Small business owners are often restricted by small marketing budgets and manpower. This should not limit their competitiveness against larger businesses or websites when focusing on search engine optimization. SEO is a basic marketing tool that everyone should use; regardless of size.

When it comes to organic search results, Small Business owners want to know what chance their online presence will have against larger competitors. The simple response is that the size of your website doesn’t matter. It’s really about the chosen keywords and how competitive those keywords are.

How can I determine what competitive keywords are?

This can be achieved by performing a Google search of your keyword/s or phrase. Then, visit the top 3 queried results and:

1. Determine the Google PR. This information is available by downloading the Google tool bar and looking in your browser. You will see a green bar and ranking (ex: PR5), which tells you how Google ranks this page/website with regard to popularity. Any site with a Google PR6 or better is well established and will be difficult to outrank in the near term.

2. Revisit Google and type, “link:www.competitorwebsite.com” into the search bar. Be sure to replace ‘competitorwebsite’ with the website name you are researching. This should be a website that appears on the top 3 Google search result for the keyword term or phrase you queried. This will tell you how many websites are linking to this particular competitor. The larger the number the more difficult it will be to outrank.

3. Look at the website code. Simply visit the competitor’s website and go to “View”, “View Source”. Look for the Meta tags of “Title”, “Description”, and “Keywords”. Are the Meta tags at the very top of the page? Does the website also use h1, h2, and h3 tags? If so, they probably know something about SEO and have applied some on-page optimization techniques.

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