SEO Tactics part 1

Search engine optimization is essential for businesses that seek to connect with prospects and customers on the Internet today. Almost all of your competitors on the first page of Google have ongoing SEO campaigns to stay at the top. Internet users stick with the winners and rarely dig through search results to find an obscure solution.

SEO is not a one size fits all solution. Some vendors say, “we build links for you.” So what. Are these links relevant? Do they help meet your present day business needs? Do they fit in with your strategic vision for growth? Will links buy your product or service?

SEO Tactic: Competitive Analysis

An SEO expert should make an effort to understand business requirements and your industry vertical before offering SEO service packages. The most competitive verticals are related to these top ranked search terms: insurance, loans, mortgage, attorney, credit, and lawyer (listed in order of importance). Small businesses in these verticals will not succeed against early adopters that have well funded teams working on optimization every day without competitive analysis.

On the other hand there are quite a number of late adopters to Internet Marketing. When the vertical is not very competitive the right product or service offering can appear on Google’s page 1 right next to the big boys within a few months. I faced this situation recently when I discovered two national chains dominated my client’s vertical but the local businesses were not at all competitive.

SEO Tactic: Local SEO Optimization

Google optimizes their search results based on relevancy parameters tied to the search word or phrase, hence the terms keyword and keyword phrase. As it turns out your location is a wild card. If your company is around the block and a national competitor is 25 miles away you will most likely show up favorably in the results. You may be alongside or even below the national chain but you can land a prospect or customer using local SEO optimization.

My recent client’s high-level objective for SEO was to extend their brand on the Internet so everyone living within in a five-mile radius knows of them.

See the relationship? Local SEO optimization meets this clients’ requirement.

Local SEO optimization involves listing your business on various business directories, or middlemen, as I like to call them. Years ago people discovered they could simply buy a database make it into a business directory and charge businesses to appear where they would have normally have appeared in the search results if the directories hadn’t outranked them. This is the problem with “we build links for you.” Directories will always have more links.

There are hundreds of business directories like Yelp, Merchant Circle, YellowPages, Whitepages, Supermedia, Yellowbook, CitySearch, etc. Some offer listings for free, all of them offer enhanced listings for a fee and all of them change their terms of service at anytime they want. Directories served a purpose at one time but today directories are just another list you need to optimize.

Ok so let’s get to the numbers. Here are the results from Local SEO Optimization for my recent client:

So what did we learn? Local SEO optimization works well for my client. Service offering #2 is very competitive and requires further optimization. Local SEO alone will not do the job if they are looking for prospects and customers for this service offering.

Ok so my client is on Google page 1 for three of their primary service offerings, what’s next?

SEO Tactics part 2…coming soon

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