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3 SEO Tips to Level the Playing Field

Chris Stocker

If you are a small family owned business, chances are you don’t have the funds that you would like to have to market your product or service.  Also, you may not be able to compete with the multi-million dollar budgets of Fortune 500 companies who offer the same services.  However, you know that your local service is better than the large, national, corporate brand, but you don’t know how to get this information to the customer.  Here is your best option, search engine optimization, SEO.

SEO allows you to compete with larger brands, especially on a local level.  Once you are considering organic search results, you are on a level playing field again.  Here are a few tips to help you dominate the search engines.

  1. Keyword Research – this is where it all begins.  You have to know what your customers are searching for online before you can begin to optimize for those keywords.  There are a lot of different tools out there to use, but my personal free favorite tool is the Google Keyword Tool.  Be sure to use the local monthly searches to determine your search volumes.
  2. Content Optimization – Now that you have your keywords that you are going to be using, create new content or optimize your current content to use these keywords.  Keyword density is something that I don’t worry about too much anymore because you still want the content to make sense for your users.  The content may be great for search engines, but when that visitor makes it to your site and it makes no sense to them, they will just leave the site right away.
  3. Tracking – With steps 1 and 2 complete, you will now start to see results in the search engines in a few weeks to months, there is no exact time table, which is what makes it even more important to track.  Track the keywords that you are targeting.  Are the search volumes decreasing over time?  Are you ranking for words that you did not even know, and if so, is there room to expand on those?

These are 3 quick tips to get your SEO up and running and start competing with the large marketing budgets of corporations.  Best of luck with your SEO campaign.