Look Like A Leader
Looking like a market leader is very attainable for any company with the right goals, focus and tactics. When I first started out in SEO a few years ago, there was a big hurtle to get around. Since we were positioning ourselves as an SEO company we had to show up at the top of the rankings for our own keywords or it would be very difficult for people to trust their ranking with us. Results are the only thing that matters.
So how did we do it? We acted very tactical. When we first started out the company was based out of a mid sized town of just over 100,000 people. We targeted the hardest keywords ‘seo’ and ‘marketing’ but we focused on owning the keywords in the market we were in. We knew ranking for the keywords of the large nearby cities would take way too long and the competitors were way more advanced. With this in mind we set a target of getting the top position in 6 months. This may not sound difficult but there aren’t many keywords harder to rank for than ones that revolve around the search engine industry.
To accomplish this we gave lectures to small businesses at the entrepreneurship and business development institutes. We also made strategic partnerships with larger firms that were great at designing and sales but did not necessarily have the technical knowledge we possessed. We were also very open about our knowledge, and giving it away for free in blogs and lectures. All of these tactics put together helped grow our business and our rankings. Once this was accomplished we were the market leader, all that anyone had to do was Google us and see who came up first for proof.
How Can You Look Like An Industry Leader?
The first step is to give away your knowledge for free. Just make sure you don’t do any work for free – there is a difference. Giving away your knowledge in the form of blogs, and lectures allows you to showcase how much of an expert you are on the topic.
Even with a potential customer having all of your knowledge does not mean they will be able to do what you do as well as you. They may give it a try, find out how difficult it actually is, (no matter how much you simplify it), they may not have the sufficient time to adequately do it, or they may not enjoy it as much as they do running their own company. But the fact is that they will remember you are an expert and hopefully you have convinced the how important them what you do is, so they will realize that it is essential and they will need your help to carry out the tasks.
If blogging or lecturing isn’t your thing consider video blogging or reaching out to reporters to let them know that you are there to help if they need an expert opinion on a story.
Other great ways of showcasing that you are an industry leader is by offering content that other people in your industry can use in their own work. This can be free photography, embeddable charts that they can use on their site. With photography asking for attribution is standard don’t be afraid to ask for credit. With graphs and charts make it easy for them to input it on their website by wrapping them with an embed code that they can just paste in their website. When they embed your work it will give credit to your site too.
David Hammel is an SEO Professional, freelance writer, professional blogger and an avid boater. He is from the Napanee area and enjoys blogging for Atkins & Hoyle about his boating knowledge and experiences.
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Comments
very useful article.
Thanks, Merle - great information! I like "give away your knowledge free...but do not work for free. Excellent advice.
Hi Merle, very good PR, enjoyed reading, liked and shared, have a bless evening
Thank you Bob
Very smart & informative article, Merle...:)
Thank you Terri and definitely agree with what you say.
Excellent information and thanks for sharing David Hammel's article with us. It's all good for people to realize out important SEO is for generating traffic from the search engines.