Search Engine Optimization Strategies Your Business Can Count On!
I just met with a plumber in a very small town wanting to rank on Google for search terms in other big cities surrounding him. He wasn’t even ranking for his own small town, let alone have any content on his website indicating that he serviced other cities. He couldn’t afford the basic $1,000 minimum monthly investment into his business nor did he know how to work with his website. He wanted to rank on Google for a really hard set of keywords and his website was relatively thin, low content, not optimized for search, and it didn’t look very trustworthy.
From my perspective, he was pretty much screwed except for one SEO idea.
How can we help this person grow his business, be happy, and refer us to other businesses?
Were we suppose to give him SEO Strategies, do the optimization work and take a business loss, or coach him through?
Then it hit us!
There are a number of super small towns all around him that have super low search engine competition, zero seo optimized sites ranking on search, and not even a competitor in his niche within those small towns.
Now we’re talking towns the size of 500 people or so… SMALL, SMALL TOWNS.
What could this gentleman do and can we help him?
- On-page SEO: He MUST write high quality, keyword relevant posts/pages on his website, and with optimized URLs. Along with updating his titles and descriptions to help the search engines define what he should be ranking for.
- Off-page SEO: Social Media indicators, backlinks, Off-page content pointing back to his site.
If he had 5 towns around him that he wanted to target, this would have to do to get the results he needed. His business needs more leads, customers, and referring customers. So our goal is to get him in front of peoples eyeballs online who are searching for the products and services that he has to offer.
The question that comes up immediately, “How do you write quality content about a small town and keep it niche and keyword orientated while empowering his leads to convert to customers?”
Start with http://www.city-data.com — Now, not all small towns will be on here. Actually the towns that he wants to rank for aren’t even on here but it provides a wealth of marketing data and information that can be used. It will take some creativity and perspective to take that information and change it enough to make it relevant and unique content. If there are 500 people in this city that could mean 500 people could run into the problems that your business solves. If there are 200 businesses in this town, that could be restated 200 business in [insert town] are in need of SEO services whether they know it or not and to educate these businesses on the value of search engine optimization is crucial to their success.
For the small towns that do not have city data available, wikipedia and the cities website could be a good source of information.
Basically use this information to craft your story. Express the problems your business solves in that town, make sure your keywords are in there at about 2-3% saturation level and the town is in there about the same or more. Make sure your main keywords are in the title/description tags. This is important!
Feel free to run a scan of your webpage or if you use wordpress install an SEO plugin to check for you. Keyword saturation is important otherwise Google and Bing has zero clue what you are trying to rank for.
Even if you are a Professional SEO Consultant you know how valuable having the right tools in your lineup are. We use tons of SEO tools to analyze our content, links, websites, and online presence. It would be wise for you to do the same as it saves time, frustration, and beating your head against the wall.
Let’s say you are a plumber trying to rank on google for “Ankeny Plumbers” or something similar…
Write a post on your website with the URL being www.xyz.com/ankeny-plumbers
Have Ankeny, Ankeny IA, Ankeny Iowa in your post a few times. Make sure Ankeny is in there several times wherever it naturally fits as well as the word plumbers, if this is your niche. Also, remember to make sure plumbers and each variation are in there too: plumbing and plumber. Talk about the problems you fix for people, how much they appreciate your work, testimonials from people from that town or a nearby town. People do business with people that they know, like, and trust. Testimonials help with this big time, video testimonials are even better!!!
In the copy, link to your contact us page and home page or other important pages relevant to the content. This is called link funneling as the off-page SEO will help google spiders crawl to your website, land on those “power pages” and then crawl to the home page. This is a small step most SEO professionals miss too. Remember this because it’s important.
From a conversion perspective, make sure your phone number and a call to action is at the bottom of the page. It will help motivate people to call you at the right time.
Once you have the pages written, it’s best to call in the professionals (such as BAM) for the off-page SEO. If I were to teach you off page, it would take an entire book (plus more). In fact, that’s what we are writing!!! If you want a sneak peak of our seo book fill out the form below and I’ll send it to you!