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Should I Use AdWords if I’m Doing SEO?

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How-Does-Adwords-Affect-SEO-Rankings

One of our favorite pastimes seems to be complaining about ads: how many there are, how annoying we find them, etc. Even so, companies continue to employ ads as a strategy to get people to buy their products for a reason: They are effective. After watching just one showing of a Super Bowl commercial, consumers are 6.6% more likely to buy the product. With those statistics, you too will probably purchase ads to promote your business at some point.

When it comes to ads, you have many options, from fancy television productions to radio, bulletin boards and billboards. Feel free to use any or all of these, but don’t forget the power of promoting your company online. Doing so is particularly necessary in a bustling metropolitan market such as Los Angeles. One of the best ways is through Google AdWords. AdWords is a program that businesses like yours can use to make and control their own advertisements. Once you create an ad, it is displayed in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS), on partner sites that have AdSense or the Google display network. You can either pay per click or per thousand impressions on your ad.

AdWords is a very effective tool that you can keep in your business promotion arsenal, but don’t limit yourself to using it to the exclusion of other strategies. If you already have an organic SEO campaign going, by all means don’t shut it down. This method of driving traffic to your site via content that you write and links to your site that you place on compatible web pages can work hand in hand with AdWords to enhance the quantity and quality of customers who eventually click through to your page. Succeeding in business is a challenge for anyone, particularly if you’re operating in the busy Southern California area with loads of competition. Therefore, use traditional advertisement, word of mouth, organic SEO and AdWords to stack the deck in your favor.

Local SEO Tips to Better Your Business

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Local SEO Tips to Better Your Business

Running a successful business is challenging no matter where you are located. However, making it thrive in the teeming Los Angeles market can seem even more daunting. Let local SEO strategies go to work for you. Once you do, you can stay one step ahead of your competition by jumping higher in the all-important Google search rankings. Here are some tips that can help you make that happen.

Look at Link Building in a New Way

In the past, you might have spent countless hours engaged in link building. The goal: to disseminate your links to as many sites as possible. You may have gone about this by leaving comments on other sites ad nauseum, or by requesting links from other sites and building your own network of links on your own site, but now things have changed. Google is looking for links that point to sites with quality content. You are far better off devoting your energy to composing worthwhile text and articles than you would be in attempting to make hundreds of superficial contacts with website administrators who have little or no interest in what you are doing.

Don’t be Afraid to Name Drop

Given that quality content is king and it’s what will elevate you in the Google rankings, it is probably no surprise that the more you can mention specific brand names in your citations, the more credible your site will appear – both to customers and to the Google algorithm that takes care of ordering the search rankings. In order to keep visitors’ loyalty, Google is committed to giving them search results that are truly meaningful and usable. The more you specifically cite the brands you carry, the more credible and search-worthy your website becomes.

Harness Social Media

L.A. is a booming metropolis with more businesses than you can shake a stick at, but don’t give up. Instead, use the power of social media (Facebook, Twitter , etc…) to draw visitors to your site. Post articles, event invitations and photos that link to your page, and do all you can to get people you know to like and become fans of your social media venues. By so doing, you create numerous links that can bring new customers to you, with very little effort on your part.

Keep’em Coming Back

Let’s say you have a website that is designed to help you sell your products to the metropolitan L.A. area. Unfortunately, you have received feedback indicating that it is not as intuitive or as user-friendly as it could be. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that you don’t have as many return visitors as you would like. Since this is one of the factors used by the Google algorithm to move you up or down in the rankings, it is definitely in your best interest to spruce up your site and make it into a more welcoming and attractive place to be. Once you implement dynamic content you will have a much better chance of getting those all important loyal customers. Do that by sprucing up your title tags and meta descriptions. Draw guests in by making them curious and promising them benefits they can’t refuse. The longer they stay, the more likely it is that they will buy your products and come back again, and the happier Google will be with the quality of your site.

Don’t Forget About Mobile Media

No question about it, your site needs to be mobile-friendly. If it’s not, Google will no longer rank you as high. As the desktop computer becomes a thing of the past and people gravitate toward using mobile devices for most or all of their online transactions, you cannot afford to pass this up. You can even go online to any one of several sites to test how mobile-friendly yours is.

Use Local SEO to Your Advantage

Thanks to the algorithm update called Pigeon that was released in 2014, Google is using the power of Google Maps and web search to give customers targeted search results in their local area. Given this new advantage, it becomes even more important that you have accurately and prominently displayed all of the relevant information about your business, including name, address, phone number and link to your website. Once you combine that with your savvy social media campaign, paid ads, customer testimonials, articles on other sites and anything else you can think of to get the word out, you can make your brand highly visible.

Distinguishing yourself from the rest of your competition is a crucial priority that every successful business must address. As SEO trends evolve over time, it remains necessary to keep your ear to the ground and your thinking flexible. If you do, you have an excellent chance of rising in the SEO rankings and making a place for your L.A. based business.

Free DIY SEO Tips For Every Business

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Free-DIY-SEO-Tips-For-Every-Business

You could have the most amazing, mind-blowing product in the world; in fact, you may even have found the cure for cancer, but it will never benefit you or anyone else unless you know how to get the word out to the world. You may have heard of search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO, and thought that the idea of using these techniques to improve your business’s rankings with Google and other platforms sounded like a great idea. At least it was great until you started to look at the costs. Sure, if the sky was the limit for your budget and you had access to top tier marketing gurus, SEO might help you. But what if you’re on a shoestring budget? Don’t fret; there are still many low-cost or free DIY SEO solutions that can benefit your company.

Use SEO Software to Analyze Your Current Situation

You don’t need to enlist the services of a million-dollar firm to find out where your site appears on the search engines or how to potentially move it in a positive direction. Start by installing a free program such as Traffic Travis. Create a “project” for your website and carefully examine all of the page warnings that show up or use our free DIY SEO services. These will indicate deficiencies on your page, including too many H1 tags or the absence of image ALT tags. If you heed these warnings and do everything you can to correct the problems, your site’s ranking might increase without putting a major dent in your wallet.

Keyword Research Tools and More!

Okay, maybe it has been a few years since you were in school, but don’t let that stop you from getting your brain into gear. As a matter of fact, the basic principles of SEO are not all that complicated, and information about it is widely available at little or no cost. Once you have done some research, you should have little difficulty attending to important tasks such as optimizing your page’s title tags and heading tags with your targeted keywords. Generate these for free using Google’s Adwords Keyword Planner Tool. Furthermore, you can further optimize your page by adding several external links, a task that you can pay big bucks to someone else to accomplish or do yourself for nothing besides some time and brain stimulation.

Do a Competitive Analysis

SEO isn’t just about improving your rankings by including external links on your pages. The other half of the picture involves accumulating links from reputable outside sites that point back to yours. As with our past example, you can line someone else’s pockets to create back links for you or you can do it yourself; it’s not rocket science. One of the best and cheapest ways to do this is to check out what sites are linking to your rivals’ pages. A great free tool to accomplish this is Open Site Explorer. Although the free version won’t reveal as much as the paid one will, you can still enter your competitors’ URLs into the search bar and learn a great deal.

Build Links That Make You Visible

Sure, links that praise your success will only be generated when you have achieved it, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait for that pinnacle to be attained. You can take steps today to begin populating the Internet with links that refer to you and your site. One way to do this is to contact other websites and offer to write guest posts for free – in exchange for a link referring readers back to your site. Another strategy is to utilize content marketing by writing articles to be shared on social media sites and on your own company’s blog. Load these pieces with site-relevant keywords and refer readers back to your link, and you can make SEO work for you without spending a dime. Finally, use the tried and true strategy of offering a free product such as a downloadable e-book or piece of software. When other sites in your industry catch wind of your compelling offer, they will link to your page as a service to their own users.

Don’t be Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish

There is no way to get around it: If you don’t have a lot of capital to invest in your SEO strategies but you are still determined to make them work for you, the only way is to spend a good deal of your own time learning techniques, making mistakes and honing your skills. In spite of the exhaustion and frustration this may bring about, you will be a self-empowered victor in the end. That being said, there may come a time when you simply don’t have the answers, nor can you figure out where to find them. That’s when you need to consult the experts – even if that means dipping into your wallet. Two examples that come to mind are handling a negative SEO attack or rebounding after a search engine penalty. Furthermore, you just might discover that the other priorities of running your business are taking so much of your time that you can’t devote more to SEO. When you are up against these scenarios, don’t despair that you need to put out some capital. Instead, view it as a return on investment that could net you a much bigger profit than you would have garnered had you continued to go it alone.

There you have it: proof that in spite of your micro-budget (or no budget at all), you can still use SEO to your advantage. It won’t happen overnight; it will involve time and a learning curve. Even so, you will be watching as your website rises in the rankings before you know it.