Search Engine Optimization - why it's important.

As I mentioned in the introduction, while you may have a beautiful website, you still need to get found. The world wide web contains millions of indexed websites in all levels of business so you need to stand out in order for someone to know you exist. SEO answers the question “What am I looking for?” for an end user. So if you are a business in Tampa, Florida that sells and delivers flowers in the area, you want to make sure that if someone is looking to have flowers delivered in Tampa, you come up as a top option and rank higher than your competitors. 

Local SEO is where you focus your content in a specific area. This could be in a city, state, a variety of states and so on. What you are doing is on a local level. Local SEO can be really great for small businesses who only have a select few locations in a city or state. What you do in a nutshell is target those areas. So if you are an Oklahoma City based steak house restaurant, you want to make sure that when people are looking for “steak house in Oklahoma City” that you are that top option. And this is done by making sure that you utilize key phrases and terms that someone may use to search for your restaurant. By using the location in an organic fashion, Google will recognize the validity of your business and where it’s at and you can move up in the rankings.

No. And if anyone ever guarantees you will rank on the first page, run. No one can guarantee that. But what you can do is put everything in place to make that happen. However, Google is an interesting animal. They keep a lot of secrets to themselves and randomly make changes to their algorithm and how they do things so you just can’t guarantee that. But there are a lot of things you can do with the use of organic and paid search to help with rankings.

There are a laundry list that you should avoid but let’s talk about keyword stuffing. Google is smart and has taken more of an organic approach to validating websites and their content. You know how you can sometimes go to a website and you see a million times “X in Clearwater, FL”? You want to avoid that. Write the content like it’s meant to be digested and subtly add content that’s relevant to search terms. Also, another thing to avoid, which believe it or not, people still do, is hide keywords in the background. You know what I’m talking about. Listing a bunch of key terms and coloring the text the same as a background. Once again, Google isn’t stupid. They know what’s going on and you can get penalized harshly for trying to be sneaky. I mean it’s Google. I’m sure they are watching us right now!

I can’t stress enough that SEO now days is more about the flow and quality of content.

Not at all. In order for you to get the best out of the initial SEO work, you need an on-going strategy. Site optimization has to continue.

We, meaning the GGC Digital teams, consistently watches the progress on how your page content and blog posts are doing and make tweaks based on traffic.  When you optimize for search, it’s not a set it and forget it. How people search changes each month. We monitor major search engines for changes in trends and keep an eye on your google search console as well. This is where things like creating blog posts, editing existing blog posts, link-building and other items come into play. During our monthly meeting we go over blogging ideas and discuss what we’ve done in the previous month to optimize your content and what trends we are seeing. We take that time to also discuss opportunities to build your audience based on the keywords and terms we monitor.