We all want to dominate page 1 of Google because that is where over 90% of organic search traffic comes from. Living and working in Oregon almost all my life, I know that the difference between the Portland area, Salem area, Eugene area and the rest of the state are all different in competition levels.
Having spent my younger years in the Portland area, the number of people and level of competition was staggering. The level of competition was fierce, but with the number of people, you had tons of opportunities to develop a successful business. That is quite different than if you are in Cottage Grove Oregon, which is an outlier of Eugene. Smaller towns allow for less businesses of the same type.
We now live and work in Eugene and service the Eugene, Springfield, Lane County area primarily, but still strive to work with local companies all throughout Oregon. However, each city and area pose different levels of service need to achieve their online goals.
That is why this post is a conceptual path to get to the top of local and/or organic search, but not a guaranteed path. It never can be guaranteed, even Google doesn’t guarantee how it will rank on specific factors. These are simply good SEO and Local SEO methods to use in your goal for search engine dominance. Also, we are a digital marketing company, so we will reference some of our services in the post for those interested.
Pre-Path Info
Let us start basic with Keyword Phrases. A keyword phrase is essentially a search term, but with the contextual nature of new search rank algorithms, it is not an exact match counting game. Google and other search engine indexing equations are trying to deliver the most relevant, local (if applicable) and trusted sites to searchers.
With that in mind, search phrases are getting longer, especially with voice search.
Sometimes it is simple, like “restaurants near me,” “bars eugene oregon,” “contractors springfield oregon,” or nowadays, it may be just “contractors” and let your IP address tell the search engine rough location and it will deliver the closest local contractors in the local search results page.
More and more, however; the search term is more like, “how do I find a good real estate agent” or “best financial planners in eugene oregon.” Some of the more common parts of keyword phrases are: “stores open now,” “food open now,” where to buy,” “where to find,” “where to get” and so on.
The examples alone would make the need for hundreds of pages with a ton of junk content. Luckily, Google does not want junk, that is why it is focused on understanding the context and indicators of sites and niches.
Let us start the path
You will see a theme of consistent effort throughout these topics.
1) Your Website
First, you must have one and have a website that is up-to-date for the location and hours. If you have a menu, parts, products or services catalog/menu then you need to make sure that it is current as well. This requires a regular effort to keep your website current. We recommend that you schedule this on your calendar, so you get it done and do not forget.
As far as the look of the website, make sure the site looks to follow some form of the modern iteration of the internet. Mainly because people judge on first impression and if your site looks old, they may assume it is out of date and move on.
Your website should perform fast enough to prevent people from leaving before they see the website. If you have issues with website design and maintenance, then maybe you should find someone or a company like ours to help.
1a) Have a Blog
Blogs are a website service, but more and more they are becoming an SEO content service. To build context for your product or service you need words, images, code, etc that allows a search engine crawler to understand what you are selling and where your are selling it.
Not all blogs are created equal, just like links. A blog can no longer be junk words to stuff keywords into. You need to focus on high quality and engaging content. See our “Blog to improve your website search rank” post for more detail about planning. If you choose not to read the whole post, just try to remember this, you need a plan and frequent content to have good long-term results.
2) Build backlinks
After page content, backlinks are the second most important search engine rank factor. Like blogs, not all back-links are created equal.
Your goal is not to get links anywhere and everywhere with whatever anchor text (visible text) you can. You want to get relevant keywords (phrases) on trusted websites that are preferably related to your industry (niche). High domain authority or trusted sites can be difficult to get links from.
There are many places to get links: Other websites, social profiles, directories (more details soon), forums, citations (more details soon), etc. A good blog can help this effort go along way, but you should also have a good backlink building strategy and dedicate enough time to get this done. Backlinking takes time to build and time to get results, so make sure that you are making time to get this done.
If you have no idea what we are referring to right now, you may want to look at our SEO Back Link Building service for some more information.
3) Online Reviews
This subject is usually called your online reputation. Google prefers their own reviews most, but they consider reviews from most of the major platforms that people use to review businesses. If you have less than four stars, you are probably in trouble for local search ranking.
Getting reviews requires that your customer take time to offer a review, or you ask. Customers that go out of their way to leave a review are usually either beyond happy or extremely angry with you.
How you ask is up to you, there are platforms and systems built to make this easier, but you still have to take time to regularly ask for reviews. We offer online reputation management and also listing management (will talk about next), that allows you to monitor and respond to multiple review locations from one location.
You can also create an email template that directs them to Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc to ask them to leave a review.
Either way, we recommend making the time and putting in the effort as much as you can, to make sure that you are building as many good reviews, knowing what your reviews are, responding to reviews.
4) Citations
While this topic has been around for awhile, it has become more prevalent as of late. These are the directories and social media locations that house your business information. Like online reviews, there are platforms that allow you to get this done more efficiently and we highly recommend you use one of them or the one that we offer. If you are interested in getting this done for you, please look at our Local SEO Services page or the Listing Management service that we offer.
If you are a local business, then this is a must.
Why use a platform? Efficiency, there are many many…. many places to build these and it is a large time suck to get it done. But, if you are wanting to, you can just search directories and social media platforms and start building accounts and updating each one for every time you change your business hours or want to add an image.
Finally the End
So the above items are the primary things that you will want to plan and work on to get the good organic and local search results for your local company.