How to Grow Your Small New York Business Online on a Budget

Contents

The Importance of Understanding New York SEO

1. Create a Local Keyword Strategy
2. Get Your Business on the Map!
3. Create New York-Specific Content
4. Master the Art of Link Building for New York Businesses
5. Get Active on Social Media
6. Tweak Your Website

Wrapping Up!

As competition becomes increasingly fierce in New York, small businesses are stumped. As a brand that has yet to become established, how can you possibly get seen by your target audience?

This may sound like a task that’s almost impossible to check off.

Today, New York is saturated with hundreds of thousands of local businesses. While the number of competitors is an issue, the quality of competition is an even bigger brain teaser.

How can you possibly do better than thousands of competitors with top-tier digital marketing strategies, products, services, and customer support?

Well, you can. And it’s not as hard as it’s made out to be!

In this blog, we’ll help you understand how you can grow your small New York business online.

We’ll offer a systematic approach by talking you through the stages of small business growth. This incremental, strategic approach is more practical and effective. It increases the chances of achieving great results that can be easily sustained.

Let’s dive into it!

 

The Importance of Understanding SEO in New York

Before discussing individual strategies, let’s flip a few pages back and cover the basics real quick.

Small business growth in New York is contingent on one practice: search engine optimization (SEO). This refers to the process of optimizing your online and offline presence to attract more visitors, earn more impressions, get more clicks, and secure more conversions.

Sounds like a dream, right? Well, SEO is that powerful.

It’s your golden ticket to achieving impressive growth as an up-and-coming business. SEO comprises a set of three key activities: on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and technical optimization.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what these practices entail:

As a small business based in New York, you should target each of these three practices to grow your business. Effective, well-balanced, and thorough SEO will help your business get seen, get ahead, and get established!

1. Create a Local Keyword Strategy 

Keyword research and optimization are the bedrock of small business growth.

Let’s understand this a more. As a small business in New York, you target customers in New York. You may offer your services in NYC, Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Long Beach, or perhaps throughout New York. Ultimately, you’re targeting people within the constraints of this state, not beyond.

Since your business is location-specific, your SEO strategy should also be location-friendly. Start with keywords. We recommend creating a robust keyword strategy that includes region-specific keywords.

Let’s say you offer tech support across New York. Now, if someone is looking for such services, their search entries will look something like this:

They may get more specific. If so, they’ll specify the service or location, which will refine the search terms even more. Here are some examples:

No matter which industry you operate in, your target audience will search for terms that follow this pattern.

If you run a food trucking company, your audience will search for “food truck New York,” etc.

If you’re a practicing attorney in Buffalo, your audience will search for “experienced lawyer in Buffalo” and the like.

These are keywords. Once they’re entered, Google’s search engine spiders will get to work and fetch similar webpages accordingly.

As a small business owner in New York, you want your webpages to show up.

If we search for “best interior designer in New York,” the following search results appear:

Why are these specific search results showing up? Well, because these companies have optimized their website using relevant keywords, including location-specific keywords.

This is exactly what you need to be doing to show up among the top search results!

If your keyword strategy is top-tier, you’ll also earn a spot in the coveted Google 3-Pack, the section with the map on the right. This often shows up as the first set of search results for local businesses.

It earns an extremely high number of clicks, so if you make it, you’ll guarantee a generous boost in traffic, clicks, and conversions!

At Search Berg, our keyword research experts work closely with small New York businesses and create an individualized strategy that helps them get to the top. We’ll give you a comprehensive keyword report for just $99. Once you put it into practice and start noticing the results, you’ll understand the importance of excellent keyword research. You can also do your own keyword research as a starting point. While it may not be as comprehensive and refined as a specialized report, it’ll give you an idea of how to get started!

Google Keyword Planner is an excellent tool. You can gain pretty accurate insights and create a great keyword research and implementation strategy as a beginner.

At Search Berg, we target a range of keywords, including primary, long-tail, LSI, broad match, phrase match, exact match, and geo keywords. We take a deep dive into your industry, goals, audience interests, and business model to structure a strategy that’s right for you. When used correctly, the right keywords will help you gain a power-packed boost in visibility.

2. Get Your Business on the Map!

We just covered the Google 3-Pack. In this section, we’ll take a deeper dive into it. Why?

Because it dictates:

1. a) Whether your brand is seen by your audience and
2. b) How your audience perceives your brand.

Creating a Google My Business profile is a great way to get your business on the map! As customers look for local products/services, there’s a greater chance of your business showing up if you have a comprehensive, accurate, and updated Google My Business page.

The best part? This is a completely free tool.

It allows you to share basic information about your New York business (business name, website, category (industry), business hours, address, phone number, description, FAQs, attributes, reviews, etc.

You can also share photos and videos to give people a slice of what your products, services, or business experience is like.

Your Google My Business profile will put you on Google Search and Maps. The better your profile, the higher your rankings!

For starters, set up your profile. Make sure you enter as much information as possible.

It must be completely authentic. If there are any inaccuracies, your listing could potentially be taken down. Take your time, double-check everything, and make sure your profile is on track.

We also recommend verifying and claiming your listing. This won’t take long.

By getting a green badge next to your profile, you’ll increase its legitimacy and credibility.

Once you’ve taken care of the basics, start optimizing your profile to improve its rankings and attract more clients.

Add high-quality images and videos to your listing.

On average, listings have between 10 and 12 images. If you can exceed this number while maintaining quality, you’re good to go! Make sure the pictures are appealing, clear, relevant, and helpful.

We also suggest setting up a comprehensive Q&A section. Here’s an example of a Q&A section from a restaurant in New York:

The more questions you include, the better. Additionally, answer questions that customers have already asked. Your profile should also include a generous amount of reviews. Now, this isn’t entirely in your control. While you can prompt your audience to send in reviews, you can’t control whether they’ll submit one and how flattering it’ll be.

Your top strategy should be offering high-quality products/services that compel your audience to leave a nice review. You can also request them to submit one by adding a review page to your website. This should redirect to your Google My Business profile, so all the reviews are collected there.

Let’s look at an example of a near-perfect Google My Business listing. This is the first result that appears when we enter “best interior designer New York” in the search bar:

This is what we’re talking about! Notice how every detail has been meticulously filled out. From the service options to the health and safety requirements to the Q&A section to the images, each detail is complete. The listing looks professional and appealing.

As you rework your profile, pay special attention to the grammar, punctuation, spelling, and syntax. As you start creating Google My Business posts, you must keep this in mind more than usual. These posts will show up when people search for specific information about your business. If the details aren’t accurate or the language is sloppy, people will get a bad impression of your business.

Google My Business does wonders when used correctly. Make sure you leverage it well!

Recommended Read: How to Optimize Google My Business Listing and Leverage It for More Sales

 

3. Create New York-Specific Content

Content is king. We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again! It also doesn’t require you to break the bank.

As a small business, you can create quality content and reach a wide audience while protecting your bottom line. You may be creating regular content right now (articles and blogs). However, it’s possible that you’re not optimizing it for location.

Let’s understand what we mean by this.

Take a look at this blog:

Written by Iles Formula, a haircare brand, it covers the best hairstyles from the New York Fashion Week (NYFW) 2019. Despite being an older blog, it still shows up among the top search results when you look for “hairstyles in New York”.

As a business owner, you must remember that your audience lives in New York. Whether they’re looking for products, services, or industry-specific trends, they’ll specify their location in the search bar.

If a web user living in Essex County is interested in hiking gear, they won’t care much about a hiking guide for Oakland. Keep this in mind as you start working on future content.

Try to write with your audience in mind. Cover local events, trending topics, and festivals in New York. If you offer legal support in NYC, write a blog on the penalties for DWI in NYC. If you run a coffee store in Syracuse, write about the most popular coffee blends to try in Syracuse.

Specify the location in at least one out of every five blogs/articles you write. This is a great way to target local customers and build your brand. We also recommend branching out into other types of content. Sure, blogs and articles are effective in increasing reach and revenue. However, they’re not enough. Over time, you should also equip your content arsenal with guest blogs, press releases, how-to guides, power blogs, infographics, listicles, and case studies.

Make sure your content is expertly optimized beyond the keywords. On-page content optimization includes title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, and internal links. Pay special attention to these. If they’re not included and optimized, they can prevent well-researched and well-written content from ranking high.

If you’re looking for the latest trends in New York, give Google Trends a shot. This brilliant platform helps you understand what people are searching for in different parts of the world. It’s like Twitter but for digital marketing! You can keep up with the latest trends in New York and search topics to gauge whether they’re popular or not. This insight will go a long, long way in helping you write content that’s well-received by your target audience. You’ll manage to check off all the boxes that need to be checked off!

4. Master the Art of Link Building for New York Businesses

When it comes to putting the word out about your business, link building is one of the best strategies out there. It’s powerful, affordable, and sustainable. You won’t yield temporary results. When implemented correctly, it can help you enjoy a consistent stream of traffic in the long run.

Here’s the catch. Skip regular link building. Instead, focus on creating a location-specific link building strategy. Many local brands make the mistake of using a generalized link building strategy. While this works well for established businesses, it’s not the right strategy for up-and-coming brands.

As a small business, you should use a more focused, localized, and contextual link building strategy that helps you get leads in your area. Local link building has been gaining more traction in 2022, and it’s easy to see why. It works wonders and helps small businesses become more visible on the web.

Any time you’re building links, you should have a strong focus on quality. The last thing you want to do is build lots of low-quality links that generate little to no traffic. You’d much rather generate a few high-quality links that create a consistent stream of traffic.

 

Start writing value-added, engaging, and optimized guest blogs for high-DA local platforms. Improve content quality across the board so you can generate organic backlinks from local industry giants. Since the organic approach takes a little longer to yield results, many local businesses use a more direct approach when starting off.

Here’s how you can go about this. If you mention a local platform in your content, email and notify them. Let them know that you value their platform as a small business and included an external link in your content. Chances are that they’ll check out your content and perhaps offer a backlink in return! This is a great way to build partnerships using local outbound links.

We also suggest using the broken link building strategy for local content. A balanced, effective, and tailored link building strategy will help you enjoy better reach and sales in the long run. This is one of the things you must do to grow your small business!

5. Get Active on Social Media

When it comes to off-page SEO, social media marketing is the best strategy in the game. There’s no denying it! If you don’t have social media pages, set them up.

For starters, focus on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Moving forward, you can also branch out into LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, and other relevant platforms based on your industry.

As a local New York business, you should create a local social media marketing plan. Focus on your local target audience. Work on new posts, stories, polls, giveaways, Q&As, and reels with your audience’s location and interests in mind. This is an excellent way to get more local traffic, i.e., qualified traffic.

If your business is exclusively based in Utica, there’s no point in targeting web users in different cities or even states. A local social media marketing strategy will help you reel in social media users who can shop your products/services and become long-term customers.

Make sure you optimize your posts using hashtags and keywords. Moreover, use high-quality, visually exciting, and industry-relevant images, videos, and infographics to keep your audience interested.

Start using chatbots! Your customer support team should be proactive, diligent, understanding, and courteous.

All in all, focus on providing a personalized experience to your audience. Your social media activity should appeal to them and offer something new that other local brands aren’t delivering.

This is an example of an excellent Twitter post:

 

Indulge in one of New York’s best burgers at Astor Court to celebrate #NationalHamburgerDay! #LiveExquisite pic.twitter.com/Qw9QboaDgx

— The St. Regis New York (@StRegisNewYork) May 28, 2019

 

The post is short and sweet, informing readers of exactly what they need to know without boring them. They’ve included “New York” as a keyword in the post. The hashtags are also relevant and perfectly placed towards the end. Lastly, the image is as appealing and eye-catching as it gets. This is how you curate the perfect local social media post to help your business get seen by your target audience!

6. Tweak Your Website

Every New York business must have a technically sound, aesthetically pleasing, and optimized website. When it comes to web design and development, make sure you check off all the boxes. If you don’t have a website, you’re leaving the bulk of your audience untargeted.

Following the pandemic, people are actively and consistently shopping online. Even after we achieve herd immunity, this trend is expected to continue. The internet is replete with active web users looking for local businesses in New York. Make sure you give them exactly what they want by showing up among the top Google search results. This can only happen when you have a website!

Set up a well-designed and well-developed site with technical SEO in mind. Focus on five key website performance metrics: page speed, DNS lookup speed, time to start render, browser caching, and hosting. As you focus on these areas, you’ll manage to launch a well-functioning site. The design should be user-friendly, appealing, clean, and modern. Keep the navigation simple and straightforward. Lastly, optimize your web copy for location. Use local keywords to attract the right segment of your audience. As you improve your website, you’ll make it more visible on the web.

The outcome? Better reach, engagement, and sales!

Wrapping Up!

In this blog, we covered six tips on how to grow your small New York business in 2022. Now that you have a good grasp of the basics, start putting them into practice!

At Search Berg, we provide professional New York SEO services to small businesses and startups across the state. If you want to hire SEO services in NY, we’re the right people to contact.

We’ve completed over 40,000 SEO projects, published over 150,000 content pieces, and created over 22,800 infographics and videos. Our track record proves our commitment to helping small businesses succeed!

If you have any questions, feel free to chat with us or give us a call at 855-444-4777. Let’s help your New York business hit the ground running!