Clients often ask us about marketing their website and SEO. They are worried about how they will be able to successfully market their website without the deep pockets of the largest companies selling online.
We will never get to the first page in search results without spending a fortune!
Not true. Any company can get to the top of search results, as long as you have realistic expectations for which search words you want to achieve these results. Individual words are typically highly competitive and costly. If you are looking to get to the top of the list for searches like “scrubs” or “uniforms” then you best be prepared to spend lots of money fighting for that. A fantastic goal, just costly.
Instead, take the road less travelled.
Work on optimizing your website and pages in ways that get you to the top of search results based on your geography. You should look to own all the searches for related products within a 50 or 100-mile radius. “Scrubs Macon Georgia” or “Uniforms Orlando Florida”. Work on all the cities and towns in your area with a decent sized population.
The strategy is a lot like how you promote your physical retail uniform store. You would not be interested in expensive advertising to a national audience. You are likely more interested in advertising that will reach everyone in your area, regional, state and perhaps nearby states
Yeah, so we’ve all this before, but how do we actually do that?
All right, let’s get specific.
Here are two ideas, nothing that is guaranteed to be a magic button, but all of which will help search engines learn that you are serious about helping shoppers in your area. You must create real website content that contain geographic references, not fake pages.
Example geography based pages would ideally have the name of the town in the URL: www.YourStoreDomain.com/scrubsinmiamiflorida Create a page on your website for each town you serve. The content on the page should have a well written description of how you help shoppers in that area. List off some example businesses in the area that use your products. List examples of the categories of products that business and individuals in that location buy from you. Show images and links to the top sellers for that town and link to those items right from your page.
Next, post news about your new website pages you just created on LinkedIn and Facebook. Then mention those pages with a link again a few weeks later on LinkedIn and Facebook. Then do it again a month later. You getting the idea?
If you spread the word to these communities that you can reach with honest, well written content, the search engines will notice. They will also reward you because they will see that your community is in fact interested in your business and your products.
The second suggestion we have is to be active online as an employee representative of your business. Visit pages that are specific to the geographic locations in which you want to be noticed and post links to your website. Leave a great review for other businesses you respect. Respond with comments to online posts that your shoppers, or potential shoppers, make on websites or social media. Be sure to be visible as a user from your store so the reviews and comments are seen as made by an employee of your company, with a website and email listed related to your business.
By creating content that talks about the geographic areas you serve, and by actively participating in websites that also serve those geographic areas, you are letting the search engines know you are indeed a trusted member of those communities. These are not tricks. These are honest behaviors you can adopt as a company that will be rewarded by search engines moving forward.