Scaling Business Operation n SEO as an Entrepreneur

[Caleb-Seah]

Hi! I'm a 1 man business operating in Singapore doing Delivery Service for Business. Right now my website is ranking at the 3rd page of google, www.vantagedelivery.com
The keywords that i'm looking to rank are delivery service, delivery service singapore.

Being alone in the business, i struggle in doing the SEO aspect of the website on a consistent basis. Therefore i'm looking for a scale-able way for me to do SEO in my free-time, perhaps 2 hours a day?

Any recommendation especially with regards to the routine i should be looking at? 
With regards blogpost, what are the recommended things to do especially when the crowd of the people who reads blogpost in my industry is close to none?

Thanks!

[LesleyPaone]

I do not know if you have already done it, but for a company like yours I would bang out as many local citations as I could. Singapore is supported by whitespark.ca, I would use them to find citations and fill them out. https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder I am pretty sure they have a Moz perk too. You could also get them to build them for you, their rates are pretty affordable.

[Caleb-Seah]

Hi!

Thanks for your fast response. But was just wondring:
Don't i need more links right now as most of my-page optimisation are quite ok already?
Isn't citation all about improving rankings over at Google Places?

[Vizergy]

Citations will help you rank for location specific queries as well.  Also - I do think you should work on your link building some more.  Do a competitive link analysis - you have competitors with much stronger link profiles.

[LesleyPaone]

Citations are links. They do improve the results with google places, but at the same time they also help with queries like "delivery in singapore" or things like "package delivery in singapore". Local citation sites generally have good rankings, so where they might have out ranked you in the past, your result might be the one that pops up, or if they pass link juice, it could be what it needs to drive your site up in the serps.

[Caleb-Seah]

Hi Billy,

I totally agree that i should work on my link building. But after much reading, it seems like content is placed on a high emphasis which i think i do not have much ideas for content.

Anything i should take note while doing competitive link analysis too?

Thanks!

[Vizergy]

Not really - the links you find that they have that are viable for you to pursue will be fairly obvious.  Just be diligent.  I do agree with Prestashop - because you are engaged in such a specific location citations will be very good for you.

[Caleb-Seah]

Hi!

I guess i'll try out the suggestion that you've suggested.

What's the moz perk for whitespark which you mentioned earlier?

What do you think can be next with regards to ranking higher?

Thanks!

[LesleyPaone]

You can check out all of the perks here, http://moz.com/perks

I would build everyone you can find that is relevant at first, then give the site a bit and see where you are sitting in the serps. Then you can start more external link building.

[JaneCopland]

With two hours a day, I would develop a weekly routine that involves some of the following, some on a daily basis and some once / twice per week depending on what sort of activity / results you are seeing:

• Daily check of Analytics and Webmaster Tools (404 errors, messages, crawl stats, etc.)
• Full set-up of Moz Analytics to take advantage of analysis and tracking here; daily / weekly checking of campaigns (Moz emails weekly updates, which are useful).
• Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks
• One or two content projects per week (more on this later)
• Regular site crawls with a tool like ScreamingFrog to complement what you're receiving through Moz, checking for on-page errors, redirects, etc.
• Short check of SEO news outlets like this one, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable to ensure you understand algo updates, interesting and relevant new ideas, and industry news, but perhaps without getting bogged down in blog posts / news that is not relevant to your business.

Regarding blog posts / content and low readership, think outside of your target market when it comes to readership. A good example of a company doing this recently was Aviva, a UK insurance company. They didn't optimise the potential links aspect of this, but they could have done so for a very good result.

They conducted a study on the over-spending of first-time parents, showing how much money is "wasted" on things parents / new babies don't really need. The mainstream press covered this pretty well: I actually read about the study in a hard-copy newspaper rather than online. Online, they did not conduct outreach well to take advantage of this study (lots of mentions from newspaper websites, etc. with no links), but the premise of the study was great.

Why was it great? Because insurance is pretty boring. But new babies are not boring to Aviva's target market, and they are not boring to a whole lot of other people besides. The baby industry is worth billions worldwide. They very effectively tapped into a subject that a lot of people would talk about, and that subject is at least somewhat related to what Aviva does (personal / family financial services).

So what about the delivery business?

Well, how about a study on the amount of money lost worldwide from delivery accidents, poor packaging and logistics, etc.? People tend to like stories about the wastage / saving of money at scale.

Or a study showing the average number of miles traveled by different types of products in international shipping, e.g. "the average piece of lamb from New Zealand travels X,000 miles from its farm to grocery stores, given that New Zealand ships lamb to Y countries worldwide. Z,000 tonnes of this is frozen whilst N,000 tonnes is chilled", etc. Tailor this to what you usually ship or leave it generic, focusing on logistics as a whole. As in the Aviva example, it doesn't have to be super tied to what you do - Aviva does not sell nor specifically insure baby products.

What you're looking to do is create content that is relevant to your potential customers and to other people besides, but is not necessarily about your subject matter if your subject matter is pretty boring. Your potential customers or "people in your industry" might not read or write a lot about the industry, but they are people with interests nonetheless, and you can tap into what DOES interest them.

[Caleb-Seah]

Hi Jane!

Wow this is a very comprehensive write-up and i fully appreciate the extra mile you go in clarifying all these things...

As a small biz owner, i don't think i have the resources to get so many stuff as i go along in SEO-ing my own business. For e.g. Moz, i don't think i'll renew it as it's really expensive for me considering, i seldom fully utilised it's tools.

May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks"? and what should we do about it ?

Thank you very much:)

[KeriMorgret]

I'm an employee at Moz, so I'm biased, but I do want to point out that this Q&A is also one of the benefits of being a Pro subscriber. People like Jane often charge over $100 an hour for consultations, and Q&A lets you get a whole month of advice from people in the field for that amount.

[Caleb-Seah]

Hi Keri,

Thanks for your wise advice... I'll consider when looking at it... As it's quite tuff for me financially on my side as i'm still a One-man business.

Do you guys think you could have a smaller version plans for entrepreneurs like us who only manages their own website and SEO for their company?

[KeriMorgret]

Right now, we don't have other plan options that are more inexpensive, but we do know people in your situation would benefit from this. I'll be sure to let the proper team know about your thread.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

May i also then ask why should we do "Regular download / checking of your own site's backlinks"

By this, I mean conducting a regular download from Open Site Explorer of your links and checking to see if they have increased or decreased in number, what the quality is like and which type of links you'd like to get more of. You can also download your links from your Google Webmaster Tools account, but it is good to have more than one source of backlink data because different services usually show a slightly different picture due to their crawling capabilities, etc. Other services that do this include Ahrefs and MajesticSEO.

I would say that if you are going to renew, definitely use a few hours of SEO time a week to get familiar with the toolset and what it can do for you. $99 a month can go a long way if you take advantage of what's on offer, but I agree that it is a waste if you don't use it. The good thing about learning to use the tools yourself is that you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars on consulting if you can do a lot of this yourself. Understanding the tools and what they tell you also means that you will be better able to pick good external consultants in the future if you get to the stage where you can employ / contract someone to do SEO for you.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jane