A Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Basic Tips for Improving Your Business

MY LOCAL SEO:

Table of Contents

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Marketing Today Give Visitors Something To Read

What is Search Engine Optimization Marketing 24 Hours a Day

It All Starts with Keyword Planning Prove The Return on Investment

Adapting URL’s To Benefit You Challenges and Limitations

Outreach: More Important than you think Looking For Help

Marketing TodayThe expectations of a marketing campaign are higher than ever before. It wasn’t long ago when marketing professionals could get by on producing catchy tag-lines, pretty advertisements and the submission of an ad in the a newspaper.

Despite the foggy at best methods to track results, companies spent mega-dollars on huge marketing campaigns and for the most part kept their fingers crossed it would work.

Todays’ maketing landscape is very different from the past; never before has their been so many avenues to advertise.

But even within just online advertising, the options and opportunities can be overwhelming and identifying which option(s) is best can be the biggest challenge a business can face.

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Platform Great For…Google Adwords Google Adwords Increasing qualified leads through

Cost-Per-Click (CPC)Facebook Engage with current followers and increase traffic

through CPC advertising campaignsLinkedin Businesses operating in the B2B sector. CPC advertising

available.Re-Targeting Don’t let visitors to your site forget you! Use re-target-

ing to improve conversion.

Search Engine Optimization Increasing organic leads and overall traffic

Expand Your Online Profile

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Increase Qualified

Traffic

On-PageOptimizaion

ContentMarketing

KeywordResearch

Outreach & Link Building

Basic SEO ComponentsWhat is Search Engine OptimizationFor such a powerful tool, it’s no surprise that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be hard to understand. However, SEO is exactly as it sounds; optimizing the online components of your business to best match what search engines are looking for.

Perhaps the trickiest part is understanding what search engines are looking for as this information is clouded and is constantly being tweaked & updated.

More and more consumers use search engines to assist in their purchasing decision. Having strong SEO is becoming increasingly more important.

An SEO campaign meets this need by working as a 24/7 advertising machine, allowing highly targeted customers to find you through search engines.

As a business owner or marketing professional, there are a variety of things you can do to improve your company’s online ‘mojo.’ Understanding the entire search engine algorithm might not be possible but understanding some key components of SEO will definitely help you get started to improve the bottom line.

Brainstorm Possible Keywords

Use Google Keyword Planner toVerfiy Which Are Useful

Begin Planning How to WorkSelected Keywords Into Your Web Page

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It All Starts withKeyword PlanningThe foundation of any SEO Campaign is built off a solid foundation of Keyword Research. Keyword Research is the process of determining which keywords are most relevant to your business.

A keyword is another name for a search term used by customers to find businesses like yours through a search engine, such as Google.

If you’re an auto mechanic, an example of an appropriate keyword would be ‘auto repair.’

Keyword research can be really easy when making use of the‘Keyword Platform’ through the Google Adwords platform.

The Keyword Planner will assist you in not only providing keywords relevant to your business but will also tell you how many times that keyword is searched per month. This will help you to identify which keywords are not only most relatable to your business but which have enough traffic making it worth your time to promote.

There is no sense trying to rank a keyword which has zero searches per month is there?

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Adapting URL’sTo Benefit YouIf you’ve done the Keyword Research, it’s now time to make proper use of the URL’s on your website.

The URL is the address of the page and the wording of those addresses can either help or hinder your SEO campaign. When search engines read your pages, they use the page address to help determine what the page is talking about.

So how can you take advantage of proper URL structure? Adjust the URL’s on your website to match your keyword research. On the right is an example of this. The method can apply where it’s logical like product and service pages along with blog posts. Don’t however change your ‘Contact’ page to ‘Flower-Shop-Vancouver’ as it’s not logical and may cause for over-optimization.

Company: FlowerShop.com

What they do: Offer special flower arrangements for delivery in Vancouver

Keyword Identified: Flower Delivery Vancouver

Incorrect URL: www.flowershop.com/services/

Correct URL: www.flowershop.com/flower-delivery-vancouver/

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Steps To Take

Outreach:More Important than you thinkThe most important aspect of SEO is link building. Link building can take many different forms; outreach is one of the mainstay components. The more quality links that are pointing to you, the higher you will rank in the search engines.

Outreach in relation to link building is the process in which a business will seek out online links from other websites.

The best place to start is with businesses, organizations and clients who have a website that you have a relationship with. Reach out to them and ask them to send a link from their website to yours. Each link acquired this way has real value in helping you rank for the keywords which are important to your business.

More on Outreach

1. Brainstorm people and businesses who have websites that have some applicability to you.

Examples include: local chamber of commerce, city or provincial small business websites, organizations that you belong to such as the BBB, vendors, suppliers, local newspapers.

2. Reach out and simply ‘Ask.’ You might be surprised by the result.3. If the answer is ‘No,’ find a creative way to entice them. 4. Get free links from local directories such as yelp and 411.ca

Give VisitorsSomething To ReadA search engines’ goal is to provide the most relevant results based on what keyword is being searched. One of the ways search engines measure relevancy is by reading web page content and categorizing it accordingly.

It’s extremely important that you not only describe exactly what your business does - but to do so in detail.

When you write content for your website, you want to consider both your customers and search engines. Fortunately, both your customers and search engines appreciate in-depth details as to what your business offers. This concept is why so many businesses will add blogs to their existing websites as it provides a platform to add additional content both customers and search engines will find relevant.

The more keywords that a search engine recognizes you for, the more like-ly you’ll show up in the results when those service or product terms are searched. Don’t however create content without direction. Use your Keyword Research to craft content which is optimized for keywords you identified as being important. In the mechanic’s research, if he discovered ‘Brake Repair’ was a keyword which was important to him, creating content with a focus on ‘Brake Repair’ would be extremely helpful.

Often times, businesses create blogs with no real direction. This is a huge waste of time & money.

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Planning Your Content

Company:Blankmechanic.com

What They Do:All things related to automotive care and repair servicing the Greater Calgary Area

Potential Keywords Identified:Brake Repair Calgary – Muffler Replacement Calgary – Oil Change Calgary

Example of Blog Post Titles:‘ Maintain Your Brakes Before They Need Repair ’‘ Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Muffler ’ ‘ Why an Oil Change In Calgary Requires Use Of Higher Grade Oil ’

Marketing 24 Hours a DayYou might be thinking to yourself, “Is all of this work really worth it?” In short, yes it is worth it. SEO is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week marketing machine. Ranking for the search terms that apply to you is arguably the most powerful form of marketing on the planet. SEO allows you to be available at any time to new customers who are looking for what you offer. Take the guess work out of your marketing strategy and invest in a marketing campaign which produces high quality leads and trackable results.

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Working around the clock; Even When You’re Not

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Prove The Return onInvestmentWhen considering ways to market your business, being able to sit back at the end of a campaign and determine if the cost of the marketing efforts outweighed the benefits is extremely important.

With an SEO campaign, you have the ability to do just that. All forms of online marketing can be tracked. That said, tracking a paid Facebook campaign requires some tech chops. Tracking an SEO campaign is extremely straight forward.

Google Analytics is perhaps the most important tool to become familiar with. Not sure how to set-it up?Refer to our tutorial.

Google Analytics will tell you exactly how much traffic you’rereceiving and from where. From an SEO perspective, you can track exactly how many additional visitors you are receiving from search engines.

Not sure how to set-up analytics? Refer to our tutorial.

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Time Constraints

Lack ofConfidence

Lack of-Know-How

Limitations

Challenges andLimitationDespite its benefits most business owners fail to conduct an SEO strategy effectively. For some, a understanding of the long-term value of an SEO campaign makes it difficult to prioritize. For others, they lack confidence what they are doing will have a positive benefit or will produce the desired results. And for most, SEO falls by the wayside only because they don’t have the time to learn a skill which is constantly changing.

Another limitation is that a business can sometimes only get so far on its own.

If you dedicate time each week to manage your SEO campaign you will see results. However, depending on the competition a progress will be slow. Even if you complete our step-by-step guide to SEO which can be downloaded from our website, you still might not rank for that primary keyword you targeted at the outset of your campaign. So what can you do?

Looking For Help?Working with us is like having a new team member on your staff. We dive into the ‘nitty-gritty’ of what you’re trying to achieve and help determine a direction to help achieve your SEO goals.

We understand sometimes you want to be involved, learning along the way while other times, you just want to get the job done. We start at the very beginning, providing you with a free website audit to discover the most suitable opportunities for your business.

We go far beyond what you’ve seen here in this guide. We have the tools and strategies to super-charge your campaign. Let us help you to achieve the results you need.

“Our focus is to help small business owners improve their bottom line through online marketing.”

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