Why Is Local S.E.O. ( Search Engine Optimization ) Good For Your Business Here In Las Vegas
Search engine optimization or S.E.O. as we will refer to it should be one of your number one priorities when running a local business. Here in Las Vegas the competition is great and you want to stay with the curve, or better yet head of that curve in the local search rankings.
Search rankings are determined by either Google or Bing or one of the many other major search engines. Anywhere people might type something and look for a result. Let us say you are looking to box, crate, and ship some expensive item across town, or even the country, you generally click on one of the first three results, and go from there. Let me see, Specialty Crating and Moving Company in Las Vegas would turn up this result. That is great if you are top ranking on page one as one of those establishments. But if you have not done the work or hired a company to do this for you, well then you being stuck on page eight are not going to see much traffic.
Traffic equals clicks, which turns into potential customers, and if you have all of your ducks in a row on your website, that will convert into direct sales.
So the big mystery. How do you actually improve ? Well that is the $64,000 dollar question is it not. Google has somewhere around two hundred different ranking factors that all tie together that determine your placement. Back to my original example. You typed in the words specialty, moving, and Las Vegas. If you have those keywords in the right places, and the crawl spiders or bots are tracking them, then you will appear somewhere down the line. The web crawlers are only going to have you show up in search engine results based on the content you have published on your webpage or blog. They are not just going to make things up, that way you do not appear under donuts when you are an aerospace company. A donut company should have relevant information on donuts on their page.
The more relevant information you have on your page, or pages, about what exactly it is that you do, the more combinations of keywords you can appear for, in theory here. Now you want them to not only mean something, but mean something to other people. Think about what you want to be found under when people are typing. Hopefully that key phrase gets typed up a few hundred times a month. That way you are spending your time ranking for things people are actually using. I see far too many S.E.O. companies promising huge results, and taking huge profits, claiming all of these page 1 rankings, which is fine and all, but the problem is, nobody is really searching for those terms. You could be the king of pink alligators wearing umbrellas in Afghanistan, but that just is not practical business sense. So when writing your content, try and make sure it has a little sprinkle of things that really relate.
Local SEO Business Infograph
Ranking Your Keywords for Local Results
Allright your S.E.O. keywords are increasing and you feel like you have covered enough search engine terms and possibilities. Now they are stuck way down where no one is finding them because they are so many pages back and buried behind tons of others content, you need to slowly march them up front and center. This is honestly where things do get tough and tricky, and website and internet companies specializing in S.E.O. come into play. This is a little bit more where theorycrafting comes into play and is not so clear. Ten different people in the industry could tell you ten different ways to rank, and they all are going to be varying degrees of both right and wrong.
Back in the old days of S.E.O. there were many underhanded ways that people used to boost their SERPS to the top of the list. These were called Black Hat SEO techniques. Although effective they directly went against Google’s terms of what they expected you to be doing, and ended up banning and eliminating all of these methods. Once upon a time on your Internets browser bar there was a little thing called pagerank. Pagerank had bar that showed a number. The higher the number the more important that webpage was deemed. A website such as Wikipedia, or Amazon, would be ranking very high as they are major businesses and provide quality content for users looking for those types of services. A new website that was offering art or paintings that had been in business for only a few months and no real online presence would be rated far lower down the totem pole of results. People figured out how to manipulate this number, and the higher that it went the higher your page appeared in the rankings.
Google began pagerank in 2000 with an Internet toolbar addon. Remember all of those spam emails you would get with links promising money, fame, and power ? Well all of those links, if you could manipulate mass emails and outreach to people and somehow fool or trick them to click, issued a signal. So did building webpages with garbage content but spamming it out with links pointing back to the main webpage you were trying to get people to view. We will go over more on Blackhat SEO techniques in another article, but my point is that many companies can still apply these types of services, so make sure that you get with an honest reputable company and not just pay $5 for some linking service that promises the sun, the moon, and the stars all together. Once this gets picked up and you get deranked, it is a hole you might not ever climb out of.
Ok so we have covered a bit on what not to do with local SEO, but how about what to do ? Social media, Facebook, Instagram, blogging, likes, comments, bounce rate, keywords, content, age and time. Where to even begin ? You could spend a year trying to become an Internet marketing guru in all of these aspects, or focus in on just one. You have read all of the articles, gathered all the knowledge, and think you have a grip on things. Well the problem is you are reading exactly what a million other people are reading. You have just generated clicks, time, and rankings for other people. The people publishing that content. Somewhat like I am now let us assume and not pretend. If you do not want to hire a SEO agency to do the work for you, then you really honestly need to become proficient in a source of traffic and try and crush it. You are not going to be able to manage ten social media accounts, blog, learn to code for faster page speed results, keep track of what is working and what is not, and then having to focus on your actual business, do payroll, hire and fire employees, and let’s not forget sleep every once in awhile!
Some of the more successful people that I have seen become a master of one form of marketing.
They really just focus in on say instagram and set that goal and vision. They are going to figure it out, post new and original content day and night, and grow that account to a hundred thousand followers. If you try and keep up with too many, you are going to fall flat on your face from burnout and exhaustion. If you are a plumbing company, is Instagram or Snapchat for that matter really going to generate you the local business that you need ? Probably not. You want to beat your main competitor who is getting all of the traffic and clicks getting the sales and money that you know you should be getting. Everywhere you type anything, they just keep coming up like an annoying little reminder that you are not on their level.
Create more original content than your opponent in the SEO battle for rankings
Here is a killer tip I will give to you in all of it’s glory. If they have 4 pages with content about their business, then you need to have 4 pages of content, with just as many if not more keywords relating to the subject matter at hand. Why would Google put you above someone else when they have shown that they are more of an authority in that particular field ? They have hundreds of words which equal many keywords people search for. If you do not put yourself on equal footing in this aspect, the answer should then be simple, you are not going to out rank them. By creating fresh and original content that people hang around and read, you are likely to gain more positive signals. Let’s take Google Analytics for example which is a great tool to track your online presence. If their about us page is viewed for an average of 10 seconds, and yours an average of 20 seconds, well it is going to appear that your information is more worthwhile to those who have found it. Point for you. Does that make sense? Now go out there and get some social signals working in your favor and find some traffic.
Pagespeed and local SEO rankings
Ah yes, the tricky stuff that can cost an arm and a leg to do. But is oh so important since we are talking about how you can get your local business better search engine rankings. We are going to take Eric the custom pool installer, and Bob his neighbor and competition. Both have websites, but one is very fast, and the other loads very slow. One is mobile compliant, the other, really has no idea. Google is opt to give a faster website priority in their hierarchy, because that will directly relate to a better user experience. If the search engine company keeps on giving you very outdated sources that are extremely slow, it will not be long until their customer base moves to another service to get better results, thus saving them time and money. So they really want to put the best and fastest content in front of your eyes at all times.
So how do you increase your pagespeed score? Learn to code some HTML, Javascript, CSS, oh and PHP. Go for it, see you in a year or two. When you pay for a website, the guy did just that, he built you a website. It is like buying a brand new pair of shoes. They are still in the box. I guarantee that you did not know about this when signing away on those thousands of dollars to get a slow website developed. It really is not his job in all fairness to re-write the developers code of the theme you chose to make it faster. Those free themes, or even the cheap ones, are not ready made for blazing fast 100/100 pagespeed scores. Why should they ? So now you have to pony up and hope you can find someone who can get into your backend cpanel, access your files, and understand enough languages here to do what is necessary to change those seconds of main page load time to milliseconds. Your competitor’s website loads in under a second, yours is taking a full 2.5 seconds to load. Take a wild guess which one wins in this race.
Tips for a faster local business website
Do not load and render enormously large pictures and photos. If some of those tiny photos on your webpage called thumbnails are actually behind the scenes 4000×2000 at a whopping 5 megs it really slows you do. Try and do your due diligence when submitting photos to a web company and make sure they are properly formatted. Most of the time they are just going to plug in what you give them. They do not have time to resize and optimized a thousand photos of your dog. What you see is what you get in this case. There are so many free tools available online that allow you to cut down on your photo size and help that page speed give your users a better and quicker experience.
That is all I have for this installment, with many more coming and always covering the topics that you will need and find useful for your local business and help improve your search engine rankings.
