It’s an uneven playing field for small business on the web
When small business start marketing themselves online, most believe that they’re playing on a level playing field. This is so far from the truth that it’s not funny. You’re not just competing with the guy down the road that sells a similar product. You’re competing, in some cases, with the whole world but you don’t know it.
Small Business Competition
Internet marketers from all round the world are competing for the traffic that you’re trying to get. You might think someone in England wouldn’t be interested in being found in your local area but what you don’t realise is that the local directory might not be owned by someone local. The websites advertising tourist attractions or accommodation might be based in India or North America. Not only are they trying to get your traffic, they’re trying to get every local businesses traffic and then they’ll probably turn around and offer to sell those visitors to you.
Serious Internet marketers will compete in almost any niche market. Because their business is 100% online, they can spend every waking minute working on traffic generation. Where you are proud of your 10 page site, they will build a 100,000 page website to compete against you across a vast range of keyword searches.
Yes, I said 100,000 page website!
One of the key things that serious marketers do that small business don’t, is set up a web of websites some of which are specifically designed to grab as much traffic as they can even if that means that Google burns them. This means that they get dropped from Google’s rankings. An Internet marketer may build 50 or more sites like this just to target your niche. They will be linked through a series of feeder sides to their main website, the one that you might see competing directly against you in the Google results. If a site does get burnt, they just build more to replace it.
This web of linked sites all direct traffic back to the main site which is protected. When I say protected, I mean that the site has everything done legally and properly so that it gives Google no reason to drop it. All of the linked sites are set up across a range of servers all around the world, quite often under different names, so that there is no obvious link back to the owners of the protected site.
So now you can see why I say it’s an uneven playing field for small business online. It doesn’t mean you can’t get good rankings for organic traffic in Google and the other search engines. It does mean that you might like to think a little bigger and keep an eye on what the people around you are doing to steal the traffic from your small business.
