I recently had a meeting with a prospective client that was breaking away from the company that she worked for and was going to make a go of it with a fellow co-worker. I would say that the industry they are in is competitive from a Search Engine Optimization perspective. It’s a service industry with lots of competitors throughout the city. She said they created a simple website and it is up and running. Her thought was that the work is done, “that was easy”.
The conversation went on and I explained how important it was to rank well in Google searches for the keywords that they believe to be important to her industry. I gave her an example of a client of ours who sell “Organic chicken feed” in Calgary. We actually got their website to rank #1 on page 1 within 4 months. (This is not always possible, competition for “Organic chicken feed” is low.) I went on to explain how Google ranking works and all that goes into it, including your keyword choices and how they are used on your website, social media, google business, backlinks, etc. After the conversation I decided to write a post about how we do it at Eau Claire Media.
We follow a very specific strategy at Eau Claire Media, the strategy has proven to work over and over again. Here it is in a nutshell:
1)Determine Keywords.
In a group or as an individual determine what you think are the words that people would type into a Google search to find your business. For example. “Home Stager Calgary” The list can be small or big but make sure you try to make it as complete as possible. There are tools that we use at this point to determine which words are actually being searched in your area and which ones are not. Some word combinations may never be searched. The tools we use are SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner.
2) Determine who your online competitors are.
Take the keyword list and do a search in google. (*Do this in an incognito window on your browser of choice. That way it will be a clean search without any search history being used to skew the results.). Remember to not include ads and do not include listing sites, just pick actual competitors. We will choose about 5.
3) Do a word count on their landing pages.
We use online tools to determine how many words are being used on their landing pages. Total number of words and total number of each keyword combination. We create a spreadsheet with theses numbers. If you have an existing website, we include your website in the chart to see the differences. If you do not have an existing website, we use the data to create a baseline for your new site.
4) Social Media.
Social media must be set up properly and it has to be used properly. If we were to rank importance of Social Media tasks it would go in this order from most important to least:
- Google Business set up properly and as many reviews as you can get. Continue getting reviews
- LinkedIn set up for the business with the goals being to grow you following as much as possible. Posting on LinkedIn weekly.
- Facebook & Instagram. Gain a following and post as often as you can.
- Everything else.
Of course there is more to it, backlinks, constant posting and competitive analysis, etc, but these are 4 simple tips but they need to be done well to ensure ranking well in Google.