Using SEO in order to gain exposure is pretty much an essential part of modern day business. Most businesses rely upon the internet heavily in order to sell their products and services, but depending upon the breadth and scale of what you’re targeting, the cost of investing in SEO and other online marketing techniques can quickly skyrocket.
The ways in which an online E-commerce business can scale upwards essentially comes down to two different areas; increasing the number of products and services being offered, or increasing the locations to which you offer them. For each of these expansions, an accompanying increase in cost for SEO is sure to follow. As content will need to be created for each of these changes and then the content will have to be optimised, and advertised both on-site and off-site, the price of such an expansion can be massive.
Choosing your Geographical Location
For new businesses, it is generally preferred that you target your own local area. You get a lot of advantages from this option, particularly if you deal in services. As it reduces travel time and only necessitates one trading location, it can save a lot of money for you business. For SEO, it means that you can target a smaller, less competitive location. Less competition means that it will be a lot cheaper to achieve good rankings, and as it will be very relevant to your business, your conversion rate should be higher too.
As your business grows, a natural part of this is that you will begin to expand to other locations. The best way to do this from the viewpoint of SEO is to create whole new sections of your website that you can then optimise for the new locations. This makes sure that your content is still highly relevant to location settings in search engines and in queries. You may also need to increase your amount of off-site outreach to increase your prevalence, as adding new content can risk diluting the success of your previously successful content.
Expanding your Products and Services
The issues with expanding to new geographical locations and expanding your products are pretty similar, as each require new content to be created, and an investment in outreach. Without that outreach, you risk damaging your chances at success in your new product line as well as your old one. If this makes little sense to you; if you imagine your ability to succeed in SERP’s as being directly related towards your website’s authority, and that authority being a currency that is spread throughout your website, adding more content to your website can spread that authority further and reduce its impact on all of the content.