How to Improve Your Local & Organic SEO: Learn the secrets of achieving increased search engine traffic and higher SERP rankings.
Why is SEO important?
In simple terms, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a practice by which a website is optimized to rank higher for specific keywords and phrases in leading search engines. SEO is important because most people don’t click past the first page when they’re searching for what they want. If you’re not ranking high, your website won’t get much traffic, and sales are limited.
Over 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine like Google or Bing. Therefore, businesses must have an effective organic SEO strategy to be found in the vast digital world.
Local SEO vs. Organic SEO
Local SEO is a term that refers to the process of optimizing a website to capture the interest of in-market customers near your business location. This includes things like creating optimal keyword phrases and having relevant local on-page content.
Organic SEO refers to the process of ranking on search engines without doing anything specific for location. Organic SEO is a term for all the natural ways of making your website rank higher in search results without paid advertising.
The fundamental difference between Local and Organic SEO: local SEO is about optimizing for locations, while organic SEO is about optimizing for quality content.
Too often I speak with business owners who have invested in search engine marketing (SEM), more often referred to as pay-per-click advertising, before proper website SEO. With poor sales results, these business owners are reluctant to even consider further SEO efforts.
Content Strategy for Organic Search
- Conduct keyword research: Start by researching the keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business. This will help you identify which terms are most likely to drive traffic to your website.
- Create content: Create a variety of types of content, such as blog posts, web pages, infographics, videos, and more that target specific keywords related to your business.
- Build an internal linking profile: Make sure all of your site pages link back to each other so search engines can properly crawl and index them for better organic SEO rankings in SERPs (search engine results pages).
- Add multimedia elements: Add visual elements like images, infographics videos, etc. to enhance user experience & engagement on website pages.
- Optimize page load time: Ensure that all page loads are under 3 seconds or less as Google considers this a factor in ranking websites higher in its algorithms these days
Technical SEO for Local Search
Some technical SEO strategies for local search include:
- Optimizing your website for local search terms, such as adding geographic modifiers to your content and using location-based keywords.
- Creating a mobile-friendly website that is easy to navigate on handheld devices.
- Make sure all of your SEO efforts are properly incorporated into any third-party platforms you use (such as eCommerce platforms).
- Implementing structured data markup and rich snippets to increase clickthrough rates on SERPs.
Need SEO help?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a systematic process whereby several on-page and off-page factors are worked upon to improve the natural (unpaid organic) ranking of a website compared to millions of competitors.
Being on top of organic search results is critical to any business’s online success. SEO is a specialized field requiring time, skill, expert knowledge, and perseverance.
Sapphire Falls Web Design takes a focused approach to enabling your site to be optimized for search engines. Our constant optimization efforts will ensure that your website stays on top of local organic search results for long periods without the need for pay-per-click advertising.
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Whether a client completely hands over the reins or wants to have input in their project, Sapphire Falls Web Design services are affordable website design solutions.
