We continue our series on how to make your website and social media equal money for your local business. Far too often online success is measured by visitors to your websites, shares, follows, and likes. The real success for businesses online though is measured in money and new clients.
The series continues this week with a look at organic SEO and local SEO. We look at how local businesses should be investing their online marketing dollars. This one will be a two-part article with the first part we dive into exactly what organic and local SEO are. The second part will cover effectively devising a strategy with your local business to make money off both forms of traffic.
We have briefly chatted about organic SEO and local SEO previously, but it is really important to understand the difference, identify which traffic source would be most valuable to your co犀利士 mpany, and create a plan of synergy to maximize your online marketing dollars.
Knowing the difference between the two traffic sources is important. Once you know the difference between the two you can devise an effective SEO strategy.
Organic SEO
Organic SEO, in its simplest form, is ranking for search terms within search engines so people are visiting your site. Using an example from a client of ours we work within the residential roofing industry and they rank highly for the keyword “best types of roofing for my roof.”
The search term has 1600 searches a month from people in the United States. The search term gets our client around 300 visitors a month to their website. There are lots of ways a company or SEO agency can rank for keywords but the details of the how would take about four weeks of seminars to explain.
Organic SEO, however, does take time for your strategy to be implemented, recognized, and for the results to come on. We have seen quick turnarounds on many campaigns. The typical turnaround time is three to six month turnaround time for the fruits of labor is typical.
It is also important to note that the traffic our roofing company is getting from these keywords is from all over the United States. Since our roofing company services an area in the Northeast, most traffic does not have a direct impact on new clients.
Local SEO
Local SEO focuses on two mechanisms in search engines: the first is map results and the second is location-based search results.
Map results are when you search for a term like “roofing company” and a map pops up on your computer or mobile device with search results that have quick links to phone numbers, open-close times, and directions. This type of search in Google you produce results called “Google’s 3-Pack.”
Location-based searches act just like organic searches. When location services are turned on for your computer or mobile devices, you get a different set of results. So if you search “roofing company” and your device two things can happen. If your location services are off it will just search the terms typed.
If you have your location services are turned on, however, you will get roofing companies in the area around. To rank in local results you need to rank for “roofing company Baltimore”. These results will show even when the customer is not searching for it. Geolocation services add the area for the user. Then Google’s algorithm picks the best companies in the area to display in the search results.
The knowledge this week will give us the base for next week. Next week we talk about devising the proper strategy of SEO to increase acquisitions into your sales funnel. Have a great week!