Competition in the World of Small Businesses

“The best part of the competition is that through it we discover what we are capable of - and how much more we can do than we ever believed possible.”

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, small businesses became more popular as people wanted to support local and help these businesses thrive throughout the continuous restrictions and lockdowns within Ontario. As the small business continued to increase in popularity, the amount of competition in the market also increased.

Source: Columbia Valley Pioneer

For the George Brown B413 Digital Marketing Program, I am completing my work experience with a local small business, from Oakville Ontario. Tea With Tracie is a luxury tea online store selling 100% plant-based and plastic-free tea sachets. While completing a social media audit for the business, I noticed that there are many other competitors in the market selling similar products.

Source: Tea With Tracie

One issue related to the business is that there were no meta descriptions, alt tags, or keywords on the pages or products of Tea With Tracie’s e-commerce site. Not having these elements integrated into the website does not help with SEO and makes it more difficult to rank in search. This means that the other competitors in the market have a higher chance of ranking on the search engine result page when customers are looking for products.

Source: Volusion

To help resolve this issue, one of my tasks was to add these missing elements to the different products and pages of the website to help with the SEO and have a better chance of ranking when customers are searching the internet. I ensured to add keywords and descriptive words to the alt tags, not only to help with SEO but also with trustworthiness and accessibility on the website. Having alt tags on images within the website can help users with screen readers understand what the image is depicting. I did some research on popular keywords and included these in the meta description, to help rank for queries that customers are actively searching for.

By making these changes to the website, Tea With Tracie will rank higher in the SERP and be able to reach more customers, becoming a more significant competitor in the market.