[Easy Guide] SEO for Local Businesses

Lesson 1: How to Use SEO Marketing Effectively for Your Business

Google search result on monitor screen

How SEO Marketing Bring Sales to Your Business

keyboard showing Google Search

1. User Search for Answer in Google

  • The user enters a keyword in Google to find an answer

2. Google display search result according to the query or keyword

Google search result
  • With the proper SEO marketing, your website listed on page 1 top positions.
  • Without any optimization, your website might list on page 4-5 of the search result.
  • More than 90% of the users never go to page 2 to look for further results.
  • It is crucial to get your website to show at least on page 1 to receive FREE traffic from Google.

3. User clicks on your website listing

  • How you set up your website meta title and description may impact the number of clicks to your site.
  • Your website should be SEO friendly and show all the important message to convince these visitors that you're the best.

4. User get in touch with you

  • If the user thinks that you are the right choice, they will get in touch with you.
  • Meanwhile, your website should design in the simplest way to let these visitor contact you.

How Google Rank a Website?

simple diagram on how google rank a website

Let's keep it as layman terms.

First, Google will analyze the query enter by the user and understand the actual meaning of what the user is searching for.

For example, if user search for "Apple", it can be meant of the Apple company or the Apple fruit. Google has it set of formula to understand the actual meaning of the query & search intent.

Next, Google has a process to find the best set of relevant contents (web pages) that answer user's queries.

For example, if you want to find a book about marketing in a library, you will first go to the marketing book racks, start looking at the spine book cover related to marketing.

spine book cover

Then, you may pick a few relevant books from rack base on the spine book cover title to check further detail on the book title, table of content, the author and summary at the back cover.

You may only pick a few books which are highly related to marketing base on the information above.

The similar concept happens to Google, which has categories each web page on the internet with the related key information. Google will use this key information to find the best relevant contents.

As a web page owner, we will need to make sure our web site content and structure able to provide the related key information to Google. The process to optimize our website to give these key information is call On-Page Optimization (Cover in lesson 3).

As of this stage, these set of results are rated as high-relevant content. But it will not be shown immediately to the user yet.

Google also leverage another important factor to determine outsider, indeed recommends the result.

For a book in the library, it means there are many other books mentioned a book name and recommend their reader to read on the book to find out more.

For Google, it means a link from other websites that link to the web page. We call this as backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the more trustworthy you have in Google eyes. We often measure this metric as link popularity.

Link popularity is about how many links you have. Think of the search engine as a big election. All the websites in the world are part of the candidates. The links to your website are votes. And links from big authority website also carried more significant weight compared to a link from low-quality web sites.

The more votes (links) a candidate (webpage) has, the more important it is, and the higher it's trustworthy.

Generally speaking, the more high-quality backlinks you have to your site, the higher your website ranking position will be.

The process to gather more backlinks for your website is called Off-Page Optimization  (Cover in lesson 4).

Now, Google will combine the relevant content and the off-page score to present the final result.

There are 200++ factors evaluate by Google to determine who should be in the top position of the search result.

In shorts, these factors are generally separated into 3 purposes:

  1. Understand user's search intent
  2. Find out the high-quality, relevant content
  3. Find out the best-recommended content mainly based on links and other sub-factors such as user experience and how long user stay at your website.

Sound complicated?

complicated algorithm on black board

No worries. You don't need to know everything to rank a local business website.

SEO is a ranking system. Imaging, the full score is 100. But you just need to do slightly better than your competitor; you will able to rank in top position.

E.g. If your top competitor just reaches 10 points, you just need to get 11 points to reach the top position.

You just need to focus on the 3 steps below, which should contribute 70%-80% of the ranking factors.

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3 Easy-to-Apply SEO Steps for Local Business

Now, let's look at these 3 steps:

#1 – Choose the Right Keywords

A keyword analysis is a process to find out what keywords entered by users that are related to your product or services.

And most importantly, you need to find out keywords that can drive potential customers to your website to make a purchase from you.

keywords on green sign board

Once you find out all these buying intent keywords, you will then create and optimize the website content that matches to these keywords. You will find out more about keyword analysis in the next lesson.

#2 – Optimize Website Become SEO Friendly

With the latest AI technology from Google, you need decent quality content to rank well. Unlike the old-time, low-quality content stuff with keywords can rank easily.

SEO friendly & responsive web design

In this step, you will learn the important website optimization steps, which include:

  • Google search console configuration
  • Meta tag optimization
  • Images optimization
  • Conversion optimization.

#3 – Effective Off-page Optimization Strategies

Step 3, Link Building is the most important part and usually take a longer time to see the result.

First, you will need to understand that not every links to your website are the same. A good backlink consists of relevancy, trust and power.

Best Links

Relevancy refers to the links come from the related topic article or use keywords as part of the link anchor text.

Trust related to getting a link from or close to the high authority website or we called it the seed site. E.g. Getting links from Wikipedia, Forbes & social media site like Facebook will contribute the trust signal.

Power refers to a link page that contains a lot of good quality backlinks.

And we need all 3 types of links (Relevancy, Trust, Power) to rank well.

We will share more in the other lesson.

Conclusion

Now, you shall get an idea of how SEO can help your business and the high-level strategies to rank your website.

 Let's move on to the next lesson to start your first step.

Lesson 2: How to Find The Best SEO Keyword for Local Business

FAQs

How Google Rank a Website?

Firstly, Google uses more than 200 factors to rank a website. And the ranking algorithm changes frequently. Nobody (even Google's employees) knows exactly how the search engine ranks a website precisely.

In simple ways, Google will try to deliver a website with the best quality and trusted content to fulfil the search request from a user. Thus, a website’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) will decide how well a site rank in the search result.

In short, a reliable SEO company will do all the works to improve the E-A-T of your website so that your website can rank well in the search result.

What are the 3 Key Steps to Rank a Website?

The 3 steps to rank a website includes:

1. Choose the right target keywords for your business.
2. Optimize your website to become SEO friendly.
3. Acquire more links to your website

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