at the top, the ball game is over.
Period.
Who cares how fancy your website is… if it’s not on the front page, the first 10 search listings no one is ever going to see it.
Related posts:
- Did You Loose Your Google Places Account Google Places Listings Cheating with fake reviews or keyword stuffing...
- Getting In Trouble With Google, Did You Loose Your Top Ranking? When your site ranks pretty good and out of the...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
