Blog

If you live in Los Angeles and you want to get your car washed, you may go to Google and type the keyword “car wash” into your Google search bar.  Which result would be more useful?  Getting random listings for every car wash from here to Switzerland or getting listings for car wash shops that are down the street from you?  Obviously, the latter would be most useful, unless of course you’re doing some sort of cross continental car wash research.

People search the entire World Wide Web to find businesses that are in their own backyards.  Google understands this.  As a matter of fact they’ve understood this for quite some time.  That’s why over the last year Google has been stepping up their local search results.

In the past, to search for car wash shops near you, you’d have to enter your zip code, the name of your part of town, or some other piece of information to let the search engine know that you wanted to narrow your search to a specific area.  Now, Google assumes that people are intending to search locally for certain keywords, even if the user doesn’t specify a geographic location.  Google uses the searchers IP address to narrow down their location to a broad geographic area.

So, if you go to Google right now and type in “car wash”, you’re likely to get listings for car wash companies in your area.  The same goes for “McDonald’s”, “spa services”, and many other businesses that tend to cater to clients face-to-face.

Why is this so important?  The local results will often appear before the top listings in the organic search results.  So, if you’re at the top of the SEO game and your company has one of the top slots in Google’s organic search results, Google may actually list ten other businesses before yours because of their proximity to the searchers location.  That’s right, ten other businesses!

Check out next week’s blog to learn how to get listed in Google’s local results.  We’ll also talk about how utilizing Google’s local business tools can help your company grow.

We all know that search engine optimization is not a one-time event like coming up with your company name or selecting the first location for your storefront.  Nevertheless, there are a few things you can do to ensure that some of your hard SEO work is not lost tomorrow.  That’s right, there are a few things you can do today that are almost guaranteed to pay off regardless of what shifts and turns occur in the SEO world tomorrow.

Take the time to ensure that your website is well designed, and highly efficient. Your website should include a good amount of internal linking.  People should be able to find good content on your site without drilling down through countless pages.  Keep things easily accessible and you’ll keep your audience.  Utilize your keywords effectively and strategically not just in your on-page text but also in your tags, URLs, etc.  Include sitemaps, both XML and HTML.  Sitemaps help visitors and search engines navigate their way through your content.

Even in SEO, content is king. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the technical side of SEO, but at the end of the day if you’ve developed a website that stands out in your industry, then you really are halfway home.   Your content needs to be a dynamic wellspring of good, quality information.

You must provide real value.  This is something that we talk about a lot here at SurchSquad and that’s because it’s critical.  Today’s consumers are savvy.  If you’re content is a rehashing of everything else that’s already out there, your readers will know it.  So, think outside of the box.  Offer up industry news and information that your competitors are keeping under wraps.

Remember, many of the people who search the web are actually in the research phase.  That means that a good number of the people who stumble upon your site are simply looking for answers.  A website with your photo and phone number is not going to cut it anymore.

Viral is the new word of mouth. Make sure that your content is easy to share.  What if someone reads something on your website that completely solves a problem their friend is having?  A person is much more likely to forward a blog or video link than an entire FAQ listing.  Or even worse, if they have to read through 20 paragraphs to get to “the good stuff” they will probably find an easier way to send the information to friends, like getting it off someone else’s website.

Get the word out. Regular marketing of your website is critical.  However, there are some marketing techniques that you can do today for a continued pay off tomorrow.  The first is to build a community.  If you do the work today to get a strong following for your website and your Facebook page, then every update and every blog is free mass marketing.  If you’re not email marketing, then get going!  Everyone’s doing it, it’s cheap, and it doesn’t annoy your client base.  Plus, if you aren’t doing it, you can be sure that your competitors are.  Take the time to build a quality email list and then use it to deliver high quality content.  You’ll get more and more people signing up for your newsletter without even trying.

Is SEO an ongoing job?  Yes.  However, that doesn’t mean that the hard work you do today will be worthless tomorrow.

Many of us have heard the common show business phrase: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”  Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for links.  It would seem that any traffic is good traffic, right?  As long as people are coming to your site, it doesn’t matter how they got there, right?  Well, yes and no.

As a general rule, it is great to have more and more traffic coming to your website.  But remember, that Google and all the other search engines, are working diligently to ensure that every website owner is getting authentic traffic either from organic SEO or legitimate paid search.  If something looks questionable, they’re going to notice.

What types of websites do you not want linking to you?  Any website that has a reputation for trying to spam the search engines, a website that seems to exist just to generate traffic, or known link farming companies are not good sites to have linked to yours.

Don’t be alarmed.  While there are times that Google will penalize a website for utilizing unethical linking techniques, they’re really good at sniffing out the sites that are just out to game the system.  If you have a legitimate website, with a legitimate business and only a small percentage of your links are bad, Google will usually not come after you.  Instead what they’ll often do is ignore those links.  They simply won’t use them when considering where to place your website on the results page.

The truth of the matter is that almost every website on the World Wide Web has links pointing to it from questionable sources.  There is usually no rhyme or reason to these bad links.  However, this doesn’t mean that the search engines are even remotely soft on unethical link building practices.  If they notice that your website’s bad links are coming in from companies that are known for selling and/or trading links, or if they notice that all of the questionable links point to a page on your website that you’ve been trying to optimize, then they will dig deeper to find out what’s going on.

There are lots of ways to find out who’s linking to you.  Here’s a short list of websites and companies that can help: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps, https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com, and http://wholinkstome.com/.