Small Business SEO Services Can Solve Your Advertising & Marketing Problems, Fast!
Having top positions on the search engines is like having 1,000 Yellow Pages Ads for your small business! Our Local SEO & Google Places optimization services can help you get top rankings in the search engines. We have helped over 100 small businesses improve their search engine rankings in Google, Google Places, Yahoo, & Bing. We are positive we can help you too!
Do You Want a Consistent Stream of New Customers Coming to Your Local Business?
Achieving the top rankings in the search engines (like Google) is an extremely powerful way to secure constant new business. Often, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people searching for exactly what you do every month online.
Look at the statistics:
- 73% of all online activity is related to local content - Google
- 82% of local searchers follow up with a phone call or show up on your doorstep – Comscore
- 66% of Americans use local search to find local businesses - Comscore
- 54% of Americans have replaced phone books (Yellow Pages & Business Directory) with internet and local search - Comscore
- 41% of consumers say they use a location in their search - Lawyer in Los Angeles
It’s obvious: your customers and potential customers are using the internet to find local services and if you are not findable in the search engines (like Google), then you are invisible to them.
The Good News: You Too Can Have Great Rankings in The Search Engines For Your Small Business’ Website
Just imagine your business’ website showing up on the first page of the search engines where potential customers can easily find your business services and/or products.
Having preferred rankings in the search engines for your local keywords can create an avalanche of super targeted traffic and produce a solid stream of quality leads, sales and new customers to your small business.
The reason why search engine marketing usually converts better than any other marketing medium is because when someone is searching on Google, they are usually trying to solve a problem. If your business’ website is findable when they are trying to solve their problem and your website looks trustworthy and credible, often you have a very, very good chance at getting the business.
Most other marketing mediums involve what is referred to as interruption marketing, where you market blindly to the masses (radio, TV, magazine, newspaper, etc). You may reach a larger audience, however it’s very untargeted. I think we’d all agree that it’s usually a much better plan to have your business available and in front of people when they are looking specifically for your services and products.
“If you have professional website set-up that is proven to convert, and your website ranks for your desired target keyword phrases above the fold on the first page of the search engines, it can sometimes be like taking candy from a baby.”
SEO’s Return on Investment is Trackable
Every businesses’ margins are different, but when internet marketing is done ‘right’, it can be one of the fastest and best returns on investment for a small business.
The amazing thing about most internet marketing (like SEO) is that you can track and measure the results. There are not many other marketing mediums that allow you to do this.
For example, you can hook up Google Analytics to your website, which will allow you to track all the traffic to your website. You can see where the traffic is coming from and even which keywords brought the traffic. In addition to that, you can add a simple piece of code to your website on your lead capture pages or sales pages (if you sell products), which will then give you the ability to track conversions. A conversion can be any type of goal: a lead, a sale, a download, etc.
Because you can track this data, you can determine ROI’s on your search engine marketing. At SBOC, we set all this up for you and provide monthly reports to you, so you can make sure you always have a positive ROI on your SEO services.
SEO is NOT Hard to Understand
Sometimes the media and other local businesses like to suggest that ‘search engine optimization’ is difficult or hard to understand. Don’t believe the hype! SEO can be explained and here at SBOC we believe that any credible SEO company can explain their process to you and show you what they are doing to help improve your website’s visibility on the search engines. In fact, we believe anyone is able to learn how SEO works with some effort and time.
Small business search engine optimization process can be broken into five simple steps:
- Picking the right keywords and keyword phrases for which to optimize.
- Creating value-based content on your website that your customers want.
- Optimizing that content for the search engines.
- Performing inbound marketing activities to generate backlinks, citations, and reviews to your web content.
- Optimizing local listings (Google Places, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp, etc).
SEO is really that simple!
Picking the ‘Right’ Keywords is Essential
This is one of the most important steps to running a successful small business SEO campaign. If you get the keyword research wrong, you could end up ranking your website for the wrong keywords or ones that are way too competitive, making the process take too long to give a return on your investment.
At SBOC, we spend a lot of time doing all the appropriate keyword research and market analysis to make sure we are choosing the right keyword targets that will provide the best return on you investment in the shortest amount of time. We look for keywords that:
- Have great commercial intent
- Have a solid search volume
- Ideally have little or no competition
The reason we look at commercial intent, search volume, and competition is because not all keywords are created equal and should not be solely based off of search volume.
For example, lets say you own an electrical business in Ottawa. The keyword ‘electrician’ is a relevant keyword that has tons of search volume, but it lacks the local commercial intent and it has a ton of competition.
The better keyword to target would be ‘electrician Ottawa’ because as soon as you add the city modifier, it makes the keyword have 100% commercial intent to hiring an electrician in Ottawa.
On top of that, ‘electrician Ottawa’ traditionally would have a lot less competition than ‘electrician’. At SBOC, we also do a full market analysis of the top 10 competitors. We actually reverse engineer what they have done to get their rankings on specific keywords. We then look at that SEO data to help inform us on what the best keyword targets will be for a strong, fast ROI.
The trick to great small business SEO starts with proper keyword and market research.
Creating Content – It Must Be Interesting & Valuable
If your site is ugly and your content is thin and/or boring, then you are making it very difficult to rank well in the search engines.
It’s not that the search engines like Google can tell if a website is pretty or not. Nor can Google tell if content is good or not. However, they can tell how long people stay on your site and whether your visitors are bouncing off in seconds due to the thin and uninteresting content.
We believe high bounce rates can result in lower rankings due to usability factors built into the search engine algorithms. It’s also just good practice for you to offer valuable content to your human searchers, since this usually results in better conversions.
Not only do you require interesting content, you need lots of it. The days where websites only had 7 pages are gone. The search engines like bigger websites – sites that have lots and lots of pages. You now need to have a content creation and syndication plan in place when marketing online.
Having a bigger site gives you a lot of benefits and it’s worth the time and investment to create lots of fantastic content.
Creating more content gives you more keyword opportunities. The search engines index and rank web pages and not websites. You can only optimize a page for 1-2 keywords, maybe 3 on a good day. Therefore, the more pages you have, the more keyword targets and possible online real estate you can pick up.
Another huge benefit to having lots of pages is that you can leverage your internal linking within your website to improve rankings. Because a major part of your rankings is determined by how many backlinks you have to your pages, you can leverage your own internal links to help rankings. This is why sites like Wikipedia seem to rank for everything. It’s because they are leveraging their own internal links.
Bigger sites usually always win. The lesson here is to create lots of interesting content and plan to continue to add content on a regular basis to your small business website.
How SEO Works
Good Search Engine Optimization is the balance of making a website’s page easily consumable for humans and for search engine robots at the same time.
What we are about to address is how to make your content search engine-friendly for bots. This will be a very simplistic explanation of how Search Engine Optimization works, but it keeps things digestible and understandable.
Disclaimer: No one knows 100% for sure what the search engines algorithms are for ranking websites. Google states they have over 200 ranking factors (which are ever-changing) that determine a web page’s rank.
However, collectively, SEO’ers have reverse engineered enough of those ranking factors to know what to focus on to improve rankings and (in our opinion) it boils down to two major ranking factors:
- On-Page Optimization
- Off-Page Optimization
On-Page Optimization involves the words and code on your website’s page. This tells the search engines what the page is about. We believe it accounts for about 20-25% of your ranking factor. It is important to make sure each page of your website is optimized correctly and sending the right signals to the search engines about what the content is about.
Off-Page Optimization is mostly determined by signals the search engines can find on other websites that mention your website. This can come in the form of citations about and/or links to your website. This is often referred to as getting backlinks to your website. We believe this part of the SEO puzzle contributes to 75-80% of the ranking factor in the search engines.
In case you do not know what a backlink is: it is when you are on a web page and you see a word or phrase that is typically highlighted in blue, which allows you to click on it and it will bring you to another website or page.
An example of a backlink would be this: Local Search Marketing
These backlinks act like a voting system to the search engines, so the more you have, the better. The goal is to get more backlinks and citations from authoritative sources than your competitors. The reason we say “authoritative” is because not all backlinks are created equal.
Getting a link from CNN’s website would most likely carry more weight than one from your cousin’s knitting blog. Acquiring links is part science and part art. At SBOC, we believe in an approach we call “inbound marketing for links”.
This is where we create compelling content and syndicate it across the web for links back to our clients’ sites. Plus, because the content is good, people will naturally share our content via social sharing and Web 2.0 sites, thus creating backlinks to our backlinks. This creates a funnel of link love that fires back to our clients’ sites, which usually results in higher rankings.
Optimizing Local Listings
When comes to small business SEO, we have to pay attention to local listings like Google Places. When local modifiers are added to keyword searches or if the search engines believe the keyword term has local intent, the search engines will display their local listings at the top of the page or attach your local listing beneath your website listing (assuming you have rankings). So it’s essential you are actively optimizing these local listings, too.
The local ranking algorithm is a little different than regular SEO, but it follows similar concepts.
The three main ranking factors for local are:
- Claim and fill out your Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local listings to their full capacity
- Get lots of citations of your NAP (name, address, and phone number)
- Acquire lots of reviews
First step is to claim your local listings (usually by phone, email, or postcard verification). If you don’t claim your listing, it makes life a lot harder for local SEO and you risk someone claiming your listing under your business name.
Second step is to keep all your core NAP data clean and to make sure your business is listed in the top 100 local listing directories.
Third step is to come up with a strategy to acquire reviews at all these different local listings. Not only is it a ranking factor, but if your reviews are positive, it can dramatically increase conversions for your small business.
At SBOC, we have extensive experience at cleaning up core NAP info for small businesses and we are super aggressive on attaining citations and reviews for our clients. Doing this usually results in great local search engine rankings.
How much do SEO services cost?
We offer affordable organic search engine optimization packages:
Our SEO packages range from $797 – $2997 a month, where our average client’s SEO budget is $1900/month. We find that, on average, most of our clients receive a 8-20% return on their investment with our search engine optimization services.
There is great article here on how much SEO services costs (You’ll notice we are very competitively priced compared to the averages).
Why You Should Get Started With A SEO Program Today
Your competitors are link building and optimizing their website’s content for the search engines and the longer you wait, the harder and more expensive it becomes to rank your website(s).
Speaking of “competition”, it is important for us to mention that we ONLY take on one client per business category per city. Once that slot is filled, we will not take on another client for that category of business in that particular city. This is why it is essential that you act immediately and get started today, otherwise you risk becoming our competition (and we don’t wish that upon anyone). :)
Still Not Sure About SEO For Your Small Business…?
View our search engine marketing case studies. You will be able to see firsthand how SEO can benefit your company, too.
What Are You Waiting For….? Contact Us Today!
We would love to hear from you! Contact us today so we can talk about your small business SEO goals.
