For the past few months, I was struggling to get my restaurant business in Denver, Colorado on the initial pages of Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing. I finally found the perfect solution to all my difficulties – local SEO. I contacted a professional SEO company providing local SEO services. After analyzing my business and its visibility issues, the SEO team presented me with an SEO package that included a wide range of strategies designed to enhance the search engine page ranking of my website and drive more traffic and sales. Let’s look at how these strategies worked to promote my business.
Local Listing Sites: Local SEO makes use of local listing sites (e.g. Yellow Pages, Yahoo, Google, Bing etc) that target local/geo targeted terms, for optimizing local search results. The SEO Company provided strategies that helped increase the ranking of my local business listing on these sites. Now, when someone searches for Denver-specific data relating to my business, the information on my business that is stored on all these sites appears as a top search result.
With enhanced online visibility, I find that more local customers have started to visit my website, which is working to promote my brand. My service provider took care to choose only local listing sites authorized by Google for promoting my small business.
Back linking: Local SEO services include building inbound links to a business website. In keeping with Google’s latest Penguin update, my SEO service provider took care to build backlinks to my website from reliable websites with content relevant to my business. I realized that relevancy was crucial because the search engines identify keywords on the basis of the backlinks. Another significant aspect is link speed or the speed at which backlinks are created. The SEO team built backlinks slowly and systematically, as any unnatural speed could make Google look at my links as spam. In addition, they also employed tactics such as social bookmarking, article and forum submissions and other off-page activities. Keyword variations, branded text, and other strategies were adopted to improve results.
Social Media Promotion: My service provider also used effective social media optimization strategies to drive my target audience to my website. They built my business profile on popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more and created posts in them which helped draw local customers to my website. They spread the posts via ‘Share’ or ‘Like’ buttons. As search engines, particularly Google, show search results from social media sites (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and more) these profiles are also helping to drive more organic traffic to my site. The SEO team also promoted my business by creating videos and images of my restaurant and sharing them through YouTube and Pinterest.
Social media marketing involves the maximum utilization of marketing potential with the features (paid advertising facility, contests, business pages in the case of Google+, and more) in social media sites. In my experience, focusing on a particular social media site for marketing purposes (Facebook Marketing, Twitter Marketing) is the best way to promote your business online.
Online Advertising
Pay per Click advertising (paying money to search engines to display your website on top search results) is regarded as a powerful way to promote business online due to easy implementation, high Return on Investment (ROI) and better traceability. The SEO team provided my business with PPC advertising services, also known as geo-targeted PPC. The advertising was focused on the Denver area, which resulted in more local customers visiting my website. Both open-ended keywords and focused keywords were used in my geo-targeted PPC.
The local SEO services provided by the SEO company help draw the attention of more local customers to my website and helped in the online promotion of my restaurant – something which I definitely couldn’t have achieved on my own.
