When beginning your SEO strategy, it’s important to have reasonable, achievable goals. This will help you focus your SEO campaign to make it efficient and effective.

If you’re a restaurant owner, you’re not going to show up at the top of the search results for the word “restaurant”.  If you’re a photographer, you aren’t going to show up at the top of the search results for “wedding photographer” or “event photos”.

This goal is unreasonable and will just end up in wasted time and frustration for you.

However, if you’re a headshot photographer in London, you can potentially increase your position on the list for “London Headshot Photographer”.  If you’re a French bakery in Toronto specializing in gluten-free products, you can work to get a good search ranking for “gluten-free bread in Toronto”.

Focus on that. The more specific you can make your product or service and the more focused your SEO efforts are on your differentiating points, the better your SEO results will be.

Once you decide what your niche is, edit your SEO terms to match that. A couple of other ideas are:

• Focus on getting your site to show up in a search for your own or your business’ name.
• Try to get the attention of bloggers who may write about your business.
• Encourage visitors to review your business at places like Tripadvisor or Yelp.