How to Steal a March on Your Online Rivals

Setting up and marketing a website for your small business takes a lot of work. There are a number of common things many small businesses are either too lazy or not clued up about to do.

Read on to find out five things you can do to leapfrog many of your competitors online and benefit from more sales/enquiries.

Optimise their Google Places listing

Google Places listings now dominate the search results for many local search terms. It’s not enough just to write a flimsy description and add your phone number, website and address.

You need to make sure your listing is optimised so you can get to the top of the pack for your chosen keywords and phrases. The difference in traffic can be significant between a top listing and a 2^nd place listing.

The good news is not many small business owners bother to optimise their listings and I’ve also written a useful article that tells you how to go about optimising your Google Places listing.

Set up and monitor an analytics account

A lot of small business owners set up an analytics account and then don’t do anything with it.

There can be real nuggets of gold contained in your analytics information which will help you improve your website. Taking the time to get to know analytics programmes such as Google Analytics or Piwik will give you an invaluable advantage over many of your rivals.

To learn more read my Google Analytics Top 10 Tips article now.

Find out what their target market really wants

Many people launch their small business websites based almost entirely on guess work. This approach leads to hit and miss results which can take months or even years to put right.

By doing your market research before you launch you will gain a significant advantage over many small businesses that simply skip this vital step.

Read my article on identifying your target market to find out more.

Write regular blog posts and articles

Writing regular content that’s relevant to your business and your target market find interesting is great for SEO and online conversions.

Nobody likes to see a stale website that’s not been updated for weeks or months. Writing content can help position you as an authority within your industry and keep your customers coming back time and again to learn more.

Unfortunately for them, many small business owners just have a website built and abandon it so by writing your own article or paying a copywriter to do it for you, you can make sizeable strides online.

If you’re stuck for blogging ideas read my article on 10 business blog topic ideas

Do their own targeted link building

Link building can be a time consuming task. Many small business owners opt for the easy but usually ineffective methods of link building such as paying for links or outsourcing their link building campaign to an overseas company.

As the old saying goes “you get what you pay for” and these two methods usually have very little positive impact on a website’s search engine rankings for the targeted keywords and phrases.

If you’re committed and tenacious enough you can do your own link building campaign and achieve much better results – read my top 10 link building tips to kick-start your rise up the rankings.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 14th, 2011 at 8:31 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.