A lot of effort goes into running a business. It’s only understandable that growing businesses want to see quick results. When it comes to marketing, this often means that brands will disregard their SEO strategy and concentrate on paid ads or social media, assuming this will lead to quick results and more visibility.
It is also discouraging to search for your targeted keywords online to find big brands ranking high on the first page. How do you compete with these brands? What SEO strategy should you rely on? And is investing in a good SEO strategy worth it?
Let’s look at some big brands and small businesses, who’ve skilfully used SEO strategies to further their business-
Leverage Location-Based Search
Zomato is one of the biggest brands in the Indian Economy. Ahrefs has reported that Zomato gets 33.7M organic traffic every month.
And contrary to popular belief, none of these are through brand searches (searches that include “Zomato”).
So, how does Zomato achieve so many organic visitors?
They’ve created different subfolders for different cities on their platform.
They’ve tapped in location-based searches. This means they’ve divided their website into subfolders.
When you create location pages, you automatically rank for these location keywords, making it a very smart SEO tactic to rank better and invite organic traffic, even if they aren’t Zomato users.
Local Search
Never ignore the impact of Google My Business and local searches. Think of it this way- you know that hotel aggregators like MakeMyTrip and Goibibo are both big brands with a bigger budget than most local hotels. However, whenever you search for a hotel in a particular location, the local businesses appear first.
This is the power of leveraging your local listings, they are in fact one of the most powerful tools to include in your SEO strategy to beat big brands.
Free Resources
Despite what many people will tell you, SEO is primarily about the reader. The search engine will rank your website or webpages if you’re adding value and answering user queries.
Free resources are highly sought after simply because they are useful and help users to a large extent.
So FreshBooks simply leveraged this knowledge and got ahead in the game. FreshBooks is an invoice and accounting software. They’ve provided free invoice templates on their website to lure in new customers.
This page appears for keywords such as “invoice template” which receives over 100 thousand searches every month.
While this might be a very fruitful SEO strategy, there’s no denying the power of a free sample. This SEO strategy is bound to create organic traffic but also help you gain new customers for your business.
User-Generated Content
You certainly can’t miss Amazon on this list! This eCommerce site has done everything right when it comes to creating a good SEO strategy. They’ve provided so many social cues on their website. This includes user reviews and ratings.
SEO always wards user-generated content as it adds to the authenticity of any site. This makes the site rank and makes the purchase decision easier by eliminating any doubts a new user may have.
Relying on user-generated content can greatly benefit a new business looking to build an effective SEO strategy.
Content Strategy
SEO is an invitation to dine at your table, content is the reason people stay. One of the most important aspects of creating an effective SEO strategy is creating the right content strategy.
Venngage is a fine example of the same. They try to answer all questions that their target audience might be asking with quality content. Venngage is an infographic design company that leverages content to rank on relevant keywords.
They’ve built an extensive guide called “What is an Infographic” which appears for different keywords like “infographics”, “infographics example” and “infographics definition” which collectively amounts to 100 thousand searches in a month.
SEO is the most cost-effective, and sustainable marketing strategy to use online. Even for small businesses with small budgets, it is easy to leverage search engines to get noticed and make the impact they want to.
If you’d like to know more about SEO strategy and the right tactics for your business, visit ideatick for more info.