Your Local Victoria Business Found On Google
SEO is a term that most business owners are familiar with even if they’re not sure what it means. SEO is a term that has grown to encompass any and all aspects of the quest to get your business ranked as highly as possible on the search engines for any given term typed in by one of your prospective clients or customers. In terms of history, the proliferation of the computer is a very recent phenomenon. SEO? It’s been around for the blink of an eye. To wit: things are evolving quickly. Google, Bing, and Yahoo are learning about search habits, and the habits of seo providers, every week and sometimes seem to be changing their algorithms just as fast. There are many terms used to describe search engine optimization and it’s different aspects and components.
Website Crawl ability
When your website is designed with your customer in mind, the search engines will for the most part follow. The SE’s ‘crawl’ your website pretty much constantly. Once the ‘spider’ hits your front page it follows all the links it finds there. Keep this in mind and we can direct the spider to some degree on where to go. The links in your header navigation will be deemed of most importance. Links in the body of the page can go to internal pages or other websites. Other website links should be marked ‘no follow’ so that the SE’s stay on your site and don’t get ‘distracted’ by outside information. The footer is a good place to link to specific posts and pages you are using to support your search engine marketing key phrases. Getting in the mind of the search engine’s web crawlers will go a long way to ensuring that your website scores well with the crawlers.
On Page Website Content
While what the search engines are looking for is a bit of a moving target, providing well written, engaging, unique content on the subject you’re working to rank for is always in style. Gone are the days when we would use meta data to tell the search engines how to rank us. Now, the SE’s actually now read your content, ‘look’ at your pages, and determine for themselves what your content is about. The best thing you can do today is to write a nice long (over 1,000 words) informative article about the subject and be sure not to cram it full of the term you’re working to rank for. The new buzz around SEO is ‘latent semantic indexing’. The new robot overlords are getting smart and they now recognize language that is similar to your key phrases. Similar phrases that support your key phrase are essential, and often should be used as anchor text to link to other articles and pages on your website.
Search Engine Optimization Victoria
Optimizing your website so that it ranks well for a given term is a technical and ever-changing endeavor. Online Management Services has a proven system that focuses exclusively on results for local businesses. My clients don’t need to rank when someone searches for a fencing company in Toronto or Tacoma. They only need to pop up when someone in the Victoria area is searching for their services. So why pay for the kind of sweeping, expensive services that big national and multi-national brands use? Online Management Services OMS is local Victoria run. My clients often come to me once they’re off a long-term contract with a firm from Vancouver or Toronto. They want a local person they can phone or text when they have a question and I am almost always available.
Keyword Relevance
Choosing the right keywords to target is a fundamental aspect of search engine marketing. There are professional tools available to reveal all kinds of information about specific key terms and phrases. How many searches are done for a term in a given amount of time, how much traffic flows through each key term, how much it would cost to buy a click with that term and so much more. The most important thing to remember is to not hit Google over the head with your key term. Page title, h1 tag and a couple of mentions in the body of the page is it. Generously sprinkle similar related phrases throughout the page and link to the page or article from within your own website using the term as the anchor text. The rest is done with backlinks.
Referral Links
Otherwise known as back links, referral links are essentially votes from other websites. They are suggestions to the search engine web crawlers that your content is what searchers are looking for when they are searching for [a plumber in anytown] or a [mechanic in yourtown]. Ask Google and they’ll tell you the only way to get backlinks is to write great compelling content that people want to read and they’ll link back to it for their own readers. This is great advice if you’re writing about travel, or celebrity gossip. But what about you? My clients are small business owners way out here in Victoria BC who want to be found by people around Victoria looking for services like theirs. Why would anyone spontaneously link to the website of a local plumber or dentist? The answer lies in the ‘group buying’ magic of [local seo].
Social Media Interactions
The search engine’s main goal is to return the undisputed expert in a given field to it’s customer (the searcher) when looking for say, a moving company. More and more your social media interactions with your community are an indicator to the SE’s that you are the best and most important expert in your field. It is more important than ever to build a social community around your business. Choose at least one social media platform and post a couple of times per week. Don’t over sell yourself. Engage with the community. Talk about community events, re-post and like from pages with big followings, and when necessary, leverage a local social media powerhouse to run contests in order to build your own following. All of this can be achieved for a small monthly fee with my social media management Victoria package.
Using paid ads in social media and search engines is an excellent technique especially while waiting to increase your organic local seo ranking. Employing a Google AdWords campaign manager is an effective and economical option to master your PPC campaigns.
Integration With Google Services
This should be such a no-brainer, but one that many people miss. Your business absolutely needs to be registered with Google Places for Business. Get your business verified (by mail). Start attracting Google reviews. Post your social media content to your Google Plus account. Register your website for Google Analytics. One of the most effective things my client’s have done is to use my system for attracting positive Google reviews from their customers. I thought like Google. Who is more expert in a given field? The business who’s not registered with us? The one who is registered with us but only has 3 customer reviews? Or the business that has 3 dozen Google reviews? Turns out I was right.