As a small business owner you probably already realize the importance of ranking in the search engines. The biggest challenge you’ll face is trying to rank in the top spots for competitive local keywords.
This is very valuable real estate for any business owner to possess. In this post we’re going to dive into a few strategies you can implement to increase your search engine rankings, grow your search engine presence, and hopefully increase your customer base.
1. Do Your Keyword Research
The keywords you choose to optimize for will be the lifeblood of your SEO campaign. Basically, if you pick the wrong keywords you’re going to be in for a world of hurt. This is where choosing long-tail keywords will come into play.
Long-tail keywords are keywords that are longer than a word or two. The good news is that these keywords are much easier to optimize for, and search trends are suggesting that long-tail is going to be the future of search.
Make sure you spend time choosing the right keywords to optimize for. When choosing more specific keywords the traffic numbers may be a little lower, but the traffic will be more relevant.
2. Write Content For Your Readers
For a long time there was a trend to write for the search engines, instead of the readers. Content written for the search engines will be stuffed with keywords and will be less readable.
When you’re creating content make sure you create content your readers will love, and will be helpful to them. If you do this they’ll come back time and time again, and they might even tell their friends. Word of mouth referrals are some of the most useful and most overlooked referrals, especially in the online sphere.
3. Have A Regular Content Schedule
When you’re starting out you’ll need to have a regular content schedule. This will not only help to build your authority, but will get people to come back to your website on a consistent basis.
This will also alert the search engines to crawl your site on a regular basis, since it’s being updated on a consistent basis with new content.
4. Ensure Your Local Listings Are The Same
A big factor of local rankings has to do with your local citations. These are entrances online where your location and contact information is listed. One of the best ways to get a jump on this is to use ‘Google My Business’, which allows you to sit your location information.
From there is makes sense to expand out into Yelp and other listing services.
Increasing your search engine rankings doesn’t have to be extremely difficult. Of course, having a custom tailored SEO campaign will help, but the above will get you going in the right direction. If you want to take your search engine rankings seriously, then get in touch with C7 Creative today.
by Calvin Bryant
Digital Marketing Geek
