Most small businesses know how to get found online by taking risks. You do something controversial, and then all of a sudden, everyone is talking about you on Facebook and Twitter.

 

Unfortunately, these kinds of strategies can backfire. You think you’ve got an excellent idea for what your customers will love, but you wind up looking needy, insensitive, or desperate. Two-thirds of the time, it just doesn’t work. 

 

But what are your alternatives? The internet is a crowded space, and it’s hard for small companies to get ahead. Is there anything you can do? Let’s take a look. 

 

Take Advantage Of Local SEO

 

 

Be honest about who consumes your services. In all likelihood, you’re not selling to people on the other side of the country. Instead, your market is primarily people who live and work in the local area. 

 

If that’s the case, it makes no sense to pay for generic SEO services that improve your ranking for non-local keywords. You’re throwing money down the drain. 

 

The Bros is an agency that offers SEO services to plumbing businesses. Most of its work involves helping plumbers rank better in local search results. And there’s a good reason for that: plumbing is a local service. So it doesn’t make sense to try to rank well for highly competitive general keywords. 

 

Complement Your Digital Marketing With Offline Marketing

 

Trying to dominate digital channels is a massive undertaking – something that’s easier said than done. The amount of competition is extreme at times, which means prices wind up getting bid up to ridiculous levels most small business owners can’t afford. 

 

But fortunately, you don’t have to play the game. You can actually rig your online marketing efforts using complementary offline channels. 

 

The way it works is simple. You strategically place QR links on posters and in stores and then get your customers to consume your digital content via mobile. 

 

The technique works because of the lack of competition in this area. Most companies aren’t doing it. Yet it can give your brand the traction it needs to grow its organic traffic. 

 

Optimize Your Meta Descriptions

 

A meta description is usually just a single sentence – around 160 characters – that describes your pages’ content. It’s the short clip of text that appears below the hyperlink in search results. And it tells both users and search engines what’s on your page. 

 

Most small businesses have no idea about the importance of choosing great meta descriptions. Often they leave it blank or just allow Google to populate it with the first couple of lines of text from the corresponding page. 

 

In general, this approach is a bad idea. Don’t do it. Instead, craft your meta descriptions individually, using tried-and-tested SEO principles. Always include your main keywords. And provide a story that thoroughly explains the value the page offers. Avoid writing a summary. Use the space to really sell the page to the user. 

 

Incidentally, you should apply the same approach to your page and content titles. Spend some time optimizing them for keywords.