Getting search results means coming up as high as possible when people search for your type of business or service. If you come up high in search results you will get clicks. That means potential customers will be looking at your website or social media posts. And hopefully, if they like what they see, you will get some calls.
On the other hand, if you don’t rank – if you don’t come up near the top of search results – you won’t be getting those calls. Because, for the most part, if you don’t place in the top 3 or 4 listings your chances of getting clicks quickly go down. The vast majority of “clicks” go to the top 3 or 4 positions in searches.
Getting Ranking
So obviously ranking in Google searches is pretty important. But improving their ranking is a mystery to most business people. That’s mostly because they are too busy running their businesses. It isn’t rocket science, but they simple don’t have the time to be concerned with something as weird as worrying about Google.
But the truth is, getting ranking is both easy and difficult at the same time. You often just have to do a few simple things. But you can never be 100% certain that you’ve done them correctly.
Two Simple Things to help get Rankings
Most “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) professionals agree there are two fundamental things that improve your ranking. There are other things that help too, but these two are really basic.
1. Keywords – Highlighting your websites and social media posts with the right “keywords” or search terms, and
2. Backlinks – Getting “backlinks” to your web properties. In English that means getting other websites to link to yours.
Tips on Choosing Keywords
Choosing the most effective keywords simply means
1) choosing the terms people looking for your service are likely to be using, and
2) Choosing the version of these terms that will help you place higher in the searches than your competition.
This can become overwhelming if you are up against 30 or 100 companies offering a similar service to yours. Especially if they are going after the same target market.
Let’s say your company offers home cleaning services to communities across southern Ontario. You have a chain of franchises in 20 different towns and cities.
If you try to make an impact on Google for your general market area you will be coming up against many, many competitors – both regional and local. Some of these will already score high in the Google rankings.
So you should probably do some keyword analysis to see which keywords work for them, and if there are any others that have potential and should therefore be targeted by you.
There are people who do this sort of analysis. And there are services available where you can do it yourself. (Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and many others)
Also, several of your local competitors will have a built in advantage because it seems, from our experience, that local providers are given preference based on location.
The Local Business Advantage
From doing many test searches it seems clear that local companies have a search advantage when it comes to local services. If you are a pizza restaurant located in Cambridge, for example, you should do well in local searches for “pizza restaurants in Cambridge”.
In fact it’s pretty obvious why Google (or any other search engine) would give preference to local pizza restaurants over pizza restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, or even Hamilton or Waterloo.
In fact our experience is that targeting “pizza restaurants in Cambridge” (where you include the location in many or all references) is quite unnecessary. Obviously Google is smart enough to figure out you are in Cambridge without you constantly reminding them.
So that gives local businesses two important advantages, at least for “local” products or services:
1. There aren’t as many direct competitors, and,
2. Local companies are given priority over those outside of the area.
And that brings us to the other important ranking factor:
How do you get Backlinks
As previously mentioned, Google is impressed when you have links from other sites pointing to yours. This apparently is not as important as it was 15 or 20 years ago. But it is still considered fairly important.
The assumption is that when other companies or services link to yours, that serves as a vote of confidence in your company or service. It establishes or strengthens what is considered your “authority”.
Of course some links are more authoritative than others. Getting a link from “Google My Business”, “Bing Places”, or even Yelp or Facebook is more impressive (and more important) than getting one from a website that you yourself have thrown up. Or a bunch of links you have purchased from somewhere – yes links-for-sale sites do exist.
Eventually a website or social media page that gets a healthy amount of traffic will accumulate a number of organic links (links others have created to recommend your service.)
But in the meantime where is a new company, or one with a new website or social media presence, supposed to get links?
The Good News
The good news is that there are directories and lists of businesses where you can list your business for a small charge, or even for free. Some of these are critically important (given a good amount of weight by Google).
There are also SEO service providers that will do the legwork for you. Creating listings in a number of directories can be time consuming, and requires a good deal of research and planning. A service that specializes in this will have a better idea of which directories to target, what to put in them, and how to do it efficiently. In fact they may have access to automated processes that can get you listed in up to 100 or more directories, in just a matter of days.
So there you go. If you would like more information about the low cost link building and keyword analysis services offered by Cross Town Promotions, just follow this link.