The other day I tweeted about how the dental office my aunt manages paid $2,000 per month for 3 months to this SEO company and got no results. Then she told me the keyword and my wife used the same strategies in our SEO book and got my aunt not one but two listings on the front page in under 48 hours.
I wish I knew that companies name because I would publicly call them out and tell them “Your SEO Sucks But Mine Don’t!”
There’s a couple reasons why my SEO strategies were able to beat over 3 months of another companies strategies in just one weekend…
Big Bites Are Harder To Swallow
Most people who start out either paying someone for SEO or even doing it themselves often go right after the big high traffic keywords. It’s an innocent mistake since they logically think “high traffic, well hell that’s exactly what I want!”
Although, what they really want is fast traffic, not lots of traffic. Most people don’t have the financial or time capital to invest in going after the top keywords in their niche. For example if you were a realtor trying to rank for the term “Real Estate Agent.” A keyword like that is going to take you months to years to rank amongst the top ten in Google.
Not to mention could you really handle the worldwide traffic that types in that keyword phrase? That’s a whole nother chapter though…
If you were a smart realtor though you would go after “Real Estate Agent [Your City Your State]” like “Real Estate Agent Boise Idaho.”
A keyword like that is definitely not going to get you all the traffic in the world. You will be able to rank for it quickly though. Which means you’ll have your target customers finding you quickly. Then as you need more traffic you start adding more keywords for more cities.
This would work the same for any business too…
“SEO Expert Boise Idaho”
“Designer Dental Delray Beach Florida”
“Family Restaurant Raymore Missouri”
With this strategy you are skipping the 1,000 searches per day keywords and instead ranking immediately for 100 keywords that get 10 searches per day (figuratively speaking). Both get you the same amount of traffic, except one you have to wait months befor eyou see results and the other gets you near instant results the whole way through.
When you play at this level SEO gets so much easier too. You don’t have to worry about all the fancy nofollowing, H1tagging, link juicing, and daily content producing B.S. - I just worry about 4 factors.
4 Steps To Local SEO Domination
Domain Name:
The first place Google and other search engines look for your SEO elements is in the address to your web page. If your keyword(s) are in that address you get a big thumbs up from the search engines.
Go ahead and Google a few random key phrases. You’ll notice that out of the top 10 listings for that phrase many of them have the phrase or keyword in their domain name.
Title Tag:
The second thing search engines look for is the title of your page to see what it’s about. You get another big bonus if your keyword(s) is in your title tag.
When I traded our local Mac store for a free 21″ iMac for some web design and SEO work, all I had to do was change their title tag and they immediately ranked #1 for “Mac Repair Boise.” (and they still hold that ranking)
Keyword Density:
The last thing a search engine is going to look for that’s physically on your website is the relevancy of your content. They way they check this is by counting all the words on the page and their combinations to find out which phrases are most common.
Then they cound how many times those phrases appear for every other 100 words on your page. This gets really complex to explain but is easier if I just tell you to make sure you have your keyword(s) 3x per every 100 other words on your page.
Backlinks:
Finally, the search engines are going to check the popularity of your website. Sure they want good quality content but they also want good high quality content that other people will like.
The way search engines measure your popularity is by counting how many other websites are linking to you out on the Internet. Each link is like a hand raised in the air voting your site as “being cool.” The more of these links you have the more popular you look to Google.
Just like in high school it does matter who you are most popular with too. You don’t want the search engines to see that only one type of website is linking to you over and over or even worse BAD WEBSITES linking to you. You want a diverse collection of incoming links and all of them from reputable sites.
Wrap Up
If you’ll just make sure your domain name, title tag, keyword density, and backlinks have your keyword(s) in them the right way then you can dominate thousands of keywords very quickly. Not the high traffic keywords but tons and tons of “long tail keywords”
