Techssocial | There are only two ways to stand out from the crowd in New York: by building a really, really, really tall building—or by building a really, really, really good SEO campaign and website. And you’ll find both aplenty in the city.
The .nyc domain is used by tens of thousands of websites—and this is discounting the .com players, which exist in even greater numbers.
To add to this, New York is a metropolis—business-heavy and tech-savvy. It houses approximately 220,000 businesses, 98% of them being small businesses, whereas 89% are very small businesses.
For reference, small businesses are those that employ less than 100 people, and very small businesses employ less than 20 people.
The NY market is beyond competitive, which can be seen in the annual growth of small businesses and the strides e-commerce is making. Since e-commerce is all set to grow even further by 2022, we can expect the situation to become far more cut-throat than it is at the moment.
Luckily, being prepared for these shifts is merely a matter of investing in impeccable SEO services—and knowing how to look ahead.
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Monthly Recurring Revenue through Monthly Recurring SEO
A major factor that differentiates established, large-scale businesses from small businesses is what we call MRR, or Monthly Recurring Revenue. MRR is a fixed predicted monthly revenue for each month that established businesses set aside. This helps them do two things:
- Achieve their targets and track monthly revenues
- Observe differences in monthly revenues
MRR helps businesses understand if and why there have been shifts in consumer behavior. It also allows them to factor in a predictable, fixed income stream, making budgeting a lot easier. In fact, the reason small businesses were hit harder by the pandemic compared to large-scale businesses was a lack of steady cash flow.
Luckily for you, monthly recurring SEO and PPC marketing campaigns are an excellent way to ensure MRR. When you sign up for monthly recurring SEO services (which most leading SEO service providers in New York offer), you benefit from:
- Link building in continuity
- Fresh content that is likely to place high on SERPs
- New keywords targeted every month
- Lead generation with PPC management in amalgamation with SEO campaigns. Together, this leads to higher traffic each month
- Web design and website updates/upgrades
The Road Less Taken: Optimizing and Link-Building for New Searches
According to Google, 16% of all daily searches are “new.” Every day, Google’s algorithm crawls 20 billion websites, looking for new content. And if this new content is value-additive for prospective users, it’s served to them on SERPs. Google’s algorithm is evolving rapidly, and SEO services are always catching up—and that’s where an innovative link building strategy can help you out.
Backlinks are vital if you want to catch the attention of search engine crawlers. But there’s more to it than that: what if these links are no-follow, or to put it in simpler terms, what if they have no link juice in them? Such as links in press releases, for example. Of course, they can still send visitors your way, but only if they’re relevant. And this is where the road less taken comes in.
Most traditional SEO services in New York play it safe. They optimize for user search intent, sure—but it’s the same old user search intent across the board. As it turns out, 15% of keywords that rank isn’t being optimized by your competitors.
This is a great source to turn to if you’re, say, sending out press releases on a monthly basis—because like we mentioned, these links might not have much “juice” to them, but they still help drive traffic.
SEO SWOT for Better Local Strategies
Often, SEOs will rehash the same tips and tricks: build authority links, optimize for keywords, content is king, yadda yadda. You know the drill—but so do your competitors. You can bet that they’re also reading similar blogs and hiring SEO services in New York to help them expand their business.
But what’s important is standing out.
SEO isn’t a monolith: what a local business needs is nothing like the needs of a nationwide business; just like B2C businesses don’t employ the same strategies as B2B businesses.
We’d suggest you start with a SWOT analysis—which is like an SEO audit, but on steroids. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats—SWOT. Whereas an SEO audit tells you about the strengths and weaknesses of your SEO strategy, SWOT analysis adds valuable elements to the mix: opportunities, so you may grab them, and threats, so you may avoid them.
And that’s how you truly stand out.
A good SEO service provider will be able to tell you:
- Where your webpages are the strongest, so you don’t fix what isn’t broken.
- Where your webpages lack: are they slow-loading? Is the bounce rate high? Do the images not load well on mobile devices? You can then work on these areas.
- Where your biggest opportunities lie: could you break into a niche market by making a social media page on a certain channel? Is there a recent fad or trend that you could incorporate into your SEO campaign, and thus expand your target audience?
- What threats you face—from other local businesses in the same industry, established businesses, or negative reviews that are dragging your digital reputation through the mud.
You can further boost your SEO campaign with advanced link building strategies, such as:
- Balancing internal and external links
- Creating rapport and establishing relationships with backlinking partners
- Broken link-building
- Convert unlinked mentions into backlinks
Joseph Dyson spearheads Search Berg’s New York SEO services. In his view, the way ahead for businesses is to be unique with regard to their SEO strategies—whether that means the addition of paid search or trying something out of the box to stand out.