Local Truckee, Lake Tahoe Search Engine Operation (SEO) Best Practices.
Optimizing your local Truckee, Lake Tahoe area website is a complex task. The ways of Local SEO are different from that of traditional organic global SEO. By performing Local SEO properly, one can easily rank their website in the higher Google listings. Small sized companies should work on their online visibility and ha
ve up-to-date profiles. This will make it easier for potential customers, or clients to get in touch with your company.
By adding the company’s profile and location, Google can quickly locate your business profile. If local SEO is done correctly, a potential client can find your website, services offered, prices, contact information, hours of operation and location with just a few clicks. SEO is a great marketing strategy that companies, especially startups and small businesses, should invest in.
Your website is your most important and valuable online asset.
Ensuring that your website is properly optimized to appear high within search results is key. Why spend all that money or time on building a website if your potential clients can’t find it? For a small percentage of the cost of building a high quality site, you can get new clients that will pay back your Truckee, Lake Tahoe SEO investment many fold. In general, it’s not a good idea for business owners to spend time learning about meta-titles, descriptions, alt-tags, keeping up with Google’s regular algorithm changes.
Some of the secrets of Local SEO in the Truckee, North Lake Tahoe area include: keyword rich meta titles of the correct length, compelling attractive meta descriptions, alt-tags on photos, keyword synonyms and permutations within the content, internal links, relevant outgoing links, and regularly updated valuable, informative content (like this blog). Click here for an article on how to find the best keywords for your site.
The biggest mistake most business owners make here is in trying to optimize more than one page for a given keyword phrase. This is like competing against yourself and will dilute your results. When we work with our clients on this, we carefully and strategically map out the ideal keyword phrases to each website page and blog post.
Social media pages play a notable role in local business’ visibility in search results.
The more proactive, valuable and interactive your social media strategy, the higher likelihood your pages will attract followers — and in turn, appear within search results. Call us if you’re bogged down with too many choices or if you’re overwhelmed and can’t keep up – we can do this all for you.
Good local SEO means a great customer experience.
In the end, a potential customer’s decision to buy (or not) will come down to the entire customer experience from click-to-close. Examples of this include the efficiency and cleanliness of your html code, image loading time, video buffering, ease and logic of navigation, etc…
User reviews help to build your business’ visibility in local search results, and so does your engagement in responding to them.
Whether they are positive or negative. However, small businesses need to ensure the reviews themselves always come from the outside. Make it as easy as possible for clients to give you a review, for example, post your Google Plus and Yelp links on your Testimonials page.
Make it easy for people to contact and/or find you.
Put your business’ address, phone number and email address in a clear, prominent position (that doesn’t require people to scroll down to see them) on every page of your site and add a contact form to your site’s sidebar or footer. This consistency is very important to Google for them to consider your business a solid, reputable company (which, in turn, leads to better rankings).
Ensure your website looks good and is usable on multiple devices and screen resolutions.
Your site needs to meet common user expectations (readable text, easy to navigate, no horizontal scrolling, etc.) on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones (the technical term for this is “responsive”). This also affects your rankings.
Register in local business directories.
Include your business in all the major business listings. Getting listed in the local business directories will help you get more listings on the first page of Google, create more backlinks and to have many visitors to your website. Often these sites will try to sell you ad space or deluxe listings. If you look carefully you can find the free listings. Be sure to have every field filled out and do not duplicate your content. Each directory listing description should be unique.
Direct data matters for local SEO.
The rise of “direct data” in the Truckee, Lake Tahoe search engine results pages (SERPs) means that companies need to provide more detailed information about themselves in order to get a top slot with search engines.
Check analytics.
Finally, you must monitor your website analytics regularly. By analyzing, you can find which practice helps you to get more traffic to your website. This is often complex and Google changes its format regularly so it can be confusing. If this is the case for you, we’re happy to set it up and send you monthly reports.
Once you identify your website’s weak points, you may need to get some technical help to get it in order. Truckee Web Design is dedicated to your success and we’re here to help you. We would enjoy the opportunity to talk with you about achieving these goals for you and your business. Give us a call at (530) 426-8404, or email info@TruckeeWebDesign.com and we can sit down together. We’re happy to share tips and insights with no obligation to hire us.
“The three essential elements of an effective SEO are effective communication, useful information and high quality backlinks.” – SEO Refugee
