One of the benefits of working at Oneupweb is our location here in Traverse City, Michigan. Not familiar with northwest lower Michigan? Check out the Our Area page for a small photo sampling.
Oneupweb is located at the southeast corner of Leelanau County, which makes our office a great starting point for after-work and weekend excursions. One-stop-sign towns are scattered throughout Leelanau County, and are nestled in and around natural and man-made landmarks such as the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and the Grand Traverse Lighthouse.
Leelanau County is the kind of place that thrives on tourists and summer residents from May through September but turns peacefully silent the moment the last orange leaf blows off the maple tree.
Following the great exodus, the million dollar question many Leelanau County locals try to answer is how to make a good enough living to allow for the opportunity to live here year around. As a result, a handful of enterprising individuals have created businesses specializing in niche products with a Leelanau County flair.
For the most part, these companies rely on internet mail order, local and national word-of-mouth (tourists are great at word-of-mouth), catalog mailings, the holiday gift show circuit, holiday gift giving and pleading with those Oprah people in Chicago to get in on some list.
Some of these companies have done an amazing job with these marketing techniques and are distributing their products all over the world, while others are still trying to get off the ground. Locally these companies are big fish in a small pond, but nationally they are small fish in a big lake.
So how does search engine optimization (SEO) fit into this?
I ran a few of these local companies’ product keywords through the old Google machine and with the exception of one company that is a giant in the cherry products industry, none of them placed very high on a search engine results page (SERP).
After poking around a few of their websites, it didn’t take long to start finding substantial mistakes which hampered their ability to place strongly on a SERP. Not good for the little fish.
Now this is where SEO can turn that little Yellow Perch of a Leelanau County business into the proverbial King Salmon.
What gets me excited about SEO is that it can give a small mail order company with an incredible product the opportunity to have a large presence in its given market.
Marketing departments, in companies large and small, need to consider how SEO can help give them the exposure that they are working so hard for.
Don’t be the little fish in the pond. Learn how SEO can give you the opportunity to be the big fish.
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Excellent point! I have been telling small businesses that this is something they have control of and can do for themselves or by working with their web developer. Great post.
Good..But how about the other that dont have the right location in promoting their business?
Thats what SEO is for .. isn’t it ??
Small businesses just need that little bit of limelight and upper hand to be visible … after that they are definitely as competent and professional in their services as the bigger companies …
it is just that initial recognition ( read ranking ) that is required to kick it off on the internet ..
I.T. Primer:
Hey thanks for responding. I think the great thing about SEO is that a physical location doesn’t really matter to promote the business. It’s all about the location on the SERP and all you need is a creative product and a solid website. If you know your SEO stuff, you can be right there, duking it out with the big boys.
You make an excellent point.
Small businesses need to realize that if they can jump on the SEO band-wagon they have a better chance at competing with their competition.
There are a lot of organizations out there that can help these businesses get on track. (I’ve linked to the website with my name)
In a lot of cases these “making ends meet” SEO ventures lead to the small business realizing the potential of a sustantially larger consumer base and shifting from local focus to established internet presense. The problem is, if you SEO for keywords like “Suttons Bay Fudge”, get established there, then want to move to a broader market (hence broader keyword umbrella) it’s questionable as to how to make that jump. Do you SEO for keywords like “Northern Michigan Fudge”, “Michigan Fudge”, “Midwest Fudge”, etc…
At that post the business has to make a growth decision… either stay small and cater to the locals via localized search terms and physical store front, or lose presence on SERP for local search terms and take a change getting into the larger market.
For physical goods, perhaps this is addressed by SEO for non-localized keywords (Sweet Fudge), but for services, like senior portrait photography where the photographer isn’t willing to travel outside a certain area, this step for catering to a larger audience (Suttons Bay Photographer now Northern Michigan Photographer) becomes a bit more complicated. If the client is going purely for organic clicks, perhaps a Google Local optimized site can cater to localized searches while keyword inclusions can cater to the broader audience.
Just my two cents about localized SEO strategies.