DYI SEO for Hawaii Businesses
Google your product or service plus your location. For example, “dentist Honolulu”, “upscale catering Oahu”, or “transmissions Hawaii.” Does your company show as #1 search result? (If so, you can stop reading this column). Is your website in the top three results? Is it on the first page at all?
Ten years ago our business was all about hardware. Our clients wanted servers and workstations. Today SuperGeeks is all about software.
Now, we still provide a significant amount of break-fix support and managed network support, but our business – like everyone else’s – has radically changed over the last decade.
The high growth areas are web design, app development and software. And like all companies wanting to stay competitive, our business model has pivoted along with the market.
One service many of our clients want is search engine optimization. In the old days, most businesses turned to the yellow pages to capture leads. These days, businesses are wanting to leverage the internet to generate more sales.
Ninety-seven percent of consumers search for local businesses online.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is popularity contest. It’s a game every business executive should take very seriously.
To ensure your website will rank high on all major search engines, you will eventually need to consider off-page link building. That’s where we take content like a press release or a how-to article and post it on a related directory, blog, forum, etc and link the content back to your website.
The more links you have back your website, the better. All else being equal, your site will rank higher than your competitors if it has many more links.
The quality of the link is also very important. If I want web traffic from the target keyword ‘bullying’, it would be ideal if there were a ‘bullying’ link from an ultra high authority site like Oprah.com – especially if the link were part of a larger article on ‘bullying.’
The benefits from good SEO are clear. Overwhelming majority of your potential clients search online. And they generally click through the first few search results. Web users seldom go beyond the first page of results.
Remember: when people search online for your product or service, those are qualified leads. One qualified lead is worth more than 10 on-qualified leads.
We have one SEO client, a dentist, who now receives 4x more leads per month than when he was using the Yellow Pages as his primary lead-generation.
Another client now gets almost 3x more traffic to his site as a results of just 3 months of SEO.
In short, SEO is good for business. Here’s what you can do yourself to optimize your website:
● Get a score.
Use this free online tool: http://websitegrader.com/. It’s a good place to start looking at some of the things you may want to address right away. Also, be sure to run your website through this: http://validator.w3.org/ It will check whether your site has any coding errors. Bad code gets in the way of good SEO.
● Run some numbers.
You can check how your site ranks using this free online tool: http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ Be sure to test a few different keywords. Try to imagine how your target customers would search online.
● Decide whom to target.
You don’t need to sell everyone all the time. And you certainly don’t want to compete against your better-funded competitors. Instead, choose 10-15 keyword strings that are relevant to your product or service and aren’t so expensive to dominate. One nice feature about being in Hawaii is most of our target keywords will have ‘Honolulu’ or ‘Hawaii’ in them. This helps narrows our competition. Think laser. Use Google Keyword Tool determine how many people search for your target keywords and how compettive those keywords are: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
● Customize Google Places.
This is a very important step. You must claim your business on Google Places and customize your profile: http://www.google.com/places/ Make sure you take the time to weave your keywords into your business profile. While you are there, add pics, video, etc. Good content always helps with sales conversions.
● Don’t forget Yelp, Bing, and Yahoo.
The same applies to other Yelp, Bing and Yahoo. You must claim your business profile and customize it:
Yelp: https://biz.yelp.com/support
Bing: http://www.bing.com/businessportal
Yahoo: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
● Leverage YouTube.
Remember, YouTube is owned by Google. So Google has a vested interest in its long term success. And if you notice, Google will often push YouTube videos to the top of a search. YouTube is just plain good for business. When you create your video, be sure to include your target keywords in the title string, the description and the meta tags.
Perhaps the greatest longtime value of good SEO is this: High organic rankings is a core competency. No one can steal that from you – at least not overnight. If you can do what it takes to drive qualified traffic to your site, then you need only focus your efforts on sales conversions. And that’s a great place to be.
James Kerr is founder and Chief Geek of SuperGeeks, a Hawaii-based IT firm specializing in SEO Hawaii, seo honolulu and search engine optimization company hawaii. You can reach him at http://supergeeks.net/
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