If you have an online business presence, you’ve probably heard of SEO. Search-engine optimization is the means through which you attract relevant traffic to your website. Think of SEO like preparation for a marathon. It takes many months of hard, arduous effort before you’re fully prepped to win the marathon. Passing the line in first place, whether in a marathon or on page 1 of Google, takes effort – a lot of effort.

And, just like a marathon, you need to work on your weaknesses. Perhaps it’s muscle strength or breathing, maybe it’s endurance or technique. Similarly, SEO is about identifying your strengths and weaknesses. You need to be able to pinpoint what you’re doing wrong and fix it. Below, we review five tips to maximize SEO for your local business; tips which, when implemented, can have an outstanding impact for your website.

#1 Keyword strategy

Selecting the right keywords is crucial. It’s not enough to be vague; you need to be specific.

In many cases, this means choosing what are called “long-tail keywords”. A short-tail keyword would be something like “club”. The problem with short-tail keywords is that they can refer to many different things. It could refer to a “chess club”, a “nightclub”, a “wooden club” etc. Perhaps you are selling niche wooden clubs. In that case, you should target long-tail keywords like “buy wooden clubs”, “where to buy wooden clubs”.

Long-tail keywords are more specific. It means you can confidently say that the article or webpage you created is specifically designed for that keyword(s). You can be confident that visitors to your website are there for the right reason. You also need to distribute keywords in the right way – using the correct anchor text etc. This informs search engines that your entire website is about the topic you created it for.

#2 Content creation

It’s not enough to leave your website just hanging there. You need to create content; an essential component to maximize SEO for your local business.

Not just any content, but quality content. In a previous world, creating any old content was good enough – you simply needed to pepper the article with keywords. In 2017, your days are numbered if you continue this outdated and damaging strategy. These days, Google rewards websites that publish fresh, relevant, original and – perhaps most importantly – useful content that has value. This is what has the greatest SEO impact.

There are three ways you can create new, fresh content:

1. By updating existing content or adding new content to existing webpages
2. By creating new pages that target a specific keyword
3. By adding regular blog content

You should create a blog if you haven’t already. It’s a simple and effective way to introduce informative content to your website. What do we mean by “useful content that has value”, though?

If our local business is about selling wine, potential blog topics include:

• “How wine can improve your health”
• “Why do wines have different tastes and smells?”
• “Your guide to how the best wines are produced”

You get the idea. None of these articles are directed toward the purpose of your business – to sell wine. However, search engines take a different view. By adding this content, you’re letting search engines know your website is relevant and informative. Your website is not about spam. By hoovering up more traffic through these blog posts, it has a knock-on positive impact on your website as a whole – which can, in the end, improve sales.

#3 Building SEO into your website

Our final tip to maximize SEO for your local business is of paramount importance.

Each webpage of your website needs to be SEO-optimized. In real terms, this means placing the right content in titles, sub-titles, meta descriptions and so forth. You need each webpage to have a defined structure. This makes it easier for search engines to not only crawl each webpage but also to determine the value and relevance that each page has. This SEO tip alone can increase your search rank quite considerably.

You also need a defined website structure. Pages shouldn’t be randomly placed and difficult to find. There should be a logical progression from the homepage to every other webpage on the website. To achieve this, you need to correctly link each page of the website to one another. This is what’s known as having a “shallow website” hierarchy. In contrast, a “deep website” design is difficult to crawl and has a negative SEO impact.

By implementing the above three techniques, your local business can maximize SEO and see its search-engine page rank improve quite considerably. As one of the leading SEO agencies in Las Vegas, we have helped both start-ups and leading brands with their online marketing team. If you’d like to receive more information on our Las Vegas SEO services, contact a member of our SEO agency today.