Appeal To Search Engines By Appealing To People
Local Search Engine Optimization
The days of hacking your way to the top of organic search engine rankings with quick tactics are long gone. Search engines care about delivering quality relevant content that engages people and keeps them coming back for more searches.
Search engine optimization best practices go hand-in-hand with website standards. Search engines discover web pages that check all of these key points:
High-Quality Content
Some businesses create a keyword strategy but wonder why they don’t see results. If you want to get a higher ranking, you have to have high-quality content on your website. Not only do search engines understand high-quality content and award it with more search traffic, but this compelling content also leads to a better user experience for your customer and has a greater chance of being shared on social media and attractive links.
Relevant Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step for search engine optimization. When doing keyword research, you should consider what relevant keywords your site already ranks for, what keywords your competitors rank for, and other keywords potential customers are searching for. Identifying these terms can allow you to connect with your ideal customer.
Demonstrating Topic Authority
You want to put content on your website to get people talking and sharing and increase your search rankings. This means you need to focus on topics you’re passionate about and an expert in. Once you’ve proved yourself as knowledgeable in one topic, prospects are more likely to explore content on similar topics on your website.
Optimize On-Page SEO
To really up your SEO strategy, you want to consider on-page optimization. This process ensures that the content on your website is relevant to users by including the right keywords and phrases in the headings and body of the copy, creating relevant title tags and a meta descriptions for each page, and using a good URL with the focus keyword.
Build Links To Your Page
External links from other websites are a core ranking factor for major search engines like Google. You can boost your search rankings by promoting content by linking it through other platforms or channels, building relationships with other websites, submitting websites to relevant web directories, and getting press to attract links from other sites.
Keep Content Current
Current content is compelling content. By updating existing content or creating brand new pieces of content, you signal to search engines that your site is staying relevant with timely content. It also gives continuous opportunities for prospective customers to engage with your site and share new content on social media.
The DCM Approach
By now you’d expect search engines to be smarter than most people give them credit for. Let’s be clear – search engine optimization matters, but many old tactics no longer apply. We follow best practices by default and focus on the areas that give you the most impact.
- Keyword research matters if you’re going to connect to the right audience. You have to know what people are searching for and craft content that offers answers.
- Follow best practices for on-page SEO including proper links and meta tags.
- Deep dive the information you want to be known for. This builds engagement and establishes your authority.
- Stay current to stay relevant so search engines know they are delivering up-to-date information instead of old content.
- Spread the word about your content to build links back to your website.
- Reputation management also influences SEO efforts. That means being listed where it matters with current information and quality reviews.
Search Engine Optimization should be a basic requirement for any website. With some extra time and effort, you can build your content in a way that best serves your audience – which ultimately serves search engines.
FEATURED PROJECT
McClure Fitness is Arkansas’s largest group fitness studio. We focused on quality relevant content and SEO best practices to secure the top search result.
Your Local Search Engine Optimization
Quality SEO comes down to a larger strategy of turning your piece of the Internet into a gold mine of information. Google specifically focuses on three key areas when establishing Domain Authority (i.e. how you rank).
- Expertise
Are you an expert in your field? Prove it! Write content that shows off your knowledge. This is hard to fake and gives search engines confidence that they are serving results you can count on.
- Authoritativeness
It’s critical to be transparent about who’s authoring the content. This means spending time on your about page, contact page, and giving references to external sources.
- Trustworthiness
If other reputable sites reference you, this builds more confidence that you are the expert you claim to be.
To maximize the effectiveness of these strategies and weed out the global competition, there’s one missing ingredient we must focus on. Local relevance takes the content about your services and couples it with prominent cities in your area. These city+service landing pages become the go-to source for information your ideal customer needs to see and can rank well in search results.
SEO is not a quick fix for traffic problems. It takes time to build robust content to become an authority. That doesn’t mean search engine optimization should be ignored. There is no secret trick here. What’s relevant ranks. Get in touch today to find out more!
