How To Leverage Rich Media SEO for Small Businesses

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Dev Basu

03/31/09

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I deal with a LOT of local business – Lawyers, Bankruptcy Trustees, Plumbers, Movers… You name it, I’ve probably dealt with someone in that industry at one point or another. One thing that most SMB’s lack is time, specifically the time and effort required to market their business in a creative manner.  Coupled with tighter budgets, and a greater need to show results now, rather than 6 months from now, an SEO is often challenged with the need to turn around results swiftly.

Innovation in SEO Pays Off

Most businesses will play the waiting game while their organic search campaign ramps up, and keep increasing their paid search spend the longer it takes to generate significant organic traffic. The one’s that are distruptive choose to dominate the rankings in other ways – Leveraging rich media such as images, videos, powerpoints, spreadsheets, and even scanned print marketing material can help with gaining quick rankings. I’m going to examine how the average small business can quickly leverage rich media to get traffic going to their site:

Digital Asset Optimization for the Small Business

• Videos – Videos are a no-brainer when it comes to capturing the low hanging fruit of search.  Where can you get videos? Chances are your client already has something shot from their Yellowpage publisher’s video production team. If not, shooting a video is a trivial task with any bargain digital camera. For those that are truly strapped for time, a video can be created from a slideshow of images.
  • Youtube is your friend when it comes to getting great rankings. Create a channel for your business, add keyword rich descriptions, titles, and tags for maximum SEO benefit.
  • Adding sub-titles to your videos boosts viewing times and increases conversion rates. Adding sub-titles is easy to do with close to any basic video editing program.
• Images – With 1 in 5 searches being an image search, adding image SEO to your campaigns pays off royally. Alt tag and file name optimization are key to getting good image search rankings. Other tips to double dip in image SEO include:
  • Add images to your Google Local Business profile
  • Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
  • Add images to local business citation sources.
  • Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.
• Presentations/Powerpoints – Repurposing internal only presentations for public usage is a great way to gain search rankings. Digital asset optimization is easy to do on one’s own website, but also through platforms such a Slide Share and Google Docs.
• Spreadsheets and Scanned Marketing Material – Spreadsheets that offer value to your customer base such as calculator, forecasts or estimate tools are often searched for on the web. Scanned marketing material such as flyers, brochures or catalogues are also viable means of adding content to your site. For maximum benefit, syndicate any such digital assets to Doc Stoc or similar sites.
  • OCR scanning software can also compare print materials into text content which can then be used to add crawlable content to your website.

If you’ve got any other actionable tips for small businesses to capture rankings other than through local search, organic SEO, social media such as Twitter, please leave your valuable comments.

Dev Basu is a regular contributor to Search Engine Journal. He owns Powered by Search, a full service  Toronto internet marketing agency; and blogs about online marketing for small businesses, search marketing, and all matters in local seo and social media. Catch up with him at his blog, twitter, or connect on Linkedin.