Whether you are a starter in business or an advance businessman, this strategy should work for getting your business a step ahead from competitors
The best strategy for small home-based business owners to stay a step ahead of their competitors is to win the war for search engine positioning. The key to building an online strategy that will separate your business from others is to use every available tactic to drive your site up to the top of the search engine results pages.
Think about the times that you have needed to find a product or service online. You probably conducted a web search and waited for results to come back. What you got back was several pages of results. However, you probably never looked any further than the first three to five choices on the very first page.
One of the companies that showed up on page five of the search engine results might actually have been the best option for meeting your needs, but you didn’t select that provider. The reason you didn’t select that provider is because you didn’t know about it.
This example illustrates the importance of search engine positioning. Very few Internet users ever look beyond first page search engine results, unless they just cannot find any viable options there. Additionally, as soon as Internet users find a workable option, they generally stop looking.
So if your competitor is the second choice on page one results, and you are the third choice, some consumers are probably buying from your competitor without ever seeing what you have to offer. Since you are in the third position, many consumers are still looking at both your competitors website and yours.
However, what happens if your competitor is in the second position on page one, and you don’t show up until page five. The potential for lost business is significantly greater. This scenario works out great for your competitor, but can be the kiss of death when it comes to your business.
The good news is that search engine position isn’t a permanent condition. There are a number of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that you can utilize to help improve your standing in the search engines. Unless you are very knowledgeable about SEO, you should do is enlist the assistance of a reputable SEO consultant to help optimize your website.
Typically, the most basic SEO recommendation for websites is to edit the content so that specific keywords that search engines are likely to index are included in the copy. SEO consultants can also make adjustments to the tags built in to the site’s background code to make the site more search engine friendly.
There are a number of other SEO strategies that can be incorporated into the design of your website. Incorporating interactive elements that encourage repeat traffic to your website, such as blogs and forums, can really help with SEO. Anything that you can do to drive traffic to your website can help.
Search engines tend to rate sites higher that have backlinks from other websites. It can help your search engine ranking to seek out opportunities to list your website in online directories that provide links to your website.
It can also be beneficial to submit articles to free article directories that include links to your website. Every place you can get a link to your website published online helps search engines look upon your website in more favorably.
Search engine optimization is ongoing. To make sure that you win the battle for search engine positioning, you have to continue to use this strategy for your small home-based online business. Keep in mind that continuing SEO effort is the key to building an online strategy for long-term competitive advantage.