5 hacks your small business can use to outrank larger ones

“Can small businesses outrank larger ones?”

To answer the question: Yes! When done right, with consistency, smaller businesses can outrank larger ones. In many ways, the current online landscape has leveled the playing field for businesses of all sizes. Small businesses now have the opportunity to compete and even surpass bigger competitors in search engine rankings and online visibility. While it may seem daunting to go head-to-head with industry giants, with the right digital marketing strategies, your small business can carve out its own space.

Here are 5 hacks to help you on your way! 

1. Nail your user experience (UX)

UX plays a pivotal role in determining a website's ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Smaller businesses can leverage this to their advantage by prioritizing UX enhancements that resonate with their target audience. Firstly, optimizing website responsiveness across all devices is crucial. With an increasing number of users accessing websites via smartphones and tablets, ensuring seamless navigation and readability on smaller screens can significantly improve user engagement and retention. This involves adopting a mobile-first approach to design, where website elements adapt fluidly to different screen sizes, ensuring a consistent and enjoyable browsing experience regardless of the device used.

Additionally, small businesses can focus on providing valuable and relevant content that aligns with user intent. By understanding your audience's needs and preferences, you can create content that addresses common pain points, offers solutions, and showcases your expertise in the industry. This could include informative blog posts, how-to guides, product demonstrations, and customer testimonials. By delivering content that adds genuine value and resonates with your users, you can establish yourself as an authoritative source within your niche, ultimately driving organic traffic and improving your search engine rankings.

2. Build your social presence

To enhance your social presence and compete with larger businesses, you’ll need to adopt strategic approaches tailored to your audience and resources. Firstly, it's crucial to identify the most relevant social media platforms where your target audience is active. By focusing efforts on platforms frequented by their demographic, smaller businesses can maximize engagement and reach. Consistent and high-quality content creation is key to maintaining an active social presence. This includes sharing informative and entertaining posts, engaging with followers through comments and direct messages, and leveraging visual content such as images and videos to capture attention.

Other tactics small businesses can use to amplify their social presence include:

• Partnering with influencers who align with their brand values and target audience can help extend their reach and credibility.
• Participating in industry events, online forums, and networking groups that will facilitate meaningful connections and conversations within their niche.

3. Use canonical tags

Canonical tags are essential tools for smaller businesses aiming to outrank larger competitors in SERPs. One effective strategy is to identify high-quality content pages on your website that serve as authoritative resources within your industry. By specifying canonical tags on duplicate or similar content pages, smaller businesses can signal to search engines which version of the content should be prioritized for indexing and ranking.

Moreover, smaller businesses can leverage canonical tags to overcome duplicate content issues that may arise from syndicated content, e-commerce product variations, or URL parameters. By consolidating duplicate content under a single canonical URL, smaller businesses can prevent dilution of their online authority and ensure that search engines attribute ranking signals to the preferred version of the content. This approach not only helps streamline the indexing process for search engines but also ensures that your business can maintain control over how your content appears in search results. 

4. Aim for a local audience 

Focusing on local search optimization can be a game-changer for smaller businesses. By prioritizing local SEO strategies, you can target the specific geographic area where you operate, allowing you to capture relevant local search traffic and compete effectively in your niche. One effective approach is to optimize your Google My Business (GMB) listing by ensuring accurate and consistent business information, including name, address, phone number, and operating hours. Additionally, smaller businesses can enhance their GMB profiles with engaging photos, customer reviews, and relevant business categories to improve their visibility in local search results.

5. Frequently refresh your content 

Search engines like Google prioritize fresh, relevant content when determining search results, as it indicates the website's relevance and credibility to users. By regularly updating your website with new blog posts, articles, case studies, or other types of content, you can signal to search engines that you are actively engaged with your audience and industry trends. This can lead to higher crawl rates and indexing frequency, allowing the websites of smaller businesses to rank higher in search results for relevant keywords.

Moreover, frequent content updates provide more opportunities for smaller businesses to:

• Target a wider range of long-tail keywords and address niche topics within their industry. This will help you to attract highly targeted organic traffic and establish yourself as an authoritative source of information within your niche. 
• Encourage repeat visits from users.This increases overall engagement metrics, such as time spent on site and pages per session. 

Carving out your own niche

Ultimately, while the digital landscape may seem intimidating for small businesses, it also presents a wealth of opportunities for growth and success. By adopting a strategic and proactive approach to digital marketing, you can level the playing field and compete effectively with bigger competitors.