Nashville SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimization gets your website to show up higher in search rankings. Using tricks and best practices, you can get your website to be found by more of your prospective customers.
Impacting Business
Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are all trying to do one thing: return the right results for their searchers. When they provide the website that offers what their users are looking for, the user has a great experience, the website owner gets a visit and the search engine will likely gain a return visitor who may, at some point, click on an ad from that search engine.
Your goal is to show up in the top 1 or 2 positions on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). If you can do that, then it's likely you're going to get a click from a searcher. In the past, it was okay to just show up on the front page, but now, you need to show up at the top or get lost in the shuffle.
Search results are free, compared to the paid ads, which of course are paid. This means that as you maintain your position, your website is likely to get clicked multiple times and it doesn't cost you anything. Conversely, when you are paying for ads, when a user clicks that ad, it costs you, the advertiser, money.
Organic Results vs. Paid Results
There are lots of reasons you want to focus on the organic search results. First, they're free, as we've already discussed. Second, the organic results (those in the middle of the page) get clicked about 80-85% more than the paid ads. Why? Presumably, it's because the organic results are not "selling" anything. It's simply an objective list of websites based on the algorithm that Google or Yahoo or Bing has come up with in order to find the right page. Let's talk about trust.
Trust on the Internet
When you get a recommendation from a friend or neighbor about a product or service, you know there's a level of accountability that comes with that recommendation. If the movie your friend told you was great turns out to be horrible, you can go back to that friend and ask them what in the world they were thinking. When you ask a search engine to recommend the right website for your specific search, there's ZERO accountability. You are at the sole discretion of the website to give you good suggestions and if it turns out to be terrible, you have no way to complain that will make a difference.
Your website needs to indicate that it's a trustworthy site and you do this by placing the right keywords in the right places.
Another way to create trust is by providing great information. If your information tells your visitors that you know what you're talking about, you're going to gain their trust and their willingness to contact you in some way.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO simply means that you're going to change a few keywords around to target specific searchers. Let's say you have a photographer who lives in Cookeville, TN and that photographer wants to show up for a list of keywords. He knows the most lucrative keyword combination in his industry is Wedding Photography, so he's going to target that keyword and include his local city so he's not competing against a nation-wide audience. He creates a page on his website called www.mydomain.com/wedding-photography/ and inside that page, he has the words Cookeville and Wedding somewhere describing the images of wedding pictures he's placed there.
Fortunately, he knows where to place the keywords. Let's look at a few of those places.
Keywords in the Title Tag
The title tag is typically what shows up as the clickable text at the top of every search result. Your keyword needs to be at the very beginning of the title tag, so it might look like this:
Keywords in the Page Name
Page names are important, too, because they're often surrounded by the h1 tag, or Heading 1 tag. This is the largest heading and, therefore, the most prominent on the page. A search engine will look at that tag to get an idea of what the page is about.
If your h1 tag says, "Nashville Real Estate" then a search engine is going to assume that page is about Nashville Real Estate because it's encompassing the entire topic of that page. An h1 tag being placed on a site looks like this:
Keywords in the Footer
It's easy to forget the footer, but it's a very important spot to place keywords because it often serves as a sitemap of the website. The text is also usually linked, and linked text plays a big role in how search engines see a page.
Let's say a website is focusing on custom homes and they want to help Google know that they have pages about custom homes. The footer will need to contain that keyword and be clickable so that a user can click that link and visit a page about custom homes. This tells Google that the page that link sends people to contains pertinent information about the linked text.
Getting Started
Now that you have an idea of what Nashville SEO is and how it works, get started with a strategy of your own. Contact us today for monthly plans as low as $99.
