How to rank for Google’s first page as a small local business

Summary:

1. It is extremely rare for small businesses to be able to rank among popular, more general search terms, because these have been saturated and largely turned into a pay-to-play race between large corporations.
2. You need to be able to cover a first page, so you need to choose a niche of a niche of a niche in a specific location where you’ll have very little competition. At this point in the market, you’ll almost always have competition, but you’ll almost always be able to out-perform them if you’re consistently targeting low-popularity keywords for local search results.
3. After you’ve exhaustively covered that specific niche, creating as many pieces of content exploring it as you can think of, you can begin exploring a new niche to grow the range of low-popularity keywords you’re hitting the first page of.

It’s a lot of boring work, but that’s what works.

It can seem impossible for a small, local businesses to compete with nationwide corporations in ranking for Google’s first page of search results. You already see they’ve out-performed you in the keyword game, and as you start looking into other methods, it seems they’ve got you beat on every front; backlinks, interlinks, seniority, shares, and return visitors. It seems the rich get richer and those who struggle only continue.

Rather than debating this, what if it’s better to stop trying to out-ball the Lakers?

Nothing’s impossible, but it’s impractical and undesirable for you to waste resources competing with billion-dollar companies in (what has become) yet another pay-to-play marketing channel. This is one of those cases where is better to give up than to struggle.

Where should we struggle instead? Niche, niche, niche; and when you think you’ve niched too far, go at least one step further. Are you an accountant? You probably intend to make helpful content about accounting to provide value to consumers looking to hire an accountant. You, of course, should provide that value on your site; but with such competition, no one’s ever going to see it from a search engine.

After laying the foundation of your platform with these valuable articles, now you begin positioning yourself. You’ve got your ‘accounting niche;’ now choose a niche of that niche, and a niche of that; then add a location. Accounting advice for masonry companies; no, accounting advice for masonry companies who exclusively hire subcontractors; and you live near Charlotte, North Carolina.

‘But why would I do that? That limits my market!’ You won’t have a (Google) market if you can’t find a slice of the search algorithm to claim the first page of. When you get your traffic up, you’ll get your portfolio and references up, and then you’ll have no problem expanding.

‘Tax secrets for stonework contractors in Charlotte, North Carolina’

‘Masonry bookkeeping blunders costing contractors thousands in North Carolina’

‘How subcontractors can save you money as a stonework contractor in North Carolina’

Chances are that you can out-hustle whichever accounting companies you’re competing with in Charlotte, North Carolina who are exclusively targeting stonework contractors—if not short-term than long-term.

After—after—you’ve exhaustively explored every angle of the specific niche you’ve chosen, you can choose a similarly specific niche and do the same thing. Of course, if you think of a new angle for the previous niche, it would definitely benefit you to explore it with more content.

The reason for this is that, since you can’t (yet) win with the popular, more general terms, your time is best invested with the less-popular, more specific terms (smaller the better, until your site ranking increases by dominating a wider variety of extra-specific topics, then you can gradually broaden your topics wherever you think you can out-perform).

As you cover the first page results of a greater variety of less-popular, more specific search terms, you’ll approach the same traffic you would’ve gotten from one of the more popular, general terms. Then larger scale competition might be more practical. 

The method is slow and takes an significant amount of time writing as many kinds of articles on a single topic as possible, while still providing value in each one individually. To add to your burden; this is all in addition to the more generally valuable articles you’ve laid as the foundation of your site. It’s a lot of slow, boring work, which is why it works in competing with flashy pay-to-players.