The Need for Search Engine Optimization
All websites, to some degree, need to implement SEO (search engine optimization) techniques in order to be found by searchers using Google, Bing, and other online search engines. There are at least a half dozen tried-and-true strategies, one of the most popular and proven being keywords.
Consider Google and Bing to have the largest indexes imaginable; each has crawled every website it can find and recorded the words being used in them and put them into a giant index. Therefore, if a particular keyword doesn’t appear on your website, perhaps multiple times, then the odds of somebody finding your website when using that keyword are very poor.
Keywords in a Website for Local SEO
Keywords is a misnomer because we’re not talking about single words. They’re really keyword phrases – groups of two or more words that form a phrase or even a short sentence. So I’ll use the term “keyphrase” from this point forward unless I’m just talking about a single keyword.
The most significant thing to realize is that keyphrases should match (as exactly as possible) all or part of the seeker’s search term. So, if you want your pizzeria to be found if someone searches on “best Hawaiian pizza in Halifax” then those words need to exist, perhaps multiple times, on your website, and preferably in the same order.
But what are the best keyphrases to use on your website? For a local business most of them are obvious. They’re the products and/or services you offer and the location of your business.
A multinational business (e.g. Ford or Microsoft) needs an entirely different SEO strategy than a hairdresser or plumber. Big, multinational companies need to stand out across the globe, while the latter are significantly more localized. Nobody wants to know if someone that’s 1,000 kilometres away can cut and style their hair!
More Than One Keyphrase on Each Page?
As a general rule, any web page can only be optimized for a single keyphrase. To put this another way, the keyphrase for the page needs to be determined and then copy is written to hold and support it, repeatedly using it as much as possible within normal reason. (“Keyword stuffing” – just putting repeated keyphrases on a page – hasn’t been effective on websites for decades.) Optimally, we need at least 200 other words on those pages. Most importantly, those words need to make sense and be interesting to the reader and match the intent of their search. If the reader “bounces,” (immediately leaves the found page) the search engine notes this and may not send searchers again to that page in the future based on the same search term.
To summarize the above paragraph:
- People need to first be able to easily find the target web page based on their search term.
- Once there, we need to give them what they were looking for.
For a “local business,” your first and best SEO efforts need to be two things:
- The words used for the products and services you provide.
- The geographical locations where the customers of those products and services come from.
A Local SEO Example
I spent most of my life in the Edmonton area and I’ve been known to occasionally get my hair cut. So to give you some context to a local SEO strategy, let’s use the example of a hairdressing salon in the City of Spruce Grove, just a ten-minute drive west of Edmonton.
The salon offers a number of different services and potential customers might come from not only Spruce Grove, but a few other neighbouring communities. For this example, we want to target five services (men’s haircut, women’s haircut, children’s haircut, women’s hairstyling, hair colouring) and the home and three added nearby communities (Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, Parkland County, West Edmonton).
In order to accomplish our plan, we will need to create 20 unique web pages. Known as landing pages, these pages aren’t available for viewing via your website’s menu and internal links system; they’re somewhat hidden. However, I will have submitted a document to Google and Bing, making those search engines aware of those pages with an aim to have them indexed.
So, with our plan complete, we’ll have a page to optimize the keyphrase “best men’s haircut in Spruce Grove,” and we’ll have another one for the keyphrase “best women’s haircut in West Edmonton,” and so on. Get the idea?
To sit down and write these 20 pages would be an onerous task. But I have two tools at my disposal:
- An AI (artificial intelligence) writer that will take an article and rework/reword it numerous different ways (because search engines don’t like seeing repetitive paragraphs in the same website) and
- A tool that will, like a mailmerge function in a word processor, insert the target keyphrase, and words from it, a few times within each version of the page.
In the end, there will be 20 unique pages on your website, all known only to us and the search engines, each with our target keyphrase, in just enough repetition to not make it look as if we’re keyword stuffing.
Is the Point to Get Thousands of Hits?
Keep in mind that we’re not aiming at getting hundreds of “hits” from each of these pages. If the search term “best women’s hairstyling in Stony Plain” was used only twice each month on Google, but you were at (or near) the top of the listings when it was used, wouldn’t the results eventually be worth the effort?
Steps to Implementing Local SEO
Despite this process being very efficient and fast compared to doing it manually, there is some required consultation and time to set up and configure the software. There is also the investment cost of the software that I need to slowly recoup when it’s used. However, in the end, undertaking the project of adding dozens—or even hundreds—of these keyphrase-targeted web pages will be significantly cheaper for you than making them all from scratch.
Please let me know if you’re interested in trying this out this strategy.
