Local SEO: 5 Essential Components

The Necessary Components of Local SEO

Avoid SEO charlatans as if they have scabies: 

And they may. The first thing I tell my clients is to hang up when someone calls them or emails them, promising to get them ranked on the first page of search. The scumsuckers often claim to be from Google. Here’s something you should hang on your wall for everyone in your company to see: “Google isn’t calling you and NOBODY can promise first-page rank unless it is Google.” 

Those companies will not only take your money and screw you royally, they’re quite likely to get you penalized by the real Google … meaning you can bend over and kiss your chances of getting found on search goodbye.

Selling is good: 

Businesses must sell products or services. That is as it should be. Stop being ashamed of selling (if you’re that kind of person). On the other hand, if you’re only trying to rip people off with low-quality goods and crappy services, go drown yourself (I speak figuratively only, of course). Our economy is based on buying and selling. 

Get over it, or go join a commune and raise sunflowers. Never be afraid to ask for the order, and stop telling your content writers not to push too hard. Get real. Stand up. Be genuine. You have something of value to offer. Offer it. I include this in the list because all the traffic in the world won’t help you if you aren’t able to convert that traffic into sales … and selling requires selling.

Employ a professional copywriter to write your website content. 

I know, anybody can write. Your cousin’s daughter is a poet. Good for her. Copywriting is writing aimed at selling something. That means every page on your website will NOT be all about you and how wonderful we are: “We make the best pizza in town and we love both cats and dogs. Come try our pizza today! And, by the way, we not only have the BEST ingredients, but we have the lowest prices too! YUMMY! You’ll love our pizza.” No, your content should call out the problem (Hungry?) and provide a solution (Get your ass in here and chow down) along with a reason why to choose you and some social proof (we’re open until midnight, we deliver, and we’ve been named the “best pizza in town” the past five years). 

That’s not a copywriting template suggestion, by the way, it’s a rough example. The content on your primary pages (Home page, product description pages, sales pages, checkout procedure …) is crucial. So is the content on your landing pages, but few of you know what those are. If your copywriter doesn’t, fire him.

Develop a kick-ass marketing strategy. 

Most small businesses don’t have a strategy at all. The owners SAY they do, but they can’t produce it. Therefore, they waste time and money chasing their tails instead of focusing on high-value activities. As with the charlatan SEO creeps, though, this area is jam-packed with crooks who will sell you a multi-thousand dollar sure-sell package that consists of trying to trick people into becoming your customers. Tread lightly. Talk to your local Small Business Development Center. Talk with a SCORE counselor. 

Get real help from someone who knows what they’re talking about and has been in the trenches before. An effective strategy will get real clear on what you’re selling, who your best prospects are, where those prospects hang out, how to reach them, and how to speak their language. It will also develop a clear-cut path people can use to buy from you, it will clear the rocks out of that path, and it will follow up with your customers to get them to come back for more and to become evangelists for you. And it will take a microscopic look at your competition. It will know them intimately. Don’t settle for less.

Make sure to cover the SEO basics. 

This is the realm of legitimate SEO practitioners. It includes things like making sure your metadata is optimized (backend SEO), developing your keyword list and optimizing for them, getting you listed on appropriate (be careful here) directories, building supporting content for your site that will play well with the keywords, getting earned mentions and backlinks from sites relative to yours (be careful here too), making sure you’re hooked up with Google My Business, developing your social media presence, and on and on. 

There’s no end to the tactics you can use to help build SEO klout. I tell my people that proper SEO isn’t one thing or a few things: it’s 1,000 little things that all matter. The charlatans will focus on big, quick wins like building a zillion low-quality backlinks. Those might give you a quick bump, but they’ll soon drag you down to the bottom of the pit and you’ll never be found again.