Local SEO The Woodlands, Tx
One of the most mentioned myths in business is that Local SEO is bad for business, that SEO messes up your company website in The Woodlands with tricks and gimmicks that turn off visitors, create a poor user experience on your site and make a terrible brand impression.
To be honest, these things are true only if your SEO execution is poor.
“If you execute properly, Local SEO in The Woodlands, Tx not only generates sales leads, it has a ripple effect that improves many aspects of your business and detracts from none.”
Let’s see how this plays out.
- Using keywords in content forces you to use language familiar to customers and prospects — keywords are, after all, the most popular phrases people use when searching on Google for the items or services you sell. Using the language of customers improves clarity and credibility.
- Using keywords in meta descriptions, title tags and URLs has a similar effect, improving clarity and focusing user attention on what is most important for them.
- SEO forces you to create a customer-driven, logical breakdown of your products and services, since SEO requires specific, focused and sometimes hierarchical site pages for each important piece of your overall offering. Besides forcing intuitive site navigation — extremely important in itself — clear and granular product/service navigation menus and sub-menus enable customers and prospects to understand at a glance what your business is all about, and what it isn’t about.
- Since the goal of Local SEO The Woodlands is conversions, you need strong incentives on your site to persuade people to submit an inquiry form or phone you. This exercise forces you to think long and hard about why people buy from you — not only that, it forces you to test different incentives, which will enable you to find even more effective ways of generating leads.
- Link building allows you to create relationships with influential bloggers and website owners in related businesses because they are the people most likely to link to your content or want you to write an article for their sites. Thus, link building facilitates referrals, improves the stature of your brand, and exposes your company to thousands (if not millions) of new potential customers. What does all this add up to? More leads.
- For many Texas companies, Local SEO has been the catalyst for developing a mobile-friendly website. A rock-solid mobile site is definitely crucial for SEO, but it’s also important for so much more. Mobile Internet usage continues to surge; it’s possible that a large percentage, if not majority, of your website traffic, is mobile-based. A mobile-friendly site creates a strong brand impression and drives conversions no matter the source of your site traffic.
Google Is Good For Sales Prospects
The common thread in these examples is alignment between what Google wants for SEO and what you want for attracting business and strengthening your Texas brand.
Google wants its search engine users to find exactly the content they’re looking for, and to visit websites that are logically laid out and easy to use on any size screen or device. Local SEO is not about manipulating search engines; it’s about creating a website experience that attracts as many of the right people as possible and then does the best job of turning visitors into customers.
If Google likes what it sees on your website, prospects will, too. It’s as simple as that.
Making Good SEO Campaign Decisions
Strategic SEO Decisions
- Increase or reduce the overall budget
- Increase or reduce target keywords
- Change the emphasis of target keywords
- How to react to changes in the competitive landscape
- Modify campaign KPIs
- Whether to add a local campaign(s)
- Change the high-level focus of on-site work
- Change the high-level focus of off-site work
- Whether to adapt to possible changes in Google’s algorithm or wait
Tactical SEO Decisions
- Develop new themes and topics for off-site, content-driven link building
- Develop new approaches to pitching off-site content
- How to create new content to support new target keywords
- How to roll out new local campaigns
- How to enhance conversions on targeted site pages
- How to edit meta descriptions for target pages to improve click-throughs
- How to fix various on-site issues that hamper indexing and ranking
- How to edit on-site content to maximize rankings
- How to find new target websites for link building
- How to modify on-site content to improve local organic visibility
Appling Broad Expertise
Some of these issues are purely SEO technical ones, but most involve many other specialties, including conversion rate optimization (CRO), user experience (UX), content marketing, front-end development, back-end development, and web design.
This is why good Local SEO campaign decisions come when they are made collaboratively, and not in a vacuum. Cruz Online Marketing Local SEO The Woodlands has expertise in all areas that contribute to a successful SEO execution because weaknesses in even a single area can result in substandard execution and results.
Don’t Expect Perfection
With so many decisions to make and so many variables, your goal shouldn’t be perfection. Mistakes are going to happen. Successful campaigns:
- Make more right decisions than bad ones
- Recognize bad decisions quickly and fix them
- Learn from mistakes and make fewer of them as time goes on
- Know that experimentation and innovation improve campaign effectiveness even when they fail
Use Data to Make Decisions, But Don’t Let Data Control You
Making Local SEO decisions totally on gut feel is sure to go wrong. Without SEO tracking, appropriate data collection and astute data analysis, you’ll be making decisions blindfolded and with both arms tied behind your back.
Often, you’ll find the data confirms what your gut is telling you. But every once in a while, you’ll discover data that completely goes against your gut, or reveals a new idea your gut never told you about.
A good example of this is keyword selection. When we start a campaign, we ask our clients to target keyword choices. Usually, their suggestions are spot-on because they are so familiar with the language of their business. On occasion, keyword volume data reveals that the client’s recommendations are much less popular than similar keywords or completely different ones. This happens because of differences in regional terminology, or because the client is used to dealing with people who understand the product rather than search engine users who do not, or because of some other reason.
Nevertheless, a purely data-driven campaign puts too much emphasis in the other direction. The Local SEO industry evolves rapidly, with new technologies and changes in Google’s algorithm continually forcing Local SEO Agencies to change tactics and strategy. Since data focuses on the past, relying on it 100 percent to shape your future can lead to serious trouble.
Successful SEO campaigns balance historical data with a careful look into the future. This helps campaign leaders know when to make changes and when to wait, which may be the most important ingredient of all in a successful campaign.
Does Local SEO Ever End?
Unless your Woodlands, Tx company shuts its doors, sells or merges, or undergoes some other transition that renders the Texas company website(s) unimportant, some degree of Local SEO work will always be needed to maintain organic visibility on Google. The intensity of the campaign and the associated costs will vary over time, depending on your business goals and other factors. Let’s take a look at how this plays out.
Phases of SEO Campaigns
- Campaign setup and launch. The initial months of a Local SEO campaign will entail additional cost if the company website requires extensive setup work to support ongoing SEO activities. This is often the case when the website was originally built without Local SEO in mind. In addition, initial keyword research usually adds cost in the setup phase, since it is far more extensive than future keyword research will be.
- Early campaign phase. The first several months of a campaign will involve a significant amount of work to catch up and/or surpass competitors, especially in terms of getting the ball rolling with on-site and off-site content, and improving the link profile. Once you and the SEO agency get in a groove on content creation, and difficult issues with the link profile are resolved, this work becomes more efficient.
- Adjustments phase. After a campaign has been in place for many months, enough data has been collected to start making decisions: Should the campaign be expanded? Should we shift the keyword focus? Is our conversion strategy working? Depending on the answers, your SEO investment may remain relatively steady for a long period of time or increase if ROI justifies it.
- Business shifts. Internal and external business shifts can have a huge impact on the cost and scope of SEO. These shifts include the introduction of new products, elimination of old products, rebranding and/or moving the website to a new domain, targeting new geographic markets, and new or existing competitors ramping up SEO. Depending on what is happening, these changes can cause SEO campaigns to expand or contract.
Sales Leads and Online Revenue
In the long term, it’s Local SEO’s ability to generate sales leads and online revenue that keeps the campaign rolling. After a reasonable amount of time has elapsed (1-2 years on average), some Texas companies choose to move toward other marketing options because they’re not seeing a critical mass of leads or direct online revenue.
Sometimes this is appropriate, but take care not to jump to conclusions, especially if Local SEO is driving a lot of organic traffic to the website and conversions aren’t happening, it could be that improving the site’s conversion funnel will solve the problem. It’s also possible that a modest increase in SEO investment will produce a sizeable increase in traffic and conversions.
Would you like to discuss how to maximize the return on your Local SEO The Woodlands investment?
Please contact us we’re always happy to learn more about your objectives.
