A strong online presence is crucial for small businesses in today’s digital age. In order for your business to be seen as active and useful, you must consistently publish relevant content.
However, it’s common for small business owners to be busy due to the nature of running a small company. Updates to a website or writing new blog content are often put on the back burner. But there’s a new search engine in town that’s reminding us why small business owners need to stay on top of trends, optimize their websites for SEO, and consistently post new, high-quality content.
Meet Yep
Yep? Yep! This new search engine from Ahrefs has 3 primary goals:
- Support good content by giving back 90% of ad revenue to creators
- Deliver an unbiased, privacy-focused search experience
- Compete with Google and other alternative search engines
Despite the fact that Yep isn’t seeing volume anywhere near Google yet, we think it have the potential to grow. In the long run, it could have a significant impact on SEO and search engine performance.
While that’s still a long-time coming, the creation of Yep serves as a reminder of how important it is to create content that:
- Solves your customers’ problems
- Provides answers to the most commonly asked questions in your field
Search engine algorithms are pushing content like this more and more so it can better serve its users. To stay relevant, small businesses need to make this type of content creation a priority. Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko reminds us why high-quality content creation can ultimately be an investment back into your business:
“Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work. We saw how YouTube’s profit-sharing model made the whole video-making industry thrive. Splitting advertising profits 90/10 with content authors, we want to give a push towards treating talent fairly in the search industry.”
Yep’s model of sharing ad revenue means that small business owners could one day get paid for the content they produce.
A Sweet Rose Case Study
Take Vinings Massage & Wellness for example. They’re a locally owned small business that offers massage therapy and wellness services in Atlanta. They post 1 new blog a month that:
- Teaches people about different types of massage modalities
- Discusses the benefits of the services they offer
- Answers clients’ questions
One of their most popular blogs is their piece “Why Do I Sometimes Feel Sick After A Massage?” This blog was written to help educate clients because they can sometimes feel sick if they don’t hydrate properly before and after a session.
Their primary goal with this piece was to answer a frequently asked question. But this blog ended up becoming a primary source of traffic for them each month since so many people search for terms related to “can massages make you feel sick.”
Right now, they help their clients for free by creating this content. But if Yep takes off in the future, Vinings Massage & Wellness could be compensated for providing educational resources.
Yep as a Source of Revenue
If Yep becomes popular enough, this approach to content creation could become the norm. It could also become a new revenue stream for small businesses everywhere.
Yep’s About Us page speaks to this further:
“With a revenue share model like this, billions of dollars will be paid to publishers. New kinds of businesses will appear, creating new forms of content that previously didn’t exist…Can you make a living from sharing quality information about your passions, whether it’s about pancake recipes or recent advancements in machine learning? No. But you could, if search engines were sharing their ads revenue.”
So How Can I Stay Ahead of the Curve?
Basically, it comes down to answering your client’s questions and doing so in a way that optimizes your content to appear in search results. Genuinity also goes a long way since the web is becoming more and more saturated with cookie cutter content.
To help your small business stand out, consider the following:
- Create the most useful content possible – If you get the same questions from clients over and over, answer them in a blog! If your clients are asking you these questions, other people are most likely searching for them on Google too.
- Optimize your content for search results – Do keyword research to see what questions people are asking the most and how they’re phrasing them. Once you’ve identified specific keywords, write new content to support them.
- Start familiarizing yourself with alternative search engines to Google – By understanding how Yep works and other search engines, you will be able to adapt to any new competitors that come up. Despite seeing 5.6 billion searches a day currently, Google may not always be the primary search engine we rely on. Many other alternative search engines already get a lot of daily traffic:
Keeping up with the latest marketing trends allows us to offer our clients strategies that will help them grow their companies. Get in touch with Sweet Rose Studios to learn more about how these solutions could benefit your small business.
