I have been trying to figure out how to boost the rank of a local business page compared to that of a blog. I set up a page (actually a wp blog) for a friend who is buying and selling cell phones that we drive traffic to through facebook. While facebook is doing well, most of the sales come from word of mouth traffic and craigslist. The cell phone type keywords are extremely competitive but it got me to thinking. We pay way more than most big online companies and could no doubt steal some business strictly on our prices. How do you attempt to rank for competitive keywords when you aren't producing new content? It is just a static page. What methods would you use to compete with the big boys.
If you're getting most of your sales from Craigslist and word of mouth then continue to do that. Continue with what's working rather than wasting time waiting for what you're not quite sure will work. Since word is spreading via word of mouth, then clearly your business seems to be benefitting from Social Media in some way and classified ads. That's perfectly fine. In fact, the more traffic you get to your site through those means, they will rank int he search engine by themselves because of the traffic. Most people don't get traffic upfront so they need backlinks or ads to help get that initial traffic. If you have nice looking photos on your website, you may also want to consider Pinterest. Continue what you're doing and see if you can scale up. I wouldn't fix what's not broken.
everythingsimpl: How do you attempt to rank for competitive keywords when you aren't producing new content? By producing new content! Even photos of old phones as gowriter suggested. The WP platform gives you a big advantage for scaling up the static site. Create a separate page for photos of each phone using tags like "buying brand-x model ###" Then put a text link on each page back to the home page and/or the "contact us" page. You could end up with hundreds of pages getting indexed with images. Google loves images and so do searchers. Besides Craigslist I would also use Backpages for the SEO boosting backlinks.
Just2EZ Thanks, I actually just started to talk about doing this because I have been using pinterest traffic for another site.
Completely agree with the above advice, however...as Just2ez said, content is so important if you want to rank. Personally I don't really see a site position well without that unless there is a blog attached for the link juice. I once had an e-commerce site where the content rarely changed and it was minimal. Ranking seemed to take FOREVER (years) but the one thing that eventually got it moving was blogging about it with links going back to my money site. This was the was the only way I could pull off any movement at all. Information and images is the key, but definitely keep up the social game...that will do you well when trying to rank.
Well, for competitive keywords, it takes longer, it may take year as well. I would say build links naturally, include almost all the methods of link building, use some nofollow links also so that it would look more natural to search engines.
Ok, part two of the question.....Even if you do actually achieve a better rank in google is it worth it? Being that this is a local business it doesn't do much good for traffic to be generated from other areas. I am guessing that you would need to target local cities etc plus the other keywords to get traffic that is necessary to increase business rather than page views. What do you think?
everythingsimpl: other keywords to get traffic Elsewhere we mentioned ZIP CODES and CITY NAMES ranked by Google. If you notice the ads Google shows you they are often local businesses. (Google knows where your ISP link is coming from, depending on your provider) Use pictures of local landmarks with relevant name tags to boost rank. The more you mention the service areas the more Google will promote you locally. As for business versus page views, always have a "Call to Action" on your landing page.
