What is SEO and Why Does my Local Business need SEO?

SEO is a common practice to help rank a website on the first page of Google and other Search engines.

When done correctly SEO is a powerful tool and your local business needs SEO to grow infinitely. It takes some time to build but like most things it is the best way to grow your business and help your customers find you more easily.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is a process that affects online presence of a website in a search engine aka it’s ranking among other related websites with similar topics.

Unpaid results, also referred to as Organic traffic, is generated by how often do specific terms appear on the website.

The more a term appears on the website or is included in the alt tags and metadata the better the ranking it will have with search engines. This however is just one simplified piece of the puzzle. To do SEO correctly there is a fine art to it.

You can use SEO to target all kinds of different categories including different types of search such as images or videos. Local Search Engine optimization is a subset of SEO where it is focused more on making a local business’s SEO have a better online presence where the community is better able to find said business.

For example, if I wanted to see what pizza places were near me, it would benefit a local business near my hometown to use terms like “St Louis Missouri” and “pizza”, or “pizza places near me”.

Your website needs good SEO or search engines will have no way to know what your website is about. Keywords are terms used throughout your site that other people are already searching for and are how the search engine computers can “read” your site. Without these strategic terms and correct placement, your website is a barren wasteland to the common search engine computer.

Although SEO is vital to the long term goals of a website, it will take some time before you start to see results as there are plenty of websites that have been around longer than your website and have a better SEO ranking. But you still need SEO as it is crucial in helping the search engines understand your website.

The most common way to assist in growing your SEO is using something called “Content Marketing”. Great SEO includes creating content centered around the keywords you wish to rank for.

For example if you wanted to Rank 4 on the term “Marketing”, you would have to write a lot of Articles related to “Marketing” or related to “Digital Marketing”. Or maybe make infographics or even YouTube videos that had to do with the search term keyword “Marketing”. And overtime this would increase your SEO.

Another reason to create great content for your target audience is because it will increase the chances of it being shared by your visitors, which will increase your backlinks — which are another crucial SEO tactic.

Backlinks are when another website has shared or linked back to your content which helps boost your ranking because the search engines realize that other websites are sharing your content so it must be valuable.

Although SEO is a valuable tool, you must proceed with caution as some techniques can land you in trouble with the search engines and permanently damage your ranking.

SEO has been broken up into two separate entities White hat SEO or Black hat SEO.

White hat as you probably figured tends to increase results long-term and are helpful and informative. Well constructed content that improves overall user experience and take time.

Black hat techniques involves spamming the search engines with practices like “keyword stuffing”, or deceptive techniques such as “invisible text”, text that has been hidden into the background, or keywords stuffed into the Alt text that have no relevance to the images or other content being used.

“Keyword stuffing” is where you put way too many terms that you’re trying to rank for into a clunky article that would only make sense to a computer. This can damage your Google ratings as it is considered not helpful content for the audience and can actually hurt your long term business ranking goals.

The Internet is becoming increasingly competitive and if you don’t do SEO properly it can result in disaster!

Businesses that have the best SEO will have the best advantage in retaining customers and providing long term value to visitors on their websites.

Most people when they’re searching for something online they need an Answer or they have a pressing problem that they need solved. Sometimes these pressing issues are as simple as they’re hungry and want to go eat at the best pizza place around town!

So they type in terms that might help them such as “pizza place near me”. Once they’ve entered the information, search engine will crawl all of the websites looking for a good match based on the keywords that the customer put into the search box. Usually people will click on the first couple of results.

If they’re unsatisfied with those results or it didn’t answer their pressing problem we’ll go back and look further or maybe they will give up.

That’s why it’s super important that you should aim to be at the top of the search results, and that you should aim to solve your visitors problems as much as you can.

The more valuable your keywords, the better your chances are of getting in front of your Target audience. Keywords that people search for a more frequently will have a better keyword value than keywords that are not typically used. Keywords used in your business may not be as valuable to another business. That’s why it’s important to be specific.

SEO can be a great Marketing strategy.

Those websites looking to get ahead of the game may choose to do something that yields faster results like Paid Advertising or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) depending on your desired business goals.

Paying for ads will obviously land your business in the top spots on the search engine results but running long term advertising can become costly if not supplemented by other ranking strategies.

Unpaid SEO strategies are going to be based on other factors such as quality, relevance and overall value to the customer’s inquiry.

I hope that gave you in some good Insight on why SEO is it important technique for your local business and why you need SEO on your website. SEO will help you with your long-term business goals by reaching your customers and solving their problems.

Is there anything that you wanted more detail on? Let me know in the comments section!

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