Whether you have one business location or many across the nation, you’ll want to follow these Search Engine Optimization techniques to help boost your organic reach.
Building out a strong SEO strategy is a long term investment of your time (or a hired agency’s time) because it requires consistency and quality content.
However, this long term investment is worth it if you plan on staying in business for the long term (especially if you’re running paid ads).
1. Keyword research
The first thing on the SEO checklist is keyword research.
You’ll want to find keywords, including long tail forms to wrap your content around.
For example, one of the services we provide is flyer and door hanger distribution services.
Some of the keywords we’d use when writing or sharing content would be just around that.
We write blog posts specific to these keyword ideas.
By building content around these keywords in blog format, youtube videos, podcasts, emails, etc., you’re creating more ideas to those topics that can be picked up by search engines.
If you’re stuck, you can use tools like SEMrush or Buzzsumo to learn about potential keyword ideas you can use on your next blog. Here’s 4 tools we use here.
The key is to find and write about content that your audience is looking for.
Avoid creating content on things no one is looking for.
2. An optimized website
Does your website load quickly?
Is it mobile friendly?
Does it provide a great user experience?
These are a few things you want to consider optimizing for.
By having a quick and user friendly website, your audience will be able to access your content easily and stay on there for longer periods of time.
Search engines like it when visitors have little to no friction when visiting your site.
As a reward for long term good results, they’ll bump you to the top.
You can use tools such as Google’s PageSpeed or Pingdom’s website test to identify your page speeds and how to optimize them.
If you’re using WordPress, you can automatically optimize your website with plugins that specialize in this.
If you’re not, you may want to get a developer involved for things that you may have a hard time optimizing for.
3. Google & Yelp local business pages
Here’s Google’s local page builder and Yelp’s Business page builder.
You may already have this in place for your business.
But do you have all the content set up correctly?
- Are you displaying your company phone number?
- Is your business location up to date?
- Are your business hours correct?
- Do you have images that help customers?
- Are you responding to your customers reviews?
If you answered yes; that’s great!
If you haven’t yet, make sure to fill those out completely and respond to both positive and negative reviews moving forward.
Customers new and old appreciate an owner who is engaged, and search engines will see this.
4. Clear and effective titles and meta descriptions
You’ve picked a few keywords and wrote A+ content around them.
Now you’ll want to title them so that potential viewers can easily be attracted to.
Whether it’s a youtube video or a blog post, make sure to include a title that’s attractive; you can use tools like Buzzsumo to help inspire great titles.
In addition, your meta description (the short description below your page title’s search result) should also be informative, clear and include your keywords.
By optimizing your title and meta tags, you’ll help increase your Click Through Rate (CTR), thus helping boost your search engine rankings.
Again, Google and other search engines want to rank those pages and content that receive a higher percent in click through rates.
5. Content distribution
Now you’ve wrote awesome content, your title and meta tags are great and your happy with your page speeds.
The final piece is to have a strong strategy for distribution of your content to help it to get to your audience.
This includes sharing the content on social media such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter etc.
You’ll want to share it with in an email blast or push notification.
By utilizing those tools to build awareness to your content, the more eyeballs you can reach.
While doing this, you may have other business owners, blog writers, or any other content creators link back to you with that’s called ‘back-linking’.
Back-linking is when another website owner links back to your website to refer to content you’ve published.
This is one of the main pillars to Google’s search algorithms that rewards websites with better ranking.
Why does back-linking work?
If you think about it, it’s sort of like referrals.
This means to Google that people like your content and are willing to refer to it, thus is should rank higher so others can also see value in it.
Conclusion
In summary, a good keyword research strategy, an optimized website, local business pages, effective content titles and a strong content distribution strategy will all help you towards building better organic traffic.
As mentioned before, the results will not be immediate because it requires search engines (and people) time to find and validate your content.
By being persistent with your SEO checklist, and setting 90 challenges to publish quality content everyday, you’ll be able to see some organic traffic for the long run.
If you’re still struggling with this or don’t have months to focus on building your SEO strategy, feel free to connect with our team to obtain a free marketing proposal.
Furthermore, if you’re looking for more ways to grow your business, here’s 6 ways to market and grow your local business.
