Making use of SEO services allows your business to dominate the results of searches made by potential customers; your business will benefit by attracting more web traffic and thus more customers. Regardless of your business goals, making use of efficient SEO services should be your first step toward gaining online visibility and building your brand.
Search engine optimization success can be broken down into six steps, each of which is accompanied by a method of action for successful implementation. As you familiarize yourself with these steps, you will begin to notice them in other successful businesses, which is a statement to their effectiveness.
1. Organize Your Website’s Information Correctly
Optimizing or organizing the information on your website in the most beneficial way possible is the most important part of SEO. The better you organize, the more visible your company will be in searches. The best SEO services will help you to optimize the information on your business’s website in a unique and skillful way.
How to do this:
- Begin by checking that your domain name reflects both the location of your business and the type of your business. If you are just starting a business, make sure you select a domain name that does these things.
- Make sure that each of your page titles have keywords that correctly identify with the services your business offers, your location, and the business itself.
- On each page of your website, include your business’s contact information, name, phone number, and address, instead of leaving it only on the contact page. You can also create hyperlinks to connect your webpage user with the contact page for easier access.
- Finally, connect your business to the community by including information about your local area as part of your website. By including information relevant to where your business is located, you increase your online visibility by intertwining your business with your locality. If someone is searching for local terms that you include on your site, your business will come up as well.
2. Expand Your Business’ Presence on Local Websites
Expanding your presence on third-party websites is a great way to increase your business’s online availability and boosts your SEO locally. The best SEO service is often a third-party source because search engines use sites like these to understand the businesses in a locality, which makes the search engines aware of your business. If your business is listed incorrectly or is not listed at all, your business might not come up as frequently in search results. Having consistent information across the board, on your sites and the local third-party sites, gets your business higher on search engine results.
How to do this:
- Examine social media websites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ as well as websites that have local listings such as Yellow Pages, Yelp, Google Places, Google+, and Yahoo Local. Make sure that your business is listed, the information listed about your business is correct and consistent, and make sure to “claim” your listing. You can use Moz Local’s new tool (getlisted.org) to do this!
- Make your listings inviting and interesting by including videos, photos, links to interesting things, and links to your website. By making your listing both fun and informative, your listings will draw customers in.
- Make sure that your business listing includes relevant keywords and is listed in the correct categories. By including where you are, e.g. “Shelby’s Café DC”, search engines will attach your business to a locality. However, do not include too many key words because it will impact your search results in a negative way. Something easy to remember that tells you where to find the business usually does the best SEO service to your business.
- Work with a top listings provider to set up an automated process that will secure and update your listings is also very helpful.
- Creating separate listings for each location where your business operates will increase the visibility of your business and locations separately, so that each one will receive more individualized attention.
3. Only Link To And Receive Links From Relevant Websites
When you link your business to many different websites, initially you may see an influx of web traffic. However the best SEO service will tell you that over time you will most likely see a drop in the perceived credibility of your business, which will translate to damaged visibility. Keep your web reputation professional by keeping your links relevant.
How to do it:
- Share your website links through social media websites generously, and encourage your friends, coworkers, and clients to share as well.
- Create newsletters to be sent out to customers designed to keep them informed about your business and always link them back to your company website.
- Get involved in the community by sponsoring or hosting events that are happening locally, giving student discounts, or participating in local charities, then encourage the people involved to talk about these activities and link back to your website when they do.
- Consider writing a blog that features local events and talk about your involvement with them or making a directory of resources available in your community.
- If you do get involved with the community, make sure that your involvement is authentic and try to keep your activity relevant to your business. Although getting involved in the community is recommended by the best SEO service, be careful SEO boosting links if third-party content writers write them.
- Perform monthly backlink cleanup to make sure that other websites that link to your web pages are not spammy and are relevant to your business. You can ask other webmasters to remove “bad” links, and you can even personally disavow them yourself.
4. Support Your Online Reviews Through Online Reputation Management
The best SEO service will say that reviews and your responses to them definitely help build the online visibility of your business. Reviews are more relevant and trustworthy when they come from past users instead of from inside of the business.
How to do it:
- Invest in a Review Posting Campaign to get your authentic reviews posted online.
- Use reminder emails or paper flyers to encourage your customers to leave positive reviews on a local review site. The more authentic and praising the review, the better its appearance in searches will be.
- To keep from appearing aggressive, only respond to positive reviews. Make sure to thank customers for their feedback.
- Never post false reviews because they are almost always discovered!
5. Be Engaged with your Customers through Social Media
Social media greatly increases visibility online and helps your business stay relevant to customers.
How to do it:
- Use social media to connect with your customers and engage them through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and other community based sites.
- Engage customers and attract new followers by offering promotions, secret discounts, new products, and things of interest with your social media venues.
6. Drive Media Coverage
Media is a very strong, reputable third-party source, thus media offers one of the best SEO sources. Encouraging and marketing media coverage really improves SEO.
How to do it:
- Develop a positive relationship with local media writers. Send them press releases, tell them about promotions and offers, and invite them to your events. Most local media have established relationships with the more popular local businesses, so if you do not have one already, start one.
- HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, is a service that many reporters who work for top media outlets use to find stories. If you are having a hard time contacting local media to cover an event you are sponsoring or think you are doing something that would be worth a reporter writing about, you can start an account with HARO and wait until a reporter is looking for a story that your event or story might be relevant to.
The best SEO services are relatively minor tweaks that make a big difference for your business. Consider hiring the best SEO service to double check your efforts and help you optimize your business.
