By Travis Bliffen
There's no shortage of “experts” in search marketing, sharing and resharing the same bad advice, worn out tips, and information that will never rank your website. If you don’t believe me, just do a quick search and see how many people tell you to “write great content.” Don’t get me wrong. Great content is awesome to have, but you can’t stop at writing.
As a small business owner, you may have to wear many hats in a single day, and wasting your time with outdated advice is not how you want to spend your precious time. To save you the hassle of scouring countless sites, I am going to tell you exactly what you should be doing to generate more traffic through local and organic SEO, using simple terms that anyone can understand.
What is Local SEO and Should I Be Using It?
Many business owners lump local and national SEO into the same boat. Local SEO is the act of optimizing your site to appear for geo-targeted keywords such as “St Louis interior design.” Organic SEO, on the other hand, would target phrases like “interior design services.” Local SEO uses citations that include your name, address, and phone number to establish your location and increase your rankings in the local results pack (A-G) as shown below.
Local SEO is for businesses that service a specific geographic area. If your business services local clients, you should be using local SEO. If you service both local and national clients, you should be using local SEO in addition to organic SEO.
How to Improve Your Local SEO Rankings
Your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) data is one of the primary considerations of how high you will rank in local results. While important, it is only one of the many known ranking factors for local search. The following checklist offers ways for you to improve your site's ability to rank locally:
• Does the title of my site and page title have a location reference?
• Does each page of my site have unique content that details what I offer?
• Does my business name, address, and phone number appear on each page of my site?
• Is my business listed in the top local directories? You can check this for free with GetListed.org from MOZ.
• Does my business have a Google+ page setup and is it optimized?
• Do I have reviews from my customers on Google+, Yelp, and other similar sites?
If you answered yes to these questions, you're off to a good start with your local optimization. For those of you with a little more experience, you can use tools like Scrapebox to find local citation sites that your competitors have and you do not.
If you do not have access to tools or just don’t want to bother, try to find a few sites each week to add your site. Doing it slowly over time will yield the best results. Getlisted.org offers a big list of local citation sources by category to get you started.
What is Organic Search and Do I Need It?
If you offer services to local and remote clients, or you do not offer local services, you should be using organic SEO. Organic results are terms which are not geo-targeted. Here is an example:
As you can see, when I search the term “interior design,” the results include pages that are not location-based such as the "interiordesign.net" result. You'll also notice that local results are part of the listing. Google now uses information about the location you are searching from to geo-target phrases like “interior design” to show local businesses mixed with national companies. Not all results return this mixed page, but for the terms that do trigger it, your business will benefit from being optimized for your local area as well as the non-targeted term.
How Do I Rank for Organic Terms?
The following is what you should ask yourself in order to optimize your website for non-local, organic search:
- Does my primary keyword (product or service) appear in the title of my website?
- Does each page of my site cover a specific product or service?
- Does each page of my site have unique and useful content that includes the service or product offered and related terms?
- Are images present on each page? Do those images have "alt text" with my keyword in it?
- Is my site easy to share on social media? Include social sharing buttons to make it easy.
- Do I have a blog on my site? Do my blog posts contain unique and useful information?
- Does my website load quickly? You can use free tools like Pingdom to test your site speed.
- Am I reaching out to other sites to tell them about my site?
If you can answer yes to those questions, you're off to a great start. Over 200 known factors go into how Google ranks a website so “writing great content” is not going to do the job on its own. The questions above are necessary steps for the most basic page optimization. Once you have completed these steps, there's still a lot of work to do. Link building is the equivalent of getting citations in local SEO and it is something you must do.
Surefire Ways to Get Links to Your Site
If you've looked over the known ranking factors, you know that links are one of the most important signals of trust for your website and one of the best ways to improve your rankings for the key terms related to your business. Here are some quick but powerful links:
1. Get a link from your local Chamber of Commerce. This is one of the easier ways to get a link, but it is a powerful one. Many chambers have a member page and all you have to do is join to get a juicy do-follow link to your website. Just contact your local chamber and let them know you want to become a member.
2. Become a member of the Better Business Bureau. The BBB is one of the most trusted sources for finding out about the quality of a business. If your business meets the criteria to join, simply submit your application and wait to be approved. Once you are approved, you will get another very trusted and powerful link to your page. You may also find yourself getting referral traffic from the BBB site as well. What’s not to love?
3. Donate to a scholarship fund. This one is easy and not that expensive. Colleges love to give away money to students and SEO companies love to get links from ".edu" websites because they tend to be insanely powerful and authoritative. Head over to the website of your local university and look for a sponsor or donors page. If your local college doesn’t have a page, just do a quick Google search and you will find plenty of places to make a donation and get a link.
4. Write a guest post. You may have heard that guest posting is dead. This is not true. Guest posting on low quality sites is not beneficial anymore, but posting on high authority, relevant sites will always help your business. I realize that you may not have the time or desire to write your own guest post. Head over to Elance or a similar site and hire a freelance writer to create your post. This will set you back about $20. Once you have the awesome post in hand, just send out some emails to related sites that aren’t your direct competitors and tell them what you have to offer. After a few emails, you should be able to find a suitable home for your post. Just repeat this process weekly and you will have a powerful backlink profile in no time.
5. Create an infographic. Again, you may not want to create one yourself. Elance and Fiverr are good places to get your image made. You can collect data from "frequently asked questions," by visiting forums related to your site, or you can just pay a graphic creator to compile information for you. Once you have the completed infographic, you can get several links from it. Submit your infographic to sites that curate them, add it to your own blog, or offer it to other related sites. The sky's the limit with these link-building powerhouses.
As you can see, ranking your website involves a lot of work, but it is certainly not unattainable if you are willing to put in the time to learn and the time to optimize. Use these tips to get started with your own online marketing campaign and enjoy the benefits of search traffic.
