How I Beat Anthony Rizzo

Our marketing agency is based in Chicago, a town shared with extremely popular World Series champion, Anthony Rizzo. And articles on the champ dominated search results.

When we first formalized our company at the beginning of April, Rizzo Young Marketing’s SEO was virtually nonexistent. Being a new company, this makes perfect sense.

But with our combined backgrounds, Maria and I knew exactly where to start: Organic Content. We created social media profiles across every mainstream platform, created a secure, mobile-friendly website, and set up our Google My Business listing. But there was one major issue.

When searching Rizzo Young Marketing directly, we were lucky to get two listings on the page, let alone all of it, because Anthony Rizzo was everywhere. To make matters worse, our Google My Business listing wouldn’t show up. I couldn’t believe it.

Despite being the only company on the face of the earth with the name, Rizzo Young Marketing, we couldn’t get our own listing to display. And it was killing our credibility.

After Maria (the “Rizzo” to my “Young”) confirmed that she wouldn’t be changing her name anytime soon and multiple calls to Google didn’t provide an explicit “You’re doing XYZ wrong”, we chose to continue with our organic content strategy.

Here’s why it worked.

THE SHOTGUN EFFECT

If budget isn’t an issue, we encourage business owners to pursue what I refer to as “the shotgun effect”. Similar to a shotgun blast, this strategy mandates your company to be splattered everywhere.

While this doesn’t yield results overnight, it does lead to a quicker SEO victory because there are so many different landing pages that can show up in search results page. Many organizations choose three-four platforms and run with them. Depending on how you count our profiles, we’ve exceeded ten.

CONSISTENCY

If I never have to preach about consistent content again, it’ll be too soon. But as straightforward as this seems, most businesses fall flat on their faces when it comes down to committing to their digital presence.

Typically, they don’t see the blowback right away. But while they’ve been inconsistent, at least one of their competitors has put in the hours to create a professional digital presence. They’re results display slowly, but sooner than later, they start creeping onto Page 1. And, over time, that leads everyone else into a major uphill battle.

ORGANIC CONTENT

We started this blog with organic content. Let’s end with it.

Numerous small businesses do not have a dedicated writer, let alone an in-house PR rep. For those who are active on social media, they tend to share articles created by other organizations.

Just to be clear, this is far better than producing nothing at all. But the effect of this isn’t nearly as positive as taking the time to prepare your own content.

Whether you do it or someone does it on your behalf, generating your own organic content will lead users directly to your digital properties. No one else’s. In general, search engines love new, relevant content. Give them what they want!

PRESENT DAY

By taking the time to develop our digital presence, we saw that each of our digital properties represented a clear-cut image of what Rizzo Young Marketing is about. Not only did our content continue to drive more engagement, each platform showed consistent growth over time.

Now, this is what our listing looks like.

Goodbye, Anthony Rizzo. It's been a fun challenge.

To get started with enhancing your SEO, send us a message at RizzoYoungMarketing.com.