May 24th, 2010 by Nick

If you are a smaller or more local company when it comes to your search engine optimization strategies you may think you do not stand a chance against the big players. This is commonly thought if there are very well known companies within your industry, as those smaller companies feel a little like a fish out of water and think they stand no chance against those who appear to be top of their game.

Any search engine optimisation company will tell you how search engines such as Google and Bing favour well known or familiar brands, which in turn makes the smaller or less known companies feel that they do not stand a chance of getting to the top of search engine results pages (SERP’s) as the search engines have a preference for the larger companies before we have even started.

Whilst some of this may have elements of truth to it, there is one very important factor to remember when it comes to a smaller business, and that is that there are fewer restrictions as to what you can and cannot post on your web pages. Whilst at first this may not seem like such a positive point, in terms of getting your page ranking higher and increasing visitors to your site, there are many benefits to this.

For starters, it is very rare that a large organisation will post any content which could be deemed controversial. Unless the nature of their business is to portray a specific opinion about something, usually they will be told not to comment on high profile news stories and remain on the fence, as opposed to taking sides. The reason large companies adopt this attitude is that they have such a vast array of consumers, that there are guaranteed to be customers who have conflicting opinions, so by favouring one side they are ostracising part of their customer base.

As a smaller company you can generally afford to have a bit more free will in what you say. This is not because you are not as important, but more that your customer base is likely to be more niche and supportive of you, therefore more likely to share your opinions and beliefs as opposed to just jumping on the bandwagon of following a big brand with everyone else.

This also works well with the increase use of real time search. If there is some breaking news regarding your industry or which would be of interest to your audience, then a larger organisation will usually not be allowed to comment until an official statement has been made or the full facts are there. As a smaller company, you can probably break the news without it having too much of a backlash, and as long as it is done correctly, it could be the thing to get you noticed.

Overall, if you are a small company be creative in your blogs and content and be a bit controversial. Granted you should still have boundaries, but just push them a little bit further.

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