Imagine you are a small vendor at a crowded shopping mall. All around you, people are flocking to attractive storefronts with bright neon signs while you’re sitting at a fold-out table with a cardboard sign on the front. This is also how content creators feel about their websites.
A good internet presence is owed in part to high tiered link building. These sites often show up as “Sponsored” results or have a .gov or .edu domain at the end of the address. They enjoy the benefits of reaping the fruits from the top of the tree. For those without advertising budgets and contracts from academic and governmental institutions, there is the low hanging fruit.
The lowest common denominators of search engine optimization can be a slog to work with unless you are crafty enough. Below is a list of helpful tips on how to squeeze the most juice out of your low hanging SEO fruits.
Spend Money
As mentioned above, the best businesses know that you need to spend money to make money.
While services like WordPress allow users to create a blog for free, they also have paid plans. WordPress’ Business upgrade costs $25 per month and bundles SEO tools, Google Analytics support, and paid monetization.
Yext is another paid service that caters to creative professionals and small businesses. Their paid packages offer API and digital asset management tools.
Be Relevant
This is the most challenging phase of SEO. Staying relevant in the digital age is getting water from a raging river and all you have is a colander.
Use Google Trends to find a hot topic that can relate to your field. Trends will give you the latest, up-to-the-hour search queries and topics. Don’t be discouraged if there are topics that outside your business’ sphere. Remember to put your brand first when writing editorial content.
Make Friends
The one-sided nature of social media allows you to build an audience that can be interacted at and gives only their attention. What you need are devotees who can bring more people in.
Establish good connections with regular clients. If they are satisfied with your service, ask them for a backlink. It never hurts to incentivize link sharing by offering contests and giveaways to people who share your site on their social media pages.
Announce Yourself
Perhaps the oldest and simplest action you can do is promoting your business through a local directory. Registering with your Chamber of Commerce will add your site to a list of online businesses.
If you are opening a physical location, this is a perfect excuse for a PR campaign. Services such as Cision’s PRWeb help you create multimedia press releases, distribute them, and track your progress across audience demographics.
Create Often
If you have a strong enough audience already, then keep it strong. Make the time to create more of the content they love. You’ll not only experience a boost in clicks, but also a boost to your reputation as a content creator.