Category: Search Engine Optimization

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4 Reasons to Invest in Local SEO

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Can’t figure out why your website isn’t attracting targeted traffic? You may have invested in high-quality website design and development, but you shouldn’t forget to factor in search engine optimization. Over the years, SEO has proven to be one of the best and most cost-effective ways to increase traffic and brand recognition. If your goal is to grab the attention of prospective customers in your area, then you should be particularly concerned with local SEO. It’s a more specific field that involves the promotion of local businesses, something that would pad your bottom line.

You probably know how popular search engines are. Google takes a commanding share of the entire market, processing billions upon billions of search queries every single day. There’s a good chance that prospective customers are using Google at this very moment to look for your products or services. However, what happens if your website isn’t optimized for the local search listings? It only means one thing: you’re losing money to your competitors.

If you’re still ignoring the power of local SEO in this day and age, you’re not doing your business any favors. Here are four benefits of local SEO to convince you to start investing:

1) It doesn’t cost as much as traditional advertising methods

Have you tried traditional marketing techniques such as print or TV advertising? If you answered yes, then you know how expensive they can be. What’s worse is that the results you get, if any, prove immensely challenging to measure. This is precisely why marketers have shied away from these techniques and made their way to the world of SEO.

Improving your organic rankings is an excellent way to increase brand recognition without costing a fortune. Yes, SEO isn’t free. You have to build a website, publish great content, and work with a reputable SEO company to help set up an effective strategy for improving your rankings. However, the total cost is usually much lower compared to what you’d have to shell out for print or TV ads. When you use local SEO software from TribeLocal it makes the tasks much simpler and cost-effective.

Moreover, thanks to analytics platforms, tracking important data has become easier than ever. You’ll find out how many visitors come to your site daily, what percentage stays for a given length of time, and other vital metrics that tell you whether or not the SEO plan works.

2) It drives targeted traffic

When it comes to generating traffic for your website, you should understand that not all traffic is the same. Imagine 1,000 people visiting your site every day, but not a single one of them buys your products or services. This can prove to be frustrating. However, when you use local SEO software like TribeLocal, you’ll start driving laser-targeted traffic which is exactly what you want for your business.

Targeted traffic means that the visitors coming to your site have a good chance of converting. After all, they are the ones who entered the keyword on Google. It’s up to you to optimize your website, so you show up for the search terms used by your target market. Driving more targeted traffic ultimately means more sales.

3) It boosts conversions

When talking about SEO, most people think that it’s all about climbing up the search engine results pages. Keep in mind, however, that first-page rankings are of no use if none of your visitors make a purchase. What’s interesting to learn is that nearly 80% of local searches conducted on mobile devices result in a purchase, whether offline or online.

This highlights the significant impact of SEO on brand recognition. Studies show that consumers trust businesses found on the first page. By improving your organic rankings, you make your business more trustworthy in the eyes of potential customers. This alone should be reason enough to start using local SEO.

4) It works for the long-term

Plenty of marketing techniques may provide your business with instant exposure, but the minute you stop spending money, all of the traffic goes down the drain. A prime example is pay-per-click advertising. As you can imagine, this can burn your marketing dollars quickly. Local SEO, on the other hand, provides your business with long-term exposure to your target audience. There’s no need to continually shell out money to hold on to your rankings, especially if you’re not in an ultra-competitive industry.

This is the biggest reason why many digital marketing specialists consider local SEO so cost-effective. Of course, you need to spend money upfront, but once the strategy has brought your website to the first page, all it takes is a bit of maintenance work to ensure that your competitors wouldn’t outrank you. This includes the continuous acquisition of quality links and publishing fresh and informative posts. Just remember to take advantage of the targeted traffic you’re getting once your website is already on top of the search listings.

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How To Do Search Engine Optimization Step-By-Step

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If you can’t afford to hire an SEO company or expert just yet, you should know that you can do your search engine optimization by yourself to a certain extent. This brief guide is going to show you what to do in order to improve your visibility in search. While the results will depend on your niche and your targeted keywords, you can rest assured your efforts are going to be rewarded sooner or later.

Keyword research is the first thing to do, as it will have a direct influence on your progress. Ideally, you should target keywords that have a good amount of traffic and a fairly moderate to low level of competitiveness. If you pick easy keywords with low traffic volumes, you may be able to rank quickly, but you won’t get enough traffic to make it well worth it. If on the contrary, you target tough keywords, you won’t be able to surpass your competitors. The reason is that you can only acquire inbound links at a certain speed. Do it too fast, and you may get penalized by Google. This is a process that has to replicate the natural patterns of acquiring links, so you can’t speed it up without risking to lose your website. If you can’t afford premium keyword research tools, you can either sign up for their trial versions or use some free ones.

PixelChefs.com – search engine optimization company in Orlando, FL recommends that once you have found your keywords, you need to develop your website around them. Assign each of the keywords a dedicated page, and make sure the copy includes the keyword and some of its synonyms. Search engines are smart enough to make proper use of Latent Semantic Indexing, so you should take this into consideration when writing your content. Don’t forget to add your keywords to the title tags. Also, invest some effort into writing compelling meta descriptions, because these are the snippets search engines display when they list your website on their search results pages. These snippets should entice search engine users into clicking on your result rather than on the other nine on the page.

Beware of over optimization, as search engines are trained to recognize and penalize it. Avoid a too high keyword density, as anything over 2% may get you in trouble. Use synonyms and related terms rather than repeating the same keywords over and over again. The longer your copy, the better. Think of your words as gates for search engines to find and index your website. The more gates you open, the higher your chances to be found for more search strings.

Develop a coherent website architecture, with clear navigation and with a solid internal linking system. This sounds more complicated than it is. All you have to do is to link back to one or two of your older pages each time you write a new one. This is the best way to ensure the optimal authority flow throughout your whole website.

The hardest part is yet to come. You need links from other web properties in order to boost the authority of your website. You can’t purchase these links, as this is against Google’s terms of service. You’ll need to use your creativity and find ways to persuade other webmasters to link to you. Writing guest articles is a strategy that works, so you should try it by all means. However, keep in mind that you need links from websites on topics that are similar or related to yours.

Social media signals are also important. Identify one or two channels your target audience prefers, and try to gather a community of loyal fans and followers on these networks. Position yourself as an authority in your niche, and your followers will be likely to recommend your website to their peers. This can boost your authority and your organic rankings.

Last but not least, closely monitor your targeted keywords and your SEO activities. You need to keep track of your progress, in order to understand what works best for your website. Tracking your positions in the SERPs can also help you stay motivated. SEO is a long-term endeavor, so you’re going to need something to help you keep your motivation intact until you see some noticeable results. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Even after you’ve reached your desired positions in the SERPs, you still have to stick with your link building activities, as this is how you can maintain your visibility. Your competitors aren’t sleeping, so you can’t afford to slow down and allow them to overtake you.

This is a brief step-by-step search engine optimization guide. By following it, you should be able to drive a steady flow of targeted search engine traffic to your website. Nonetheless, you have to be aware that the above-described process requires sustained efforts and an awful lot of time. If you can’t do it, you should rather outsource it to an search engine optimization company.