The sad truth is that most small business owners whether they build their own website or hire a professional web designer, quickly lose their enthusiasm about having the website because they don’t notice any increase in traffic to their business. Doesn't take long to see that no one visits their website. This can be extremely discouraging if a lot of time and money has been spent creating the website. Many business owners simply give up at this point. This is very sad because a small business website that is properly focused on local search with the proper search engine optimization (SEO) techniques being used can increase business for the brick and mortar store just like it does for exclusively online stores.
The average person usually doesn’t learn about SEO techniques at first. Some business owners will research how to get traffic for their local business website and find out about SEO and either attempt to do it themselves or hire an SEO professional to assist them with SEO implementation and finally experience some success. Studies have been done that show that hiring a professional is 80% more effective than trying to do it yourself. This is mainly because it can take years of experience before a person understands all that they can about SEO.
A SEO professional spends their entire career making it their business (literally) to keep up to date on every new technology and procedure involved with SEO such as:
- Article Marketing
- Back linking
- Content Development
- CSS Basics
- Duplicate content issues
- How Search Engines Work
- HTML Basics
- Internet Marketing
- Keyword phrases
- Keyword Research
- Keywords
- Link building methods
- Long tail and short tail keywords
- Marketing Basics
- Metrics
- MySQL Basics
- Page Ranking
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- PHP Basics
- Redirects and how this affects ranking
- Research
- Search algorithm changes
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Sitemaps
- Social Media
- Statistics
- Web Development and Design issues in SEO
Without knowledge in these areas or at least the vast majority of them, a person cannot call themselves an SEO professional. To be an expert, they should know what they need to know in order to be able to implement what needs to be done to enhance your search engine page ranking.
Being found on local search is imperative to the success of your website and your local business because according to Pew Research 86% of online searches result in a local offline purchase. This means that if a local buyer can find you, they prefer to buy local than buy from the Internet! However, if they cannot locate you then you may miss out on the purchase. The other factor is that you must show up on the first page of search results and most business owners cannot accomplish this without a professional.
Local Search Optimization
And now I’d like to invite you to take advantage of our Local Search Optimization package. We do all the work for you. We even do keyword research to ensure your business description is keyword-rich. Click to learn more about our Local Search Optimization package.
