When it comes to SEO, Northern Beaches businesses often struggle to find local, affordable help. They have been inundated with offers from dubious overseas based seo services or big expensive national digital marketing services who try to confuse and scare clients into expensive long term contracts. We know, we get those approaches ourselves! Adsurf is a local Northern Beaches based provider of SEO Services along with Google Ads Management (aka AdWords) and other digital marketing services – and it’s a much more personal experience!
Most business owners know that search engine optimisation is the process of getting their websites found on search engines like Google but have little idea of how to go about it, or worse, have vague outdated ideas about meta keywords and other long dead practices. Getting your web pages ranked well in Google means scoring highly enough in the competition between your pages and all the others that might be an answer to a search query. You need to do that in a way that Google can understand so it starts to think of your page being better than the others.
There are many factors involved in the methods used to rank web pages but high on the priority list are factors such as having good unique content on your pages, providing a good experience to your website visitors, such they can find what they want easily and perhaps showing some proof that you are a credible business, maybe even one with some authority in your particular niche. After those major factors are in place you can start to consider the more technical side of optimisation.
A simple check you can do yourself is to check out your competitors websites already ranking in Google and comparing their pages objectively against your own. Ask yourself why those pages might be ‘better’ than yours. Do they have more comprehensive text content? Are they well written, error-free and professional looking? Do they have good illustrations, images or video that are appealing to customers? Search engine optimisation all starts with having the right content presented in the right way. The higher the standard of your competitor’s pages, the higher you need to set standards for your own website.
Search engine optimisation all starts with having the right content presented in the right way
That may mean looking at website design issues too – the wrong design can make customers have to hunt around your site for the info they want. Ideally we want to present info in a logical way that minimises the clicking around a customer needs to do. If your competitors pages use multi media content then it would be wise to offer a good multi media experience too. Remember the competition is really between you and your competitors, you’re not really fighting Google.
Then there is the technical side of optimisation, ensuring the website structure, meta tags and code is as search engine friendly as possible. Getting the internal links right, using the images and their meta tags wisely to help with SEO, reducing page load times and a bunch of other stuff your SEO guy might need to look at. There may also be brand or authority issues to look at, Google is unlikely to push a big brand off the top ten to make way for a new website so it is wise to pick SEO battles you actually have a chance of winning, at least until your business is an authoritative one.
Authority may or may not be a factor in different marketing battles
That authority factor may or may not be a factor in different marketing battles. Many, probably most, local service businesses won’t need to worry much about it while national businesses may very much need to work on their authority. Adsurf can help guide you on how to build your own authority without the need for expensive link building services. Using those services these days can actually be very dangerous as Google can sometimes penalise websites with an unnatural looking approach to backlink acquisition. Adsurf will guide you around the traps and show you how to stay safe if backlink acquisition becomes a necessity for your website. We’ll also dispel some of the myths about social media and SEO and stop you wasting time and money that other digital marketing services will cheerfully take from you.
A good SEO consultant will discuss those sorts of issues with you honestly and not try to pull wool over your eyes.
A good SEO consultant will help you optimise your site by looking at all these aspects of your site. He’ll advise you on content, site structure, website development, the search terms and topics to compete for and he will help you with building your authority too if you need it. He won’t stop there though, he will also tell you how to make the most of your traffic by looking at how to convert more of your visitors into real clients. He might also suggest other online marketing tactics such as a Google Ads campaign or social media where it might be advantageous.
A word about Local SEO
Does your business mainly serve local clients? Perhaps you are a tradesperson such as an electrician or plumber with a mobile service that mainly serves customers in a particular area? Maybe you have a shopfront or other premises like a chiropractor or a hairdresser? If that?s the case, you should be working on maximising your presence in Google?s local listings.
So how is it done? One of the most important aspects is to get your Google My Business page set up correctly so that it is not only accurate and up to date but also consistent with the other information about your business that?s around the web, including your own website and resources like Yellowpages and Facebook. It?s about getting directory entries and perhaps some other links to your website and it?s also about some basic optimisation of your website. Those other mentions act as ?citations? for your business, helping Google to trust it as a genuine ongoing business.
Your GMB page also allows customers to review your services and if you get some good reviews, those can also help boost your search visibility. The more you get and the more you get the other aspects right, the greater the chances of your business showing to local Google users.
There?s quite a bit of work involved and it is really easy to mess it up and hurt your chances but we?re here to help. We can take the workload off your hands and get everything correctly organised along with arranging several directory listings. There?s no need for monthly fees, our local booster is a once-off fee only.
We?ll either create a GMB page or edit yours if you already have it set up and ensure some critical things are in place and consistent with your website. We?ll possibly make some edits to your website for consistency and basic optimisation and we?ll what other websites are already linking to yours. That allows us to see if any of those need correction (assuming you have – or can recover – the login details). We can also arrange for more directory entries to be citations for your business.
For many locally focused businesses that?s all that is needed to start getting some search engine traffic from your local area. Of course, we can help with bigger projects too including with ongoing optimisation programs and Google Ads.
If you would like to know more about SEO for your business use the contact form to get in touch!
If you’re looking for a local Northern Beaches SEO service, and not one in some far off land you’re in good experienced hands with Adsurf. We’ve been doing SEO for years and spend a lot of time studying Google. We speak plain english so you don’t need to worry about learning SEO gobbledigook – we’ll worry about that stuff.
We’re not just all about SEO services though, we also get involved in other aspects of online marketing such as Google Ads Management, social media and website design optimisation to get more conversions from your traffic.? Get in touch for a chat about your needs.