Dominating Google Page One For Local Small Businesses

posted on Jul 27 by Tim Conley in the Internet Marketing category

WARNING: Do Not Share These Local Search Engine Optimization Strategies With Your Competitors

I do Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for my clients, but I don’t do it like normal SEO companies.  Their goal is to get you to rank well in the search engines, which I see as just the baseline for doing SEO.  The reason I do SEO for a client is to generate leads, build lists and make sales–ranking well in Google or Bing is just something that needs to be done to accomplish the latter.

Here is the basic recipe I use for each client.  Details vary, but this will get you great results.

You will need the following:
1. a blog
2. links to your site and blog
3. videos
4. Google’s Keyword Tool
5. free accounts with business listing directories
6. articles & guest blog posts

Goal: Bump Your Competitors From Page One
The amount of work you will need to do is directly related to how competitive your local market is and how much effort your competitors are putting into SEO.  If you have a law firm, you’re going to have much more competition than a mortuary–in fact, for Arizona you would have over 40 times the page competition.  Hey, if you are or know a mortician in Arizona, contact me.  I can get you complete dominance in the search engines.

The basic idea is to bump your competitors from page one of your most important keywords and keyword phrases (I’ll just use keyword to mean phrases, too).  Few people ever set their search engine preference to allow for more than 10 natural search results so that means your prospect’s screen real estate is limited to the 10 listings and the sponsored ads at the top and right side.

If you control those 10 result spaces, the people searching will obviously click on a listing that belongs to you–very few will ever click to see what’s on page two.

The way to get control of page one’s search real estate is to have many web pages with your keywords in them and then link them to each other.  Of course, I am simplifying the process.  You don’t want to link all your web pages (from your main website, blog, squidoo lens, business listings, article directories, etc) to each other because the search engines may think you are trying to spam them.  What I do is use the natural cross-linking of my clients’ blogs to benefit their main pages on their company website.

Once I have their main site ranking in the 1, 2 or 3 spot for their main keywords, I start building links to articles, videos, guest blog posts, squidoo lens, etc to get those ranking in the other spaces.  Typically, a client’s main site will rank #1 and then have another 4 or 5 of the search results taken by their articles and videos, which provide the visitor with contact info and/or an incentive to opt-in on the main site.

This may sound convoluted and in a way it is.  You will be building a web to support each page or article or video you want to rank for each of your main keywords.  Once you learn how to do this, it isn’t difficult to get results.  It just takes a lot of time.

Most small business owners don’t have the time to dominate their competitors on Google so they hire Local Marketing Mastery or an SEO person to do it for them.

Blogs Are a Small Business’ Best Friend

A blog is one of best tools for dominating your competitors on Google.  You can post great content that prospects like to read, plus you can build links to your main site to get it to rank for your keywords.  You can also get the blog posts to rank for your keywords and Google is happy about all of it.  Google will reward you with excellent ranking for creating excellent content and then using keyword-rich anchor text to link your web pages.

Social Media Sites Make Great Link Buddies

Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, and many more can have links to your content (main site, blog posts, videos, etc) which Google rewards your site with just a bit more authority for each quality link you get.  If a bunch of people Digg your blog post, you’ll get traffic from Digg, but you’ll also get more links back to your post.  Your post will start ranking higher and sometimes jump immediately to number one.  Use social media sites to link to your content and to encourage others to link to your site.

There are ways to pay for these links, but that isn’t allowed by Google and you won’t need to do a cheap trick like buying your links to beat the pants off your competitors.

Youtube Is Not A Boobtube

Videos are awesome.  People like watching them and have done so since the invention of movies.  You can use videos to get exposure for your business in actual video views and with click-through traffic.  They rank well in search engines if you put your keywords in the description.  For my clients, I put their phone number and website into the videos so a viewer can call or visit their site and I put the website URL in the description so it’s an easy click to their main site.  I like to use Jing and Powerpoint to make simple How To videos, which can get a lot of attention from your market.

Start using these tactics and you’ll soon have your competitors driven off page one of Google.

If you have questions, feel free to post them in the comments section.

Tim Conley, your friendly neighborhood Local Internet Marketing Strategist

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  • Tim,

    Your doing a great job here, but you are giving away too many great trade secrets. :)

    It's a shame most small businesses won't do it. I have been servicing small business in the local arena for some time now and I find they want it all done for them.

    Here's a little gem for your readers:

    This is a great way to knock off some of your competition once you have already established a strong rankings with your own site and G-Maps in the 7-Box. It's a secondary strategy.

    Find the local authority directories that are showing up on Google's first page for your GEO keyword phrase (that have search volume of course) and get your listing within that directory.

    You know Google already likes it because its listing it on the first page. Now what you want Google to do is list your specific listing within that directory on the first page of Google instead of the listing it displays now. So what you do is build some links to your specific listing within that directory.

    Links aren't just for your sites (and secondary sites) you can use them for all those vertical directories. Social bookmark, write a few articles, blog posts, etc and point some link love back to that listing.

    Within a week or two your listing should be displaying instead of the generic one on the first page and now you have created another breadcrumb that leads back to your small business.

    Hope you like the tip and I hope it made sense because its late - almost 2am, and really should turn it in. :)

    Anyways, great job Tim on your blog & site here.
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