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Investing in SEO Services to Bring More Visitors to Your Site in Los Angeles
Do you operate a website for your business located in Los Angeles? Are you looking to increase traffic to your website and acquire more customers? Do you find yourself in a competitive industry and are looking for tactics to best position your business? Do you operate a local business within Los Angeles and are looking to see how you can increase foot traffic into your place of business? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then SEO may be worth investing into for your business! Below you will find some helpful insights that explain what SEO is and how it can potentially help your business. Find helpful information that can assist your business needs as you begin to look into SEO services in Los Angeles.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the practice of making a website accessible for search engines and creating content that can begin to rank highly within search engines for keywords that are important to you, your industry, and your ideal customers. While the name ‘search engine optimization’ may seem like SEO work only operates solely within a search engine, such as Google or Bing, the work is oftentimes focused on a business or brand’s respective website. Search engine optimization is focused on determining how a business can rank for relevant keywords and will encompass strategies to help a business’ website to rank for these keywords. While there are hundreds of different factors that contribute to search engine rankings and there is no specific formula for gaming rankings, there are three main areas that are typically focused on with search engine optimization: content, technical structure, and external factors. Below you will find a breakdown on each area, how they typically operate, and how they should be factored into your search engine optimization work.
Content boils down to what you are talking about on your website. In order to rank for keywords, these keywords have to be effectively integrated into a website’s content. It is nearly impossible to rank for a keyword without your website including it on a page in one way, shape, or form. The first step when determining your SEO approach to content is to identify themes, topics, and most importantly, keywords that you want to focus on in your content. This process will typically require input from a wide range of business stakeholders to ensure that what you are talking about in your content is relevant to your business and can provide value to people that are searching for things related to you and your respective industry. After these topics and themes have been identified, research will need to be done to identify the keywords that you want to target with your content
Keyword research is one of the first areas that a SEO consultant can support a business with. After receiving a list of approved topics or themes, an SEO consultant can begin to leverage search engine optimization tools that can provide data around specific keywords. These tools often can list keywords, how often they are searched for (average search volume), what competitor websites are currently ranking, and how high your website is currently ranking. As the keyword research phase is finalized, a SEO professional should be able to produce a keyword research document that encompasses all of the keywords that your business should be targeting, along with guidelines on how to begin ranking for these keywords.
Content creation and optimization are the next steps for the SEO content process. After finalizing the keyword research, begin writing your respective piece of content that is focused on these keywords. The intent of this piece of content is to solve the user’s search query and to ensure that they do not need to visit anywhere else in order to solve their issue. When it comes to the actual creation of a piece of content, a SEO consultant can handle the writing of a page, but can also coordinate and collaborate with writers in instances where there is already a dedicated content resource. SEO consultants should provide a webpage with a recommended set of meta titles and descriptions that include the targeted keywords and are designed with the intention of improving clicks on your results within a search engine results page (SERP). After a piece of content has been created and is launched, continue to monitor performance for this page. It is recommended to monitor keyword rankings and sessions going into the page. Once you have several weeks of data, plan on updating a piece of content based on your learnings.
A second area of focus for search engine optimization is how a website is built and if its technical structure is accessible to search engines. Accessibility to search engines is often called ‘crawlability’. This essentially means that if you have a page or a website, a search engine crawler can visit and not encounter any issues with seeing the page or site’s content. In order to ensure a clean and efficient technical SEO structure for your website, a SEO consultant should closely work with your respective development team to ensure that your website is well optimized and does not provide any issues to search engine crawlers.
While crawlability is one area with technical SEO, there are several other technical areas that impact SEO. Page load speed is increasingly becoming a major area of focus for technical SEO, especially for mobile. Businesses should ensure that their website can load quickly and do not have any issues with loading content on specific browsers. A SEO consultant can also provide recommendations on other technical areas, such as SEO-specific elements such as canonical tags that help to indicate to search engines what page variation should appear in search results. Finally, another important area within technical SEO is your navigation and how you internally link to other pages on your website.
The third area of focus within SEO are external factors - essentially how is your business talked about amongst third parties. External factors, such as backlinks to your website and how your brand is talked about on third party websites contribute to your SEO performance. The importance here is that discussion of your business elsewhere can lead to people searching for you to learn more. When businesses focus on external factors for their SEO strategy, it typically involves a SEO consultant working with public relations and brand marketing teams to identify third parties that may be receptive to discussing your business. Assuming a third party is open to talking about your brand, they can create content on their own website that links back to your website in the form of a backlink.
It is worth caveating that this is an area within SEO that is somewhat delicate and if not implemented correctly, could lead to penalization from a search engine’s algorithm. While external factors, such as backlinks, can help to show your connection with third parties, websites can sometimes acquire backlinks that do more harm than good. In these instances, a website may have paid for a backlink that is not naturally or is receiving backlinks from potentially spammy or harmful websites. When working with a SEO consultant, it is imperative that you get them to commit to not gaining you any potentially harmful backlinks. Nonetheless, if external factors are set up well and are naturally gained, a website can see significant SEO improvement from these efforts
How SEO Can Help Your Business
Search engines often see billions of different searches performed throughout a respective day. Users search for things, such as a product or a service, because they have a need and are turning to the search engine to fulfill this need. These searches are indicative of the ‘demand’ and how your SEO strategy is set up can determine what your ‘supply’ is. A well-optimized website can ensure that your business consistently capitalizes on searcher demand, which can translate into an improved bottom line for your business. Users that find a high ranking website that helps solve their need may turn into a customer and could potentially continue visiting your website after initially discovering you via a search engine.
Since search engine optimization is not considered a ‘paid media’ tactic, this means you do not have to pay for your organic search traffic like you would have to with search engine marketing, also known as ‘paid search’. Your organic search rankings are developed naturally as a result of your SEO efforts and can be sustained without having to pay for your specific positioning. With this in mind, search engine optimization can often be seen as a cost-effective way to develop traffic and improve your bottom line. If your business does not have the budget to consistently invest in paid search advertising to gain search engine traffic, SEO can be your primary way of acquiring high-converting traffic. The cost of SEO is typically centered around how much you pay for your SEO consultant and the services that they provide. When looking to hire a search engine optimization consultant, be mindful of this and factor in your SEO budget against your larger marketing budget that may also include paid advertising.
Local SEO Services
If you run a business in Los Angeles and are highly dependent on foot traffic to grow and develop your business, consider investing into local SEO services. For example, if you operate a retail business within the Fashion District of Downtown Los Angeles, you may be aware of how hyper-competitive this area is when it comes to acquire foot traffic and in-person customers. The same goes for a sushi restaurant located in Little Tokyo that is looking to stand out amongst a plethora of restaurant options. The key to help developing more in-person business is to tap into the potential of local search engine optimization.
As the name may suggest, local SEO is a subset within the larger form of search engine optimization that specifically focuses on locally-relevant keywords and searches. For these locally-focused searches, a search engine will display a list of results that are specifically focused on a user’s given location and what nearby businesses are relevant to these searches. Users that perform local searches are typically interested in identifying the location of these businesses in relation to their current location, how far away they are, and if people in the area like this business. Businesses that are set up for local SEO success include up-to-date information, such as address, hours, and phone numbers. These businesses also integrate targeted local search keywords into their page or website content to help develop rankings for these keywords.
When working with a SEO consultant on local SEO efforts, ask if they have experience working with local SEO platforms, such as Google My Business, and how they approach local searches. In the previously provided examples, if you are a retail company located in the Fashion District, determine if you want to have reach throughout all of Los Angeles or if you are specifically trying to target nearby customers within a specific neighborhood. This can result in different targeted keywords, such as ‘clothing store in los angeles’ or ‘fashion district clothing store’. A SEO consultant can then work with you to optimize your webpage around these targeted keywords and can help to set up your Google My Business profile to capitalize on these searches.