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Local SEO – Online Marketing Company for Local Businesses

For local businesses looking to find new customers organically, without paying big bucks for costly ads, here’s an affordable solution.

The Basics Of SEO

In the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there are five important things you need to know.

  • Keyword research
  • On-site SEO
  • Off-site SEO
  • Content management
  • Link building

Let’s take a quick look at each one.

  • Keyword research
  • On-site SEO
  • Off-site SEO
  • Content management
  • Link building

1. Keyword research

If you’re new to the world of SEO, you may not know that keywords matter. Essentially, your keywords are words and phrases that customers might use to search for your products or services online. For example, if you’re a lawyer and you specialize in family law, you may want to focus on the keywords “family law” or “divorce lawyers”. When customers search for these phrases, your website will typically show up near the top of the list. This is known as search engine optimization (SEO).

There are numerous tools you can use to find the keywords most people are using to find your services or products. If you have an existing SEO company that specializes in organic (non-paid) search traffic, you can ask them for a free keyword tool such as Google Keyword Planner or Wordstream.

2. On-site SEO

On-site SEO primarily deals with the optimization of your website to boost your rankings in the search engines. Essentially, you’re optimizing the content of your site and the format in which it’s delivered to earn top rankings in the search engines. For example, you may want to focus on acquiring highly-trafficked and trusted webpages for your practice that are also optimized for the most important keywords.

Now, this doesn’t mean that every single page on your website needs to be perfect in terms of SEO. In fact, there are many ‘SEO traps’ that you could fall into if you aren’t careful. For example, stuffing your keywords all in one area of the page may cause your site to be penalized by Google (along with a drop in rankings).

3. Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO primarily deals with getting traffic from one website to another. Essentially, you’re trying to get other websites to link to your website to boost your rankings. There are two main types of off-site SEO: 

  • Link building
  • Content sharing

The first one is link building. As we mentioned above, getting other websites to link to your website is a great way to boost your rankings. However, you need to be careful not to overdo it and end up with a ‘spammy’ link from a website you don’t know or trust. This is where link building becomes link building 101.

When you develop and promote your website, you’ll be prompted to choose a link building strategy. Typically, you’ll be offered one of three solutions: 

  • No link building
  • Named links
  • Hybrid links

If you don’t have the time or the resources to build out a linked-list of websites, you can choose the ‘no link building’ option. This is typically the safest and the most affordable solution. When developing your link-building strategy, pick one or two solutions to start with and then develop and expand from there. As you get more experienced, you can take on more complex projects. Choosing the named-link strategy may also be an option if you’re looking for a quick and easy solution. The key takeaway here is to choose a strategy that suits your needs and resources. If you have the budget and the time to develop a fully-functional and engaging website, you might want to consider a hybrid link strategy.

4. Content management

If you’re looking to create a physical product, you’ll need to take into consideration that you’ll have to get it approved by a publisher or the like before you can distribute it to the public. If you’re just creating an informational website, you don’t need to worry about this as much.

Regardless of whether you have a physical product or an informational website, you’ll need to get content approved before you can make it live. This is where content management comes in. Essentially, content management takes all of the content on your website (whether it’s blog posts, product descriptions, FAQs, etc) and makes it accessible to the public. It’s a great way to increase website traffic and get more people interested in your brand or business.

5. Link building

Finally, we come to the most important part of SEO: linking. As we mentioned above, getting other websites to link to your website is a great way to boost your rankings. You get the most benefit when you link to authoritative websites in your industry. To find these websites, you can use a tool like Google’s SEO link planner to find the best-performing links for your targeted keywords.

Google’s link planner is a free tool designed to help you find and link to authoritative websites. When you enter your keywords, you’ll get a list of websites that are already performing well in the search engines and are ready to be linked to.

To get started, just click “Get free SEO link recommendations now” and you’ll be taken to the tool. From there, you can enter your targeted keywords and get a list of authoritative websites that are ready to be linked to.

You can also see the traffic and the domain authority of the websites that are ready to be linked to. Essentially, this is a great tool for people looking to get started with SEO or for anyone who wants to learn more about the topic.

As SEO continues to evolve, the field is changing and innovators like Neil Patel are setting the pace.