Small business and individuals are often faced, at least offline, with the daunting task of competing with big box stores. More often than not, the small mom and pop shop gets squeezed out by a larger, competing business that offers similar (and often inferior, but not always) product at a much lower price.
It’s a bone of contention, especially for this small town guy who has seen Vancouver Island change from a series of small towns with quaint shops to a sprawl of big box stores and shopping centers.
One place the big box stores can’t compete, or at least don’t compete, is local search. As a small entrepreneur serving a very focused region, you can easily out optimize the larger, even medium sized competitors. To learn how to fold the big box stores, read my article on seven strategies to optimize for local search. The why is a bigger question, one that I’ll answer below.
Simply put, a business reaches a point in it’s growth plan where it either has to seek business outside of a particular operating region to facilitate the growth plan or it must stop growing and be satisfied with the business it has. If you choose to grow, you have to target other markets with your SEO campaign. Nanaimo becomes Vancouver Island, Vancouver Island becomes BC, etc…
By strengthening your efforts and campaigns to target multiple regions, efforts aimed at smaller regions are diluted.
Let’s say your business previously had all of it’s business come from Nanaimo. Recently, you’ve expanded into the Comox Valley but haven’t targeted that region with any marketing. Your site shows up well for Nanaimo related searches, but nil for the Comox Valley.
You could just add the words “Comox” and “Courtenay” to your titles, and it could work, but each word you add takes value from those you already have. You also need relevant links from the new operating region and relevant content to give you some market penetration.
The more regions you add, the more time you have to spend marketing them and the more competition you have. This scales to the global level, where you’ll need a staff of marketers, seo specialists and web gurus working on your SEO full time.
I don’t have to spend as much time, for example, as a global blog like SEOmoz. They’re a great company, with awesome articles. They have an office and an editorial staff, they have tens of thousands of visitors and probably more links then I’ll ever have to my website. They’ll not show up for SEO Nanaimo though, because it’s not worth the traffic to go through the effort. Most big businesses, and even mid sized businesses with multiple operating regions are faced with the same. To support growth, it’s just not feasible to target a single market.
And that’s where your advantage as a small, local entrepreneur comes into play. By spending an hour or two a week on SEO you can watch your site soar above those of your competitors without the costly expense of an in house SEO team or outsourced marketing.
