The way I see it, there are 3 specific business types that can take advantage of Search Engine traffic. First, there is the traditional local small business.Do you own a local printing shop? Are you a piano tuner? Is your business locally involved in professional services? If so, I think you have a big advantage when it comes to search engine optimization.
You can garner lots of search engine traffic by simply adding relevant and well-thought out articles, videos, blog posts, or other content to your website.
The reason you have an advantage is that there is typically much less competition for search engine traffic for local based keywords. So, if you are an “accountant in Walla Walla” you will be able to get traffic from Google for that term much easier than you would for the broad term of “accountant”. So, if you own a small business, then keyword research can REALLY boost traffic to your site, big time! If you can find the right keywords and create some great content surrounding these keywords, then you are well on your way to gaining a presence in Google and other search engines.
Second, are online businesses with a product to sell. This might be an e-commerce store or any other product based sites. First and foremost if you own a site like this, you should make sure that you are ranking for your brand name and/or products name(s). However, by doing a little keyword research, you might be surprised to see the related search terms to your product that you are NOT ranking for.
You can often gain great search engine placement for these related key-phrases by writing a relevant piece of content that targets these keywords in the title. Third, are content based or affiliate sites. These are websites that don’t actually sell their own products, but make money through advertising or affiliate sales. (This is the majority of types of sites that I personally own by the way). These types of sites do have a disadvantage over the other 2 business types that I mentioned. It can difficult to rank for certain keywords without actually selling the product you are
referencing.
However, don’t fret…there are LOTS of long tail keywords that you can rank for! Information and affiliate sites can take a little more time and effort to research great keywords, but with the exact match domain finder and quick competitor analysis tool, you are sure to make your job of finding these “golden nugget” keywords a whole lot easier. Best of luck as you follow one of these 3 strategies for getting search engine traffic!
Some great information and refreshingly balanced. I believe there’s been a lot of fear put into bloggers to avoid linking out, lest they lose “link juice”, but I’m with you that linking to the right sites increases relevance. I also agree that SEO is anything but dead.. There were some unscrupulous link builders, and they got theirs, but attracting quality authority links is still at the heart of good rankings and traffic. I believe that better SEOs have been writing high quality relevant content all along.