Tag: SEO

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What to Do When You Only Place Organically for Your Business Name – Part Two

Grow Your Local Presence With These Tips
Grow Your Local Presence With These Tips

Continued from Monday as to what to do when you only place on Google and Bing for your business name…

Fourth – Connect with local businesses or your Chamber of Commerce
Sounds like a no-brainer, but Google will value links you get from authoritative local sites  like your Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau heavier than sites that do not have strong local value.

Fifth – Work to build smart links from authoritative sites
If you are in a specific industry, ask if your trade association will allow you to be a monthly guest blogger. The links back to your website from your bio. block at the end of a blog post on an authority site in your industry that just happen to also contain your own location specific keywords are like gold for you. Your association will be glad to get free, well-written content, and you’ll get SEO juice. If you are not a fabulous writer, pay a ghost blogger to write the piece for you that you can do final editing on. It will be well worth the time, money and effort.

Sixth – Get professional help if you need it
If you do not work on your own website, consider getting professional help to assist with these important placement strategies. With competition for clicks in AdWords you can easily ring up a big bill fast, but you’ve got to have Web visibility to bring home the bacon!

If you are in Fredericksburg, Virginia – our hometown to be, as of August 2015, make sure to check out our services for SEO evaluations and a sensible approach to helping you place in local searches.

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What to Do When You Only Place Organically for Your Business Name – Part One

Clear Strategy
Get a Clear Strategy on How to Place Organically

If you only place for your own business name, (which is totally not difficult as that is the name plastered all over your website), it is time to get busy!

First – find out what you should be placing on
Do some keyword research. If you are using Google AdWords, the tools found there are a great place to start to see what Google says is popular. Also check out your Google Analytics statistics. If what you see at Analytics is still not what you personally feel you should be placing on, put on your thinking hat. Sit on Google.com for 15 minutes and do a reality check. What would you enter on Google to find what you are selling in your own business and in your own area.

Second – get strategic about the terms you want to own
Don’t go hog wild crazy trying to place on one and two word terms or for that matter forty keyword phrases. Start with two or three phrases that contain three or four words each and preferably that contain a location specific word. If you don’t place now for just about anything but your name, start small. Try first to place on terms with your city name within your placement phrase.

Third – start building out or buying unique content using your selected terms
I like website page creation plus blogging on your on-domain blog to try to build some keyword density in a smart way. Google will penalize you if you try to stuff keywords into the content, so go easy on how many times you use your new keyword phrases and strive to keep your content natural and readable.

Make sure to check back on Wednesday for more tips on what you can do to start placing organically on search terms other than your business name.

If you are a Fredericksburg, Virginia business owner, give me a call at (540) 693-0385 to set up a free teleconference to discuss ways we can help your business place better for local Fredericksburg searches today.

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Positioning Your Website to Own Your Location

My new Spotsylvania, Virginia office location.
My new Spotsylvania, Virginia office location.

I am getting ready to move this summer from Waldorf, Maryland to the Fredericksburg, Virginia area to Spotsylvania, Virginia.  As a result I am already starting to plan and to position my own website to grab market share in the Fredericksburg region.

Here are a few of the things I will be doing in the upcoming months to my own website to position myself locally.

1. I’ve already bought for $10 a new Google Voice phone number with my new local area code. Instead of 301 I want my area code to be 540. I will be using this local Fredericksburg phone exchange on my website and expect to list phone numbers in both Spotsylvania and Fredericksburg on my website.

2. I will be using my full street address again on my website in the footer of all pages. Google loves location specificity and when you include your phone, address, city and state as well as zip code, Google understands more clearly how to categorize your website.

3. Google Local is an issue. Many business owners have real trouble updating their address in Google Places when they move. For some reason Google will continue to show your old address instead of your new address. As I do have full access to my old pages and new pages, and the ability to for a while to receive mail at my old location and phone number, I will be making my address change on Google before I move. I have found for some that try to do this after they have moved, it can be a problem when Google wants to send a snail mail update and they do not have access to mail.

4. I will start reworking my content to put Virginia in on my pages and to mention my location on blog posts more fully as I start to transition my business to its new location. Planning ahead is key and this blog post is simply the start of the process for me.

My new billing and office address in August will be:

10708 Chatham Ridge Way
Spotsylvania, Virginia 22551

5. Once I am landed in my new city, I will be joining the Chamber of Commerce. What a great way to connect with local business owners. Plus they will link to my website as a member and Google loves location specific links that are authoritative.  This will help Google to know I have moved.

6. I am a Google Local Guide and have already started to write about Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania, Virginia locations. That will give Google another online cue as to my new location.

It takes a while to own your local location for your business, but with careful thought and planning you can start to appear in local searches at your new location if you plan ahead.

Need some help with smart solutions to position your own business locally. Contact me at McCord Web Services today.

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The New World of SEO

Google Partner Badge
McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

How organic placement is determined on search engines has changed significantly in the past two years. Google states that it evaluates over 200 different factors to determine website placement on their search engine including links, the age of the domain name, some types of social media activity, and quality of content.

A service firm can no longer optimize a website based only on a set of keyword phrases and expect placement to be the same for every reader. Now, search engine results are personalized; meaning that what one customer sees is not the same as what another sees, and can even be different from what you, the website owner, sees online.

This makes traditional search engine optimization, as it has been known obsolete. Personalized search results are impacted by the search history that you yourself make every time you do a search on Google.com, Bing.com, or Yahoo.com. Results are impacted by what you search for and what you click in to review.

Additionally, personalized search results are now being skewed even further by your social media interaction; such as your activity and friend network on social sites and Google+.  And, even the authority of sites that link to your site. Add to that the emphasis that Google.com has placed on pushing local business listings, using Google+ Local, ahead of regular organic search listings and the art of improving search placement has become very, very complicated.

Today, a business must focus on organic and paid placement to garner leads and sales. There are still smart things that can be done to help to boost your website’s placement but gaming the system to grab top spots is a dead strategy and some actions can even permanently damage your search authority.

If you are looking for smart, ethical services to help improve your visibility, I invite you to visit our website for more information.