The Dangers of Hiring an SEO Company That Specializes in One Vertical
When you are shopping around for a digital marketing agency you may search for “lawyer seo company”. When doing searches like this you will find yourself looking at SEO companies that target just one industry only.
Below are some of the problems you will encounter by moving forward with an SEO company that specializes in only one vertical:
- Possibilities of working with your competition.
- You are just a number to them.
- No custom strategy is created.
- You’ll be given a template for your marketing strategy which they created for a competitor of yours.
SEO Locale has a different approach when it comes to bringing on new clients. We will not work with your competition and we provide you a true custom strategy that is aligned with your expectations and goals. As a smaller agency, we can provide the attention you deserve without any type of the limitation.
Listen Now: Future of SEO in 2020
Marc Brookland and Nick Quirk discuss with Neil Howe at Business Innovators Radio about how Google is always changing. Local Service Ads by Google will be expanding to more local small businesses. Local Service Ads, if available in your city and industry, will appear on the top of Google Search with the Google Guarantee badge. Consumers looking for “movers near me” can trigger Google Local Service Ads and businesses will appear in that position.
Applying for Local Service Ads
If you are a small business you can apply on the Local Service Ads platform by going through the process of background checks, licenses and business information. This process can take up to 2 weeks. Once you get approved you will be able to select your geographic area and budget. Google will then determine the cost per acquisition for you. With this model, you pay per lead versus the pay per click model. For our clients we see a higher percentage of closed leads compared to other directories.
Google Local Service Ads vs Pay Per Click
Google Local Service Ads can cost around $15 per lead and in traditional pay per click, with a typical conversion rate of 1-3%, you will find it tough to get an ROI. In 2020 the cost of Google Local Service Ads could increase when it starts to expand. Jumping on this as early as you can be a good start for your small business if it is open in your industry and area. Google Local Service Ads have minimal maintenance per month compared to traditional pay per click. All you really need to worry about is your targeting and keywords.
What is Google Guarantee?
Protecting the consumer with a guarantee of the service. In Google’s terms of service with Google Local Service Ads, they will protect the consumer up to $2,000. This is an important factor for consumers and the local small businesses to provide the highest quality of service. Google is creating a comfort level for consumers so they know they are protected while hiring a business to perform a service.
Optimize Your Google My Business
Optimizing your Google My Business by setting up the categories your business is in and making sure information is accurate on the platform. Keeping consistency with your Google My Business is key to the success. Posting on Google My Business can easily help you get a promotion out or a service you provide. Sending triggers to Google that you are relevant for your service and/or products by connecting everything. Customers want the engagement of your business so make sure you have a GMB post strategy in place. Search Engine Land showed a correlation between images and the number of calls a local business receives. Marc discusses how difficult it can be to get images for businesses, so posting images can help optimize your GMB.
Websites Are Still Relevant
The strategy between websites and Google My Businesses still need to be strong. Ignoring your website can be detrimental to your digital marketing strategy as a whole. Beating out the big directories can be difficult, but you need to come up with a strategy that will overtake the competition by targeting easy wins with long-tail keywords. Creating enough authority to start beating directories and competition can be accomplished with a full online marketing strategy.
Obtaining Conversions From Your Website
Make sure your website has a great user experience with great page speed and an easily accessible contact form. Don’t force your users to find what their search intent was so you can answer their questions without them exiting. Remarketing & Retargeting are important pieces to bring back users and obtain that conversion. Touchpoints these days can take up to 20 times when years ago it could have just been a handful. The market is becoming busy and there is a lot of information that is accessible through the internet. Look at your data points for assisted conversions. Remarketing won’t make a direct impact but will assist your brand awareness and help to convert into another lead source.
Creating a Successful Remarketing Campaign
When your users exit your website this could be a result of a user not finding what they are looking for or shopping around. With a successful remarketing campaign it is important to be everywhere from social media to Google Partner websites. Send the users to a new landing page that may answer their questions or bring them back with an incentive.
How Will Video & Voice Search Expand?
With 5G on the horizon for most cell phone services, and allowing technology to be leveraged with faster speeds, creating a strategy with voice search and answering people’s questions with long-tail keywords. The increased speed will start allowing people to leverage video more on all types of websites. Many people currently fear having videos on their websites as they believe it will slow their site speed. The growth of mobile traffic will continue to increase in 2020.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Platform Comparison Market Share
SEO Tactics in 2020
Google Local Map Pack is starting to become more of a trusted area in search results. In November of 2019, there was an update to nullify people who tried to manipulate the Local Map Pack. We will start to see a shift in the map pack for more quality in 2020. Businesses will find it more difficult to rank for certain areas and keywords with this quality shift.
Link building will still be an important piece for an SEO strategy – this is a key factor for Search Engine Bots to determine what keywords you should be found relevant for.
ADA Compliance will work hand-in-hand with SEO, as there are compliance items like image alt tags for your on-page SEO strategy.
Address technical issues on your website for the user’s experience and the search engine bot’s crawl-ability.
Moving forward keep doing everything well and do not focus on just one item of your strategy. With Google making ~8 updates a day to their search algorithm you will need to keep up and maintain your strategy regularly.
Best of Both Worlds: How to Make SEO and User Experience Work Together
When you dig into what search engine optimization (SEO) is at its core, you quickly realize that it’s all about user experience (UX).
Search engines like Google don’t want to recommend their users to sites with a poor UX, so they only rank sites who check certain boxes. And website owners want to rank high, so they try to do things that the search engines want, accidentally improving their UX in the process.
But if you simply focus on UX, you’ll notice that SEO becomes much easier and less complicated. In this article, we’ll tell you a few ways you can tackle both UX and SEO at the same time. Let’s get started!
Responsive Web Design
Did you know that, in 2018, over 52% of all web traffic came from mobile devices? That’s a number that is expected to continue to increase over the next few years, and because of this, search engines have begun to rank sites that are mobile-friendly higher.
By having a responsive website design, your site will look good and function well on multiple devices. And not only will your users enjoy being able to cleanly browse your site on their laptop, smartphone, or tablet but search engines will take notice, too.
Page Speed
It doesn’t matter how good your website looks or how strong your content is if your website won’t load quickly. Users aren’t sticking around to wait for something to load when there are a ton of options in their search results that will give them what they want… and fast.
By ensuring that your site loads quickly, you’re improving your UX and giving your site a better chance to rank higher. Not sure if your site is fast enough? Google offers a useful speed checker tool that will give you a grade, as well as some pointers on how to speed your site up.
Simple Navigation
It can’t be overstated how important speed is in regards to positive user experience. And while loading times play a huge role, user navigation is equally important, too.
Because let’s face it, if users can’t find something on your site in just a few clicks, they’re not going to stick around for long. And if too many users close out of your site too fast, search engines will take note and bump you down in the search results.
A great way to ensure your navigation is good is to follow the three clicks rule. If something on your site can’t be found in three clicks or less, your site’s navigation is too complicated.
Addressing UX and SEO at the Same Time
Well, there you have it! Those are a few ways you can address both UX and SEO at the same time!
Remember, search engines want to direct their users to sites that offer good UX. So by focusing on UX, you’re actually improving your site’s SEO at the same time.
Make sure your site’s website design is responsive, so it’ll work well on every device. Speed is important, too, so try to make sure your site is as fast as possible. Navigation is something that you should put a high priority on as well, especially if you want to keep users on your site for more than a few seconds.
Need help with your SEO strategy? Still have some questions? Contact us today, we’ll be glad to help you!
What is the role of SEO in internet marketing?
SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s the foundation of organic internet marketing. We believe it’s important that everyone understand the role of SEO in marketing because it can either make or break your entire marketing campaign. This will cover the many ways that SEO influences organic traffic to ensure you get visitors. You can have a national or local SEO approach.
Organic Traffic
You might be wondering what organic traffic is. These are visitors that come strictly from search engines. Anyone coming to you from Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engines would be considered organic traffic. If you optimize for a good keyword, then this can get thousands or millions of visitors with ease. We will cover this deeper in other sections, but you will not get good organic traffic with bad keywords.
Proper Traffic and Keywords
The foundation of SEO is to ensure that search engine spiders, a program that indexes your website and understands its content, is looking for keywords. This ensures that you get relevant traffic. If you want traffic that pertains to finance, then you’ll need to use keywords that are related to this topic. That sounds simple, but many people don’t use keywords properly.
You want to ensure you use specific keywords and related keywords in order to be indexed properly. For example, if you’re targeting investors, then you’ll want to use words like stock investing, nest egg and dividend stocks so that people searching these terms will find your website. Failing to use these words will result in low traffic.
Targeting Many Areas
Experts at SEO know that you can target a whole range of users with proper SEO strategies. This is done by using relevant and related keywords in a way that bolsters your presence while also capturing other traffic sources. Every keyword you use is like putting a bid in for different users.
Best Indexing
Having a website that can be easily crawled by search engine spiders dramatically increases your search engine position and indexing speed. This is pivotal to Internet marketing because better speed means more traffic. You don’t want to wait several days for spiders to crawl and index your website. You can improve this by using an XML map, having a descriptive URL, ensuring your website load quickly and properly adding keywords in headers.
Conclusion
When it comes to organic traffic, SEO is one of the most important skills to master for internet marketing. This determines how much traffic you get and the people who will visit your website. For the best effect, you should use an expert who knows how to handle on-page and off-page SEO to ensure you get the most traffic possible from your website.
How Users Interact with Your Website Is A Crucial Metric to Follow
The usability of your website is linked to how efficiently, effectively and satisfactorily your users and visitors can see and interact with your website. Everything in your site will be included in the user experience when they visit such as the use of the menus, navigation bars, buttons, videos, images, content, games, forms and hyperlinks. Owners of websites must monitor how effective their user experiences are.
Why Is Website Usability A Critical Metric?
Oftentimes, the usability of your website is important because it’s all about customer service. The goal of any company is to meet or exceed the needs and wants of their customers and visitors. This needs to be done quickly and effectively. To gain loyal customers that come back time and again, usability must be maintained on every front.
Factors That Influence Usability?
To understand the usability of your website requires organizations to research their target and current audiences. Search engine optimization services from reputable companies like us here at SEO Locale will include investigating your customers’ needs and how they respond to the designs and messages throughout your website. Below are some of the factors that can affect a website’s ability to meet customer needs:
- Accessibility – Website accessibility includes visitors being able to easily navigate, understand and interact with your site.
- Responsiveness – A responsive website design is one that works to offer optimal interaction and viewing experiences across all device types including smartphones, laptops and tablets.
- SEO – Search engine optimization is needed to make an organization’s website visible in the search engines using organic, natural results. SEO is best done by professional SEO experts. At SEO Locale, we can optimize your website to get top listings in the search engine results.
- Layout and Navigation – This factor pertains to how easily and efficiently visitors can find what they’re looking for using the menus and navigation buttons on your site.
- Content and Messaging – More often than not, visitors will visit your site when looking to have a question answered. To satisfy these users, your content and text should be designed in a way that is easily noticeable and understood.
- Effectiveness and Errors – This measurement is taken to ensure there are as few errors as possible with visitors come to your website. It is important to note how many visitors get what they’re looking for after visiting your website. Were they able to find exactly what they were looking for?
- Task Time and Expectations- The task time is a measurement of how long it takes your visitors to find what they’re looking for while browsing your website compared to what they expected. Essentially, you want to find out how efficiently people can use your site.
Website usability is a crucial metric that organizations need to use when planning the layout and design of their website. Ideally, customers should be kept in mind when this is completed. At SEO Locale, we can ensure your website has the best usability possible for your visitors, contact us for a digital marketing evaluation.