Best Seo Service in Richmond

Seo in  Richmond  , VA SEO: A Quick & Dirty Guide to Local SEO Marketing

Organizations (especially retail businesses and career colleges) hear a lot about “Local Search Marketing” and “Local SEO”. I put this quick and dirty guide together to help you understand the basics of Seo in  Richmond  and to give you some quick and easy pointers on how to improve your website’s position in search rankings.

And I figured that the best way to help you understand some of these concepts was to write as if I was helping clients in my home town of Richmond, Virginia. Well, actually I live in a small town outside of Roanoke called Salem – but more on that later.

What is SEO? What listings are we talking about?

SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”. When marketing folks talk about SEO, we are referring to the different ways that web pages are served up in the “organic” search results displayed by engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

An “organic” search result is simply a result that someone does not directly pay for – it’s not a paid placement or ad, but is instead arrived at because of an algorithm that measures the relevance of a particular web page to a particular searcher’s intent.

In the same way that Google’s goal is to provide search results that are the most relevant to a user’s intent, you want to appear at the top of those results that are most closely aligned with what your customers want.The art of SEO and of Local SEO Marketing is to improve where an organization’s pages appear when people are looking for relevant services on a search engine. So, if you are a Japanese restaurant in Richmond, you want to rank highly when people in the Roanoke area search for “Sushi restaurant” as well as “sushi in Richmond” or “Japanese restaurant”.

That said, the algorithm that search engines use (especially Google’s) is a mystery to some extent and is kept that way so that people cannot unfairly game the system (that is why the algorithm is changed and improved constantly as well). We SEO pros do not know the search algorithm, so we collectively put our heads together based on experiences with client sites to make (very) educated guesses about what matters and how much.

One thing we do know: Google cares about location and about localizing search results. There are a few market-driven reasons behind this – it helps them sell more advertising and a rising percentage of searches are aimed at finding local, offline resources to fulfill a particular need. Searchers in Richmond and surrounding areas are overwhelmingly likely to be searching about events, services, and goods in the Roanoke area and Google serves up results to match.

Here are 9 tips to help you get started in optimizing your search results:

1.) You Manage What You Measure – set up Analytics and Webmaster tools. Google offers two free tools that will let you track the traffic to your website (as well as warn you if it goes down, slows down, isn’t usable, or just really sucks). Setting these services up is relatively painless and can be done in less than 15 minutes. (If you want help, just drop us a line.)

Use Analytics and Webmaster tools to benchmark how much traffic you are getting as well as how many times your pages appear as part of the results for different search queries. You can also use these tools to see where your pages appear as part of these queries.

2.) Consider ‘landers’ as part of your site. Many sites, especially local sites, are designed using the old idea of an “information architecture” where you have a home page, pages for each product, a contact page, and so on. If you want to be competitive in a local market, then look at the various reasons your customers and clients engage your services and write pages specifically aimed at those reasons in addition to the pages specified in your architecture document.

Google ranks both your entire site (which SEO firms track as “Domain Authority” – more below) as well as individual pages (called “Page Rank”). Creating pages specifically aimed at showing users that you have what is relevant to their particular needs is a very solid (and underutilized) strategy for local businesses and organizations.

3.) Improve your Home Page or Landing Page content. A surprising number of businesses (really good ones) have little or no content on their home pages. Some of this is hold over from the days of the “splash page” in web design. These introductory pages, while beautiful, no longer serve the purposes of businesses looking to improve their search presence. For a local example, search for “Blue Apron Restaurant Roanoke”. Gorgeous layout, but light on content.

Most local businesses are similarly light on home page content despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of top search results in Google are pages with more than 750 words worth of relevant content – and in many cases, over 2,000. This means that creating a home page or landing page with focused, detailed content is a huge opportunity for most local businesses.

4.) Make your Content Useful: Google has learned that people are looking for information that serves a purpose. This means the kind of information that helps people make decisions. Detailed service descriptions, FAQ’s, community builders, product information, and testimonials are all great ways to give users what they want and to rank well with Google.

How does this work in the real world of Roanoke? Here’s an example.

Here is a screen capture of the top 5 organic results for “Emergency Plumber Roanoke”. Note that the top entry has Plumbing as part of the domain as well as the page name. It also lists 24-hour emergency service in the text that Google grabs to describe the site.

The remaining two are from a business that has Richmond specific content as part of page titles and copy. But not a whole lot on emergency plumbing itself.

If I were counseling a plumber who wanted this sort of business, I’d advise writing a page for “Emergency Plumber in Richmond” and then write page copy that includes typical repairs made as part of emergency service, reasons you might need emergency service (as in “How to know you need an emergency plumber”), and typical emergencies you’ve seen in the Richmond market. Then I’d be sure to include some testimonials that include kudos for emergency service (and hopefully get clients to leave those testimonials on social media properties like Facebook and Google+/MyBusiness).

5.) Use Keywords & think like your user: “Keyword” is just a fancy term for “things people type when they search for stuff”. When you are thinking about how best to drive new business using local SEO, think in terms of what your users really want. And then look for opportunities that are being ignored.

Here is an example.

This screen shot shows the three featured listings that Google serves up when I searched for “Where should I go for dinner?” I didn’t include “Richmond” in the query. I just typed a question that was natural and assumed that Google would give me nearby results.Seo in  Richmond  .