Ranking for local search keywords in Google isn’t as easy as it once was. However, if your company isn’t ranking for keywords relevant to your business’ niche, you are missing innumerable conversion opportunities. Now is the time to start!
Here are four ways your business can start ranking higher for Arizona searches.
Exact Match Domain Names
Some search engine gurus will tell you that exact match domains don’t work and not to bother, but they can still prove useful for a lot of businesses. If you are just getting started in the digital space, it might be worth it to spend more time establishing your company’s digital branding.
However, if you already have a website or are looking to get started with some web experience already under your belt, securing an exact match domain for a localized keyword can create conversion opportunities you would have missed otherwise. You can just use this domain to rank and then funnel users back to your site.
If the site turns out to be a loss, there is always a market for aged domains on Saw.com.
Local Case Studies and Success Stories
A great way to integrate localized keywords and make conversions is to public case studies from local projects or clients. Case studies pull double duty, letting you target keywords that station your services within a geographic location while also fixing you as an authoritative voice within an industry.
Case studies work because they prove to prospective clients that you have encountered their problem before and solved it successfully. Better yet, you can show the client just how efficiently your services solved that other person’s problem, so future customers know exactly what they are getting.
And clients love that! They love knowing exactly where their hard-earned money is going. After all, doesn’t everyone?
It also reiterates that you are an experienced and trusted source within a given community. When a customer sees that someone has hired you, they’re more likely to take the plunge and hire you themselves. A co-sign—even from strangers—is really powerful in local search results.
Case studies are a great excuse for you as a business owner to improve processes in the future. Even failures that you identify in the case study can be noted and reframed as improvements to be made in the future.
(Of course, I would not recommend lying about results or omitting relevant information in case studies. That said, you are under no obligation to put ALL of your shortcomings on full display. It is recommended that you don’t!)
Update Google My Business Listings
When it comes to the most cost-effective tool for garnering consistent traffic, maintaining a good presence on the first page of relevant Google search results is king.
One way to make sure that you are in Google’s good graces is to keep your business’ listed hours of operation up to date. Google loves an active and responsive businessowner, so respond to reviews and customer complaints as often as you can.
Maintaining professionalism and class in your interactions with the public here is very crucial. It’s difficult to scrub a bad interaction with customers from Google’s memory. If an interaction goes sour beneath a customer review and the customer cries foul, remember that it is YOUR wallet that will be penalized.
Even worse, any response you make in the heat of the moment is solidified in internet history. All future searchers will have access to it, unless you opt to pay for some costly internet reputation cleaning service. It’s not worth it. Keep it classy in the first place, and you will be fine.
Secure High-Quality Backlinks
Teaching Google that you are a source to be trusted involves getting existing trusted sources on the internet to cosign your page’s content.
Securing high quality backlinks is important to really speed up the process of ranking highly on Google’s search results, but it’s not easy. It takes an investment of time, money, or sometimes both! Some business niches are so saturated that free quality backlink opportunities are far and few in between, if they exist at all, and paid backlinks are discouraged by google.
But it’s doable, even in competitive niches. An entrepreneur willing to put in the time can make it happen. Think about the resources that you turned to when you were first getting started with your business or in your niche: what websites did you turn to? What content was most valuable to you?
Then, find those sites (or sites like it) and see what they’re publishing these days. Then write an AWESOME article and send it their way. More often than not, you’ll be writing for free—but remember that you are being given the opportunity to secure your website’s rank in google for months or even years to come if the backlink is of high enough quality. So it’s worth it!
