Doctor, Dental SEO Consultant in Salt Lake City, UT

Tyson Downs, Dental SEO Professional

The Secret To Success In Improving Your Local Search Engine Results

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If you haven’t been tapping into the power of local SEO, (Google Places, Bing Local, Yelp, etc) you’ve been leaving money on the table.

Every single day, millions of small business owners around the globe tap into the power of search engine optimization hoping to finally strike it rich. They spend an almost insane amount of time and money just trying to get their websites and web properties ranked just a bit higher in Google, focusing on all kinds of keywords.

And while some of them will actually be able to rip and claw their way to the very top – at least with some of the less competitive keywords they were targeting – the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of them will fall to the wayside. All of that money and all of that time will have been wasted on literally no improvement in your business.

This is true for a million and one different reasons, but the most obvious one is that folks just aren’t targeting local SEO traffic the way that they should be. There is literally no better tool for boosting your business almost overnight then finding hot prospects in your local area. Combine that with the simple fact that you’ll not have to go toe to toe with hundreds of thousands of different businesses from all over the globe – you’ll only have to outrank the handful of services you are directly competing with locally – and you have the kind of super powers you’ve been looking for.small-business-search-engine-optimization

But you will have to properly plan and execute a near flawless local SEO strategy if you’re hoping to really boost your business. Luckily, that’s exactly the kind of information you’re going to find below.

Before anything else – you have to have a plan

Way too many people get into the search engine optimization arena not really 100% understanding how much work it really can be. They have conjured up some sort of fantastical myth of a pimply faced teenager punching away rapidly at the keys, just trying to crank your ranking a little bit higher than it was yesterday. And while this might not be too terribly far off the mark to how things are in the SEO world, you’ll need to give that same pimply faced teenager and effective SEO plan to work off of or you’ll be wasting all of your money and time.

Just like everything else in life, the right search engine optimization outline can make your business flourish like nothing else. Not only will you be able to target specifically the kinds of keywords you’re going to go after, but you’ll also be able to clearly outline which different SEO tactics you’re going to leverage, the chokepoints you’re going to have to fight through or conquer, and how the entire SEO plan will tie into your business.

Without this critical game plan, you may as well be flopping around in the dark.

Ignore the latest and greatest tactics du jour and instead spend your time building real strategies.

This is probably the biggest chokepoints that most business owners and even SEO professionals have to contend with on a daily basis. The world and landscape of search engine optimization is the most ever-changing and rapidly shifting of any major traffic generation tool you’ve ever seen. Nearly every single day Google and the other major search engine networks make changes to their algorithm, meaning that the things you did to rank yesterday could very well be the things that send you into the oblivion tomorrow.
online-marketingAll of this change means that you’ll have to spend and almost unfair amount of time just seeing what kinds of curveballs these major companies have thrown you now (which is why it’s mission critical to hire a professional SEO firm – but now’s not the time to go there). You know, the kind of time that you just don’t have as a smart and savvy business owner.

The good news is, that most of the foundational elements for what works in the local SEO arena hasn’t changed since day one. This means that you’ll be able to lay down a solid bedrock of SEO efforts, and enjoy real rankings almost from day one. You’ll be able to skip out on the hot topics of the SEO world unless you really want to get into them, giving you the chance to shortcut your online success.

Conclusion

All in all, mastering local SEO is the number one tool you can use in your marketers toolbox to build your business into the kind of success you’ve always dreamed of. You’ll be able to specifically target hot prospects that are likely to convert into paying customers, all while not having to fight with everyone and their brother who is trying to do the same thing on a global scale. Mastering the local SEO game is essential for modern business success, but it doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg – or any of your incredibly valuable time – to pull off.

3 Important Steps to Take Before You Hire an SEO Company

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Most businesses aren’t going to always be able to hire an in-house SEO expert to handle their online content all the time— which makes outsourcing their SEO services an increasingly attractive offer for their practice– but there’s a catch.

 

1. You Need to Understand the Basics.

a seo concept with key

SEO is a tricky industry that requires a deep understanding of both the business the SEO specialist is trying to promote and the SEO
industry as a whole. This can make hiring an outsourced SEO professional rather tricky; and the best way to insure that a business isn’t going in blind is just to make sure that that business has at least a decent understanding of the SEO industry as a whole– they don’t need to be an SEO expert (they wouldn’t need to hire a professional SEO firm if they were experts)– but businesses should understand some of the concepts of SEO before attempting to jump into the industry. I recommend hiring somebody that specializes in your industry as each industry has different nuances. At Titan Web Agency, we specialize in SEO for Dentists, Doctors, and other healthcare professionals.

 

2. Understand What ‘White Hat’ and ‘Black Hat’ Mean

 

The first thing you should keep an eye out for is the distinction between whitehat and blackhat SEO– if those two terms mean nothing to you, then you need to research them before you continue on in your business’s SEO endeavors; it’s important.

There are plenty of authoritative sources of what the difference between those two – and their respective definitions actually are – but the general distinction is a distinction of ethics. White hats are the good guys who follow the rules as they were meant to be followed and do things “legitimately”– but black hat SEO’s are people who understand how to play the system and get the highest volume of traffic through abuse of how search engines work. They use shady tactics and can go unnoticed, but when they get caught (when), they can leave a website or campaign in a worse-off position than it was when it started.

However… most people fall within some form of “gray hat” classification in this area. The whole purpose of SEO is to get you ranked higher on search engine results pages; and you wouldn’t be able to achieve that if you didn’t read the rules and were willing to bend your content at least a little just to get that extra boost in search engine ranking. Generally go with a white hat; but understand that anyone who calls themselves a white hat isn’t being entirely honest about it.

3. Understand The Premise of Backlinks

Utah SEO ConsultantBacklinks, or simply links are also another thing that you want to be sure to understand. Links are like a referral or reference from one site to another. If an industry leader in your space mentions your business and ads your website address to their site, that’s a good think! That would be considered a good link.

Links play a heavy role in how a website is ranked by search engines. While links are generally a good thing, bad links are definitely a bad thing. Links should only be made if the thing they are linking to is definitively relevant to the central theme of the website to begin with. Spam-links are a sure-fire way to get downranked from search engine results pages.

The nature of SEO in general is to have frequently-searched text in the content of your website while still maintaining that every portion of your website be consistent with an overall topic. A website should have a theme, and should have relevant links and content relating to that theme– anything else is to be avoided.