When you are working on a low budget and doing the web site yourself, here are some local seo tips that can help you bring your site up near the top of Google and Yahoo. One of the first things I do is to pick out a site name that has at least one of the keyword search terms your customers would use to find you. As I discussed earlier, I use Market Samurai, for all my seo needs. I also use it to help pick out my domain name for the web site I am designing. Today we are going to be finding out what would work best for our fictional fence company located in Miami.
The first thing I would do is to find some keywords that will bring people to my site. Since this site is going to be for a local Miami fence company, the search term Miami Fence Company is going to be the one of the top choices for a domain name. miamifencecompany.com is already taken, but miamifencecompany.net is still available. What I am looking for is a domain that has the words fence and the city Miami in this case in it. You might also try miamifences.com, and fencesmiami.com. Those are both taken so my next choices are miamifences,org which is available and fencesmiami.net. What I am trying to do here is to take two of the most popular search terms for fence companies which is the local city and fences, hence miamifences, or fencesmiami. With the choices that I have the best choice is always a domain that ends in .com then .net if com is not available. Digging a little deeper I find premiermiamifences.com is available. That’s It! We’ve found our domain name. The reason I chose this domain name is because it includes common search term miami fences and it also includes the word premier which can be used in your description and title meta tag.
By using great search phrases and words (premier+miami+fences) that people would use to find you in your domain name, title and description, google will understand those words are important to your site. Thus when people search on those words, google will take the fact you use them in all three (title, description, and domain name) into account when deciding who to put at or near the top for searches on those words. Hopefully this means they will look closely at your site as one of the top results. Google does not stop there in deciding who ranks at the top, but that does play an important part in it. Back links, age of domain, and many other factors also are important.
One thing I get all the time is that the local company I am working with already has a domain, or they only want a domain that has the company name in it. I can certainly understand that, especially if you are an established company with years of being in business. In those cases, I recommend you might consider two web sites. One with your company name as the domain and one to be used strictly as an advertising site. Branding, is as important many times as keyword search terms are. If your company has already spent thousands of dollars advertising, and the company name is well known in the local area, you may not need to add the second site. But just remember you may very well be the established leader in your local market. But Google does not know that and so you will still need to optimize your site using the other steps I have outlined. And you can still use those keyword search phrases in your web site title and description. The bottom line is understanding the search engines and how they decide who best relates to the search term the user has typed in. If you have a small local business and want to get your company’s web site at least on the first page, and if you follow this simple process in picking out a domain name, you will have a jump on the competition.
Anyone can benefit from local SEO Services, even Fortune 500 companies. But the biggest benefits are for anyone who has a local presence and wants to attract local people or businesses who might want to purchase or need the products and services you might offer.
A good example of this is contractors. It used to be that contractors had to spend a lot of money to be able to get new business. The choices were limited and quite expensive. Print media (expensive and no real assurance it was going to be read by those who need your product or services) radio or tv (even more expensive and much less control) The Yellow Pages (still expensive but an absolute must if you wanted local people or businesses to find you), and finally the usual stand by’s word of mouth, referrals, and truck and yard signs. There are many great contractors who built their business based on the Yellow Pages and referrals.
Today it is much easier and substantially less expensive for a local contractor to get his company name out there and to generate quality leads by taking advantage of the internet and what it offers. And it has a much lower cost than traditional methods. It can also seem an impossible task to get any business directly from the internet. That’s where local SEO services come into play. By using the internet wisely contractors can target their marketing dollars to specific areas or people who are actively looking for the products and service you might offer. You can geo-target your advertising dollars to specific zip codes, to precise demographics, and even more important to only those people who are searching for your type of product or service.
How does all this happen and what does it have to do with search engine optimization? Well let’s say you build decks and you want to target people who own their own homes, earn enough to be able to pay for the work, and love close enough to make it profitable for you to do the job. Sounds like trying to find a needle in a haystack huh? Well not really, in fact it is easier than you might think. Let’s take a look at how I might work with you to achieve these goals.
First thing I might do is to open my software program called Market Samurai. It is a program that I can enter some keywords into and then pull the valuable information from regarding which phrases and keywords work the best to target just those internet users who are looking to buy your product or service. For example, if you owned a deck building company and wanted to target home owners, with enough income to afford to purchase a deck. You might also want only leads from people who are close enough to you that it is profitable for you to do the work for them. In other words homeowner who live with fifteen miles or so of your office.
With market samurai, I can pick a couple of keywords or phrases and then have the program go out and find a bunch more keywords and phrases. I might decide to limit the phrases to three words only, or ten words. After Samurai has done it’s initial search I can then analyze the words. Once analyzed I can see how many searches are done on a daily basis for that specific keyword or phrase. It will also tell me how many hits on my site I could expect if I am able to bring my website to the top position when the word or phrase is searched for. I found that deck builders had 139 searches daily. With the top ranking result being my site I could expect to receive up to 306 hits to my website daily. While at the same time if I was the first showing google ad using google ad words I could only expect 20 hits per day.
I also see that there are 653,000 other web sites out there that have this phrase somewhere in it. And of those 44,900 mention the phrase in their title. Finally Market Samurai provides a percentage between 1-100. The lower the percentage can indicate weak competition. In this case the number is 7%. So this tells me I have a great chance to dominate this keyword phrase in google because there are less than 100,000 sites that use this phrase in their title and that the ratio between those that use this in the title and those that use the phrase somewhere in their web site is very low. So if I was designing a web site for you to sell decks, I would consider using deck builders as one of my optimized keyword search phrases.
One of the most confusing things for many of my small business customers, is understanding what seo actually is and what does it mean for them. In short SEO is being able to help the search engines such as google, yahoo, ask, etc find your website and then to make that web site once found, one of the most relevant to several search terms that best describe you.
Let’s take a look at google and how they decide who gets top ranking when it comes to a keyword or a keyword phrases search. Just like local people in a small town might recommend one store over another because they like the store more. Google has to make similar decisions every time you type in a word or a phrase for google to search. There are many factors that go into how google chooses who is better suited for a particular keyword, and it’s not a simple process. But for the purposes of this article I will strip it down to just a few of the things google does to make that determination.
All of these are in no particular order, since only google really knows in what order and importance they look at these factors. Many of the factors google considers could fall under the banner of trust. They might first look at the domain name. Does it contain some or all of the keywords or phrases the person searching has typed? Next they look at the description meta tag to see if the words are included there as well. Then they look at the text on your website to see if the words are there and that they make sense. Meaning the web site has not just typed the same keywords over and over without them fitting into an actual sentences.
Next and perhaps more important is they look at the back links, which are links from other web sites to your web site. Are these links coming from sites that are similar to your web site. Do the same search terms come up in the other back link sites? That’s why back links from social media, blogs, forums, published e-zine articles, directories etc all play an important part in helping google to pick the most relevant sites. It’s all about trust!
Think of it this way, if you did a survey of 1,000 people and found 25 people used Brand X product and 912 people used brand Y. You might conclude Brand Y is a better product than brand X. Well the same holds true for google, if you have 912 back links from sites that are discussing keywords similar to what is in your web site and only 25 back links go to your competitors web site, then it is reasonable for google to trust your web site will be more relevant than you competitors so therefore your site will rank higher when those keywords are searched for. Back link building is absolutely the most boring and hated task in SEO, but I believe it is also one of the most important to a successful web site. When you are discussing SEO with your web site designer or local SEO expert, make sure they cover what they can and will do to build back links for your site. If they are not willing to do any work on back links they may not be the best solution for your company’s web site help.
If you are like most small to medium sized business owners you probably haven’t done much with including the internet as part of your marketing strategy. You may have heard from several friends and business associates “you should get a website.” But you haven’t done that yet or if you did you are not happy with the results. It could be the site looks great but you’re not seeing the results you thought you would. Sale have not been generated using the power of the internet and frankly you are a bit fed up. After all the internet is not the most critical thing to your businesses success, or is it? It very well could be a critical cog in your future success if you can find someone who understands the internet and how to make it work for you. That’s why we are here and that’s why I started this blog. I look forward to listening to your thoughts and answering those tough questions about why it is not working for you. Got a question? Ask Away!