February 20, 2010 in Articles by Margaret H.

Local Business Has Opportunity When Fortune 500 Fails SEO

As local businesses start to optimize their webpages for search engines and customers alike – and learn to use the best keyword search terms their prospects use, with a consistent plan for both on-page and off-page SEO – the new “level playing field” can even tip the advantage toward the small business. YOU get the new customers!

If you do this right, and they do not, then who do you think will dominate the first pages of the search engines for the keywords your prospects are using in their searches for what YOU offer? (Even when you are offering the Fortune 500 company’s own products.)

And who will the prospects then choose to do business with?
Why you, of course!

It’s not a matter of deep pockets. The mega-bucks shelled out by Fortune 500 companies for PPC advertising is largely wasted. These companies jointly spend millions of dollars daily on 100,000 keywords. But shockingly, only about 25% of Fortune 500 keywords even rank among the top 50 natural search results. (Conductor Research, Q4 2009 Report)

Even with all the metrics available, they just don’t “get it.” The study found that more than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies had nearly zero search engine visibility!

32% had “very low” search visibility, while 14.6% had “low” keyword search visibility. A mere 25% managed to show up in the top 50 search listings for a keyword, product, or service. How bad is that! Your goal is to get several page one listings, to be highly visible for people searching your local area for what you have to offer. So with the Fortune 500, you can “eat their lunch!”

The solution for these Fortune 500 companies?

It’s the same as for anyone. They need for each of their business lines or product lines to apply sound keyword research (like we do). Then they need to use the most relevant and popular of those keywords strategically placed on-page, in the site’s metadata, and in hundreds of anchor text backlinks from social news (e.g., press releases published across the web), social media (e.g., videos published to YouTube and 25-30 more sites), social bookmarks (e.g., delicious and Digg), good content (e.g., articles published across the web), and in fresh content on their sites (e.g., blog articles) – or else they have no hope of showing up (much less dominating) competitive search terms when people type a phrase into a Google search (“organic search”).

They need the same SEO services package we offer to you (and we do most of if for you, so you can run your business). It would save them a ton of money from their current PPC advertising costs. Their listings would be more targeted to the searchers’ actual queries, and their conversions would increase, generating more sales and profits.

But even when they get good keywords for their paid search (sponsored search ads), the research shows they fail to use those in SEO campaigns. They pay thousands monthly for computer services. The geeks they hire probably know the technology well (Hey, I admire and need the skilled technical people!) – but this SEO world with its vast interrelationships of disciplines for blending online and offline marketing with sophisticated, ongoing market research and tracking, plus proprietary automation technologies to get the message out there in hundreds of places – is another universe to them. To most of their traditional marketers, too. Overwhelming.

Perhaps, too, it’s a cultural problem for them. For once, they cannot buy their way to the top, as in paid search where they just up the ante for a keyword (and pay through the nose). Why can’t they simply hire SEO experts to optimize key webpages, outsource content production (even though they would surely overpay again), and have the SEO and website traffic experts get all that optimized content out there?

See, now you know that YOU are way ahead of them… poised to profit as one of those for whom a deep recession makes fortunes. You know to seek affordable, impactful SEO help and to laser-target searchers’ buying keywords to your location, products and services. In the game of local search, the people find your local business, not them, and … YOU WIN!