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Back in December 2010, Google came right out and said that reviews will now play a part in their ranking algorithm.  This change was prompted after a recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for business.

Well not anymore.  Google has changed the game again, now factoring in reviews.  With that in mind, if you know  a business that has provided exceptional service or one you’d recommend to your friends and family, why not take a couple minutes to write an online review.

There are plenty of place to write reviews; one of the most well known is Yelp.  But writing online reviews can be time consuming and confusing for some users.  The video below shows not only how to write a Yelp review, but why it’s more important now than ever before for your business to start collecting reviews and reaping the benefits.

Google now detects bad businesses

Google: Judge, Jury and Online Shopping Executioner

Choosing the right web designer/developer and online marketing company can be rather difficult. There are so many companies out there today that are hungry to capture new clients. Here are 5 simple questions that will help you find an online marketing partner that cares about growing your business almost as much as you do. The “right answers” to these questions are the ones that will ultimately help you find the business that thinks more like a partner and not just someone out to take your money. The “wrong answers” will bring light to the difference in their outlook on your business.

1. What information will I need to provide for you?

The right answer:

“Well first, tell me more about your business; where to you spend most of your time and how do you connect or interact with your customers? What is it about your business that frustrates you and what do you think frustrates your clients? What is it that you love to do in your business and where do you think you provide the most value to you customers?”

The wrong answer:

“What do you want the website to look like?”

2. How will you develop my online marketing solution?

The right answer:

“We start by learning more about your business by talking with you about it. Then we take some time to think about your business and where it fits in your industry. Then well present our idea and give you a marketing blueprint; a plan for achieving your online goals.”

The wrong answer:

“We’ll show you 3 options and you pick the one you like best.”

3. How long will the process take?

The right answer:

“The first week or so will be spent in the planning phase. After you’ve approved the direction we’re headed, you’ll have something to see within another week or two. Then we really get to work with creating content, optimizing your site, promoting your site online etc. We’ll work each step together. ”

The wrong answer:

“Until we’re finished. I’ll call you in a few week and give you an update on our progres”

4. How will you help market the site online?

The right answer:

“We’ll do a competitive analysis to identify the strong players and then analyze their online strategy…then we’ll do it better. We’ll identify what keywords and phrases people type into the search engines when they’re looking for your business and begin to track which ones convert prospects into leads and customers. We’ll modify the code on your website so the search engines have everything they need to rank your site highly for the relevant keyword searches. We’ll claim your business listings in the major search engines and submit your business to 100′s of online business directories and internet yellow pages so your business can be found in many ways online.”

The wrong answer:

“We’ll submit your site to the search engines.”

5. What if I decide to work with another developer later?

The right answer:

“You own all of the work we do to your site. We’ll give you the source code, all of the content, any licenses or registration contact info we needed, and all of the external links we’ve build for promoting your site that we have. ”

The wrong answer:

“It’s your content but our technology (or our design). Print out the pages and hand it off to that developer.”

When it comes to internet marketing, the saying “Buyer Beware” is more true than ever. Local business online marketing companies are popping up all over the place; many with little experience marketing businesses online and no results to show of their skills. By finding the internet marketing company that thinks like a partner you may pay a little more. But the benefits are that they are working toward achieving your goals, not just delivering a product. Think of the value of their experience and expertise and remember to add those into the equation when you’re considering which company to go with and what they are offering.

You may have noticed recently that when you start typing a search into Google, results are instantly displayed below as well as suggestions. This is Google’s way of moving toward searching at the speed of thought.Faster Searches

Faster Searches

By predicting what users are going to search for and showing results before they finish typing, Google  can save between two to five seconds per search.

As a user types a search term on Google’s homepage,Google automatically starts displaying the search results for the query. There’s no need to press Enter. The list of predicted queries (which are displayed in a drop‐down menu below the search field) is generated using Google’s auto complete  algorithm.

Predictions

Predictions help users guide their search even when usersdon’t know exactly what they’re looking for.  The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so users can stop typing as soon as they see what they need or what they are looking for.

Instant Results

Depending on the users’ connection speed, results can appear almost as soon as a user enters a character into the search field.  Prior to Instant, users had to type a full search, hit return, and hope for the right results.

Based on Google’s estimates, if every Google user on earth  would use Google Instant, a total of 3.5 billion seconds a day will be saved. That’s 11 hours saved every second.

Internet Marketing And Search Engine Glossary

A nice list of Internet Marketing and Search Engine Term Glossary List. Basically it explains most of the marketing keywords in short and easy to understand description. Do you know what CPC,CPM,PPC,and ROI mean? You do? Good for you, you are a seasoned IM.
advertising network: A service where ads are bought centrally through one company, and displayed on multiple Web sites that contract with that company for a share of revenue generated by ads served on their site.

algorithm: The technology that a search engine uses to deliver results to a query. Search engines utilize several algorithms in tandem to deliver a page of search results or keyword-targeted search ads.

anchor text: The clickable text part of a hyperlink. The text usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about.

click through rate (CTR): The rate (expressed in a percentage) at which users click on an ad. This is calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of ad impressions. CTR is an important metric for Internet marketers to measure the performance of an ad campaign.

content network: A group of Web sites that agree to show ads on their site, served by an ad network, in exchange for a share of the revenue generated by those ads. For example: Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network.

contextual advertising: Advertising that is targeted to a Web page based on the page’s content, keywords, or category. Ads in most content networks are targeted contextually.

cost per action (CPA): A form of advertising where payment is dependent upon an action that a user performs as a result of the ad. The action could be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or asking for a follow-up call. An advertiser pays a set fee to the publisher based on the number of visitors who take action. Many affiliate programs use the CPA model.

cost per click (CPC): Also called Pay per Click (PPC). A performance-based advertising model where the advertiser pays a set fee for every click on an ad. The majority of text ads sold by search engines are billed under the CPC model.

cost per thousand (CPM): An ad model that charges advertisers every time an ad is displayed to a user, whether the user clicks on the ad or not. The fee is based on every 1,000 ad impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). Most display ads, such as banner ads, are sold by CPM.

geo-targeting: Delivery of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won’t be shown based on the searcher’s location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

Googlebot: Google uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in the Google.com search engine. Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Google bots begin with “Googlebot”; for example, Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for Google’s mobile index; Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for Google’s image index.

inbound link: An inbound link is an hyperlink to a particular Web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that Web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a Web page.
invisible web: A term that refers to the vast amount of information on the web that isn’t indexed by search engines. Coined in 1994 by Dr. Jill Ellsworth.

keyword: A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results. Many Web sites offer advertising targeted by keywords, so an ad will only show when a specific keyword is entered.

link bait: Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a Web page and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links from other sites. Or, as Matt Cutts of Google says, “something interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

link building: The process of getting quality Web sites to link to your Web site, in order to improve search engine rankings. Link building techniques can include buying links, reciprocal linking, or entering barter arrangements.

meta tags: Information placed in the HTML header of a Web page, providing information that is not visible to browsers, but can be used in varying degrees by search engines to index a page. Common meta tags used in search engine marketing are title, description, and keyword tags.
pay per click (PPC): See Cost per Click (CPC).

quality score: A score assigned by search engines that is calculated by measuring an ad’s clickthrough rate, analyzing the relevance of the landing page, and considering other factors used to determine the quality of a site and reward those of higher quality with top placement and lower bid requirements. Some factors that make up a quality score are historical keyword performance, the quality of an ad’s landing page, and other undisclosed attributes. All of the major search engines now use some form of quality score in their search ad algorithm.

return on investment (ROI): The amount of money an advertiser earns from their ads compared to the amount of money the advertiser spends on their ads.

search advertising: Also called Paid Search. An advertiser bids for the chance to have their ad display when a user searches for a given keyword. These are usually text ads, which are displayed above or to the right of the algorithmic (organic) search results. Most search ads are sold by the PPC model, where the advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad or text link.

search engine marketing (SEM): The process of building and marketing a site with the goal of improving its position in search engine results. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search.

search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

search engine results pages (SERPs): The page searchers see after they’ve entered their query into the search box. This page lists several Web pages related to the searcher’s query, sorted by relevance. Increasingly, search engines are returning blended search results, which include images, videos, and results from specialty databases on their SERPs.

social media: A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction.

spider: A search engine spider is a program that crawls the Web, visiting Web pages to collect information to add to or update a search engine’s index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.”

title tag: An HTML meta tag with text describing a specific Web page. The title tag should contain strategic keywords for the page, since many search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing pages. The title tag should also make sense to humans, since it is usually the text link to the page displayed in search engine results.

universal search: Also known as blended, or federated search results, universal search pulls data from multiple databases to display on the same page. Results can include images, videos, and results from specialty databases like maps and local information, product information, or news stories.

Web 2.0: A term that refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services. These usually include tools that let people collaborate and share information online, such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.

Why online visibility matters?

Consider the following facts: 9 out of 10 consumers use the Internet to find local products or services. Of these, 86% follow up with a phone call or in-store visit. And with more than 1 billion local searches every month, this translates into a huge opportunity to attract new customers through the Internet! That is why a growing number of small & medium businesses just like yours are investing in their online presence.

Ask yourself if customers find you online

If not, you’re missing out on reaching consumers at the most critical stage of the buying cycle – when they’re comparing products and services to choose a business. Don’t assume that having a website is enough to succeed online. With many of your competitors already promoting themselves online, you need to make sure your web presence is effective on all the major local search sites. The good news is that promoting yourself online and expanding your clientele can be easy and affordable. By investing in your online marketing, you can attract new customers while reducing your overall advertising budget!

Important tips for improving your online visibility

These are our top tips for improving your business’s online visibility. The list is based on research conducted by the industry’s leading experts. The tips are ranked by difficulty level. Some you can do on your own while others may require professional assistance.

Please remember that being visible on the Internet requires ongoing maintenance. Factors that influence your visibility change all the time. We recommend that you stay tuned with us so that you’re always up-to-date on our latest tips.

The tips:

Tip 1: Claim your Local Business

Tip 2: Update your full and accurate address on all local business directories, search engines and your website in the right categories

Tip 3: Put your business in the right categories

Tip 4: Include product / service keywords in your local business listing title

Tip 5: Add or verify your business listing with data providers for search engines

Tip 6: Get your customers to write online reviews about your business

Tip 7: Engage your customers online on user review sites such as Yelp

Tip 8: Use social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with current customers and attract new customers

Tip 9: Advertise online

Tip 10: Create a clean, coherent website with content that targets your keywords

Tip 1: Claim your Local Business Listing

Claim (i.e. verify) your business listings on the relevant online resources (e.g. search engines like Google and Yahoo, and directory sites like CitySearch and Yellowpages).

Why It’s Important

Claiming your listing will get you better rankings on search results, show customers the correct information about your business, and prevent your listing from getting hijacked (i.e. edited by someone who is not the business owner).

What It Requires

1. Visit the relevant search engines and directory sites.

2. Find the ‘Claim your business’ link.

3. Validate\correct your business details and claim it.

Difficulty: Medium

MediumDiff Consult an expert

Tip 2:  Update your full and accurate address on all local business directories, search engines and your website

As simple as this sounds, hundreds of businesses fail to take this crucial step – which can translate into lost dollars. Take the time to check that every relevant site lists your business’s correct address, phone, email, website, and any other contact details.

Why It’s Important

An updated address generates a sense of trust for customers and search engines, as well as helps more customers find you.

What It Requires

1. After claiming your listing you can update your address details. Check that your listings are consistent across all sites.

2. Please note – If your business is located in a suburb but your service area includes a nearby city, you may want to consult an expert as to your visibility for potential customers searching according to the nearby city. An expert may be able to help you become more visible beyond your immediate location.

Difficulty: Medium

Tip 3: Put your business in the right categories

Customers find you either by specifically searching for your business name or, more commonly, by a general search for a product or service you provide.

Why It’s Important

If your business is not listed under the proper categories, you may not be found by customers searching for your product or service.

What It Requires

1. Visit the search engines and directory sites and check which categories your business is listed under.

2. Do your category research – compare how your competitors categorize themselves and familiarize yourself with the categories offered by the search engines and directories.

3. After claiming your business (Tip #1) you may select your categories. Choose all the categories relevant to your business so that you’ve covered the range of potential searches.

Difficulty: High

Tip 4: Include product / service keywords in your local business listing title

This helps customers find your business more easily on search engines (especially if your business name does not spell out what you provide).

Why It’s Important

According to industry research, the highest-ranking businesses on search engines have some variation of their top keywords in their listing title (e.g. plumbing, gardening, towing, etc.).

What It Requires

1. Choose your business listing title carefully – incorporate a keyword as naturally as possible.

2. Be consistent – update your listing titles across all the relevant sites.

3. Consider consulting an expert – a professional can best assess a reasonable combination of keywords for your business listing title.

Difficulty: Medium

Tip 5: Add or verify your business listing with data providers for search engines

Search engines and local search sites use data providers (e.g. InfoUSA, Localeze, Axciom, etc.) as a source for their information.

Why It’s Important

Because local directories rely on data provider sites for their information, you want to make sure your details are correct at the source.

What It Requires

1.Visit the data provider sites.

2. Find the ‘Claim your Business’ link.

3. Validate/correct your business details.

Difficulty: Medium

Tip 6: Get your customers to write online reviews about your business

Ask your customers – on your website, in person, or through your literature – to submit online reviews about you.

Why It’s Important

Reviews about you helps increase your online visibility. It will also build credibility, good word-of-mouth, and draw in new customers.

What It Requires

1. Any time you have a satisfied customer, ask him/her to take a moment to review. you

2. Make it easy – provide your customer with the link(s) to post their review.

Difficulty: Low

Tip 7: Engage your customers online on user review sites such as Yelp

Create more “buzz” around your business. You will see what your customers have to say and how you can improve your business.

Why It’s Important

Online reviews of your business are an increasingly influential factor in your business’s online rankings, and therefore your visibility.

What It Requires

1. Read your online reviews. Learn what customers like and don’t like.

2. If the site allows you to respond, respond to your reviews. Engaging in a dialogue shows that you take your customer service seriously, and can impress new potential customers.

Difficulty: Low

Tip 8: Use social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with current customers and attract new customers

As social networks gain overwhelming volumes of traffic and attract more and more users, you have a ripe opportunity to connect with many potential customers.

Why It’s Important

Many businesses gain visibility through social sites. They are a popular forum for engaging in dialogue, organizing groups, and sharing recommendations (and warnings). Customers may be more inclined to interact with you if you are open to communicating through these sites. This will also allow you to form a community for your business – a way to communicate with existing customers, advertise sales or specials, and be visible to potential customers.

What It Requires

1. Unless you are a savvy social web user, you may want to consult an expert to familiarize yourself with the various features of these sites and avoid any practices that may turn off potential customers.

2. Once you’re comfortable navigating these sites, be sure to sign online to them regularly.

Difficulty: High

Tip 9: Advertise online

Today’s online advertising options allow you to buy traffic and measure your ROI (return on investment) per advertising campaign.

Why It’s Important

There is a limited amount you can do to drive organic traffic to your site (traffic that arrives naturally) in a relatively short time. If you want to boost your online visibility (especially if you want to see immediate results), you should consider advertising online in order to increase your exposure amongst your target market.

What It Requires

1. Research your options, such as PPC (pay-per-click campaigns) versus traditional paid advertising.

2. Consider consulting an expert regarding the key message, content, and design of your ad/banner/landing page.

3. Consider consulting an expert as to how to wisely buy traffic, gain positive ROI and measure which investments have been effective.

Difficulty: High

CONSULTATION RECOMMENDED!

Tip 10: Create a clean, coherent website with content that targets your keywords

A website is a critical factor in determining online presence. More and more small and medium-sized businesses have created websites, even if they are extraordinarily basic.

Why It’s Important

It’s the reality that most consumers today expect a business to have their own website. A website is a one-stop, convenient destination to answer all the customer’s questions – who you are, what you offer, your contact details, rates, updates, news and specials.

Note – your website can be as simple as a homepage with your logo and contact details. Even if you don’t operate a store-front business you should still have a website. It offers an accessible face to the Internet-savvy consumer, and you want to be visible to them.

What It Requires

1. If this is your first time creating a website, we highly recommend you consult an expert. The process involves technical, functional and marketing aspects which you will want to set up as successfully as possible.

2. A good start is a nice, static site – use a clean, unified design to show your business is professional and well-organized. Make sure it is user friendly and that the content incorporates all your business information, some customer reviews and a basic SEO (search engine optimization) readiness.

3. As your business grows, you can develop your site. Make it more interactive and invest in SEO to take full advantage of your online exposure potential .

4. Be sure to create a version of your we site that is optimized for mobile search engines as more and more people use their cell phones to find local products and services.

If you can’t find your company website in the search rankings, chances are your potential customers can’t either. This could be because your site is not properly optimized to allow the search engines to understand how to rank your site.

We see this problem a lot with small business websites. Unless you do a search for their company name, their site is non-existent in the rankings….which is next to useless when it comes to bringing in new business.

Even a website with all the bells and whistles won’t show up highly in the SERPs (search engine results pages) if not properly optimized.

Organic search engine rankings, which are free, are those that appear in the main body of the search engine results. These are the links that the search engines deem the most important and relevant to the search term entered. Organic rankings carry a “trust factor” compared to sponsored listings, or “pay-per-click”, where companies bid for the page 1 placements on the right of the page. It’s a fact that 70% of searchers will almost never click a pay-per-click ad when relevant organic listings are present. Most internet users today are savvy enough to know the listings on the right are paid advertisements.

What Kind Of Results Come From Search Engine Optimization?

Attaining a page one ranking for keyword searches related to a business is like hitting the jackpot. Once a page one ranking is achieved, traffic comes in to a company website for free, apart from any time related to or fees paid to a SEO service company.

One of our recent clients was ranking well for the local city that his business is in but his client base encompassed 6 other local cities. Checking the rankings showed that his site was not on any of the first 10 pages of the Google results when these other city names were used. With some light optimization on his site and just a couple months of search engine marketing, we were able to achieve an additional 600+ page one rankings and more than doubled the traffic to the site.

Just one sale for this client meant a healthy $500 in profit so his whole investment in an SEO program and maintenance fees were paid off almost immediately. Having your website come up at the top of the search engines for relevant keyword searches on the organic site is definitely worth the time and effort it takes to get there.

Reasons for Poor SEO Performance

When we analyze many of our clients websites, we find there are some common errors that cause low rakings in the search engines. Poor SEO performance is usually caused by a combination of factors like:

• Local business listings not claimed or optimized in search engines
• Flash animation making it harder for search engines to spider the site correctly
• Improper use of title tags, heading tags, meta data and keywords in the site and on pages.
• Targeting the wrong keywords/Site not optimized for the highest searched keywords.
• Few of poor quality back links or relevant links pointing at the clients site

Our Services

Go Pro Local does a complete analysis on your site based on the most relevant and highly searched terms for your business. We perform a complete competitive analysis of the top ranking sites and compare them to your site. By learning all about why the competition ranks highly, we are able to fine tune your online marketing blueprint to focus on what the search engines need to rank your site highly.

We have several SEO packages to fit any marketing budget:

Discovery Package: You provide your website URL and the keyword you want to rank for and we’ll deliver a detailed report giving you step by step instruction on what you will need to do both on-page and off-page to optimize your site. This detailed report will include instructions on:

• Current rankings for relevant keywords and keyphrases
• Keyword use in title, meta keywords and descriptions tag
• Keyword use in body, H1 headings, page name, domain name and URL extensions
• The number of back links your site has
• The number of visitors to the site
• The readability level of your web pages
• And many other detailed SEO factors like
• Summary score based on analysis of top 10 competitors

Go Pro Consultation Package: We start with an initial consultation to discuss your target markets and the results of the detailed website analysis from an SEO perspective. We’ll cover where you are ranking for the keywords and what it will take to get there based on the competition level.

Following this, we will work with your existing web designer to implement various optimization elements into your site for higher rankings, or our skilled SEO experts can perform these modifications directly.

We offer many levels of website search engine marketing (SEM) and promotion packages to suit your budget. All packages include monthly reports analyzing your website rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and several other major search engines for the keyword phrases we are optimizing for.

For more information and a free website analysis, simply enter your information into the form or call us now at 480-478-0543.

When it comes to choosing an SEO company to work with, there are some important questions you’ll want to be sure to ask to ensure the person you are considering is both competent and qualified.  Here are a list of questions you should ask:

1. Have you optimized other cleaning services? If so can you give us an example of feedback/response they have received?
Go Pro Local has completed many cleaning service sites as that is where we have the most experience.  That being said, we also work with many different businesses and consumers.  These have included hot tub wholesalers, photographers, solar electric companies and many more.

The specialized tools we utilize work for any business and are best suited for local search engine marketing for local business like yours.

There are some great testimonials from our clients on our testimonials page.  We took one client from no website to over 1200 page 1 rankings for highly searched geo-modified terms.  The results have been a dramatic increase in business and customer interaction.

2. Based upon your professional opinion when should we expect results?
SEO is an on-going process of promoting your business online.  With a consistent effort over time, we see the best results.  In the most challenging cases, we see measurable results in 6 months.  If we are aggressive, it’s normally much less, sometimes in as little as 2 months.

3. Will you/company be doing the work yourselves or will you be outsourcing the job?
We do not outsource core tasks.  All work is done by our employees and we do have some employees offshore.  All core tasks are performed in house.

4. What is the payment schedule?
We bill by credit card on the 1st of the month.

5. Who owns the rights to the SEO work?
You do.  Some companies retain the rights to all the work they do meaning if you quit using their services, you lose a lot of what you had paid for.

6. What is the monthly maintenance after the site is live?  What does it include, and why is it due at the same time as the initial investment.
Monthly maintenance involves many different SEO tasks that are independent of a website build.  Claiming local listings and directory submissions are just a few of the tasks that begin to happen right away.  Other maintenance and promotions tasks include link building, article marketing, video marketing, blog marketing, forum marketing and more.  We have several levels of maintenance programs available.  The maintenance packages are customized based on your business, online marketing blueprint and how aggressive you want to be.

7. Will you be providing any additional value added services with the setup? Example: blog, ezine, newsletters, PR, etc.
Often times, we’ll use all of the above methods.  We also create content and perform SEO copywriting services for clients that are used for off-site content on blogs and other outlets.  As an added service we can help with newsletters and email marketing as well.

8. Is there a limited number of keywords that will be used?
We usually select a group of 20 search terms to focus on.  These keywords are determined by performing in-depth keyword research and competitive analysis.  This way we are able to target buying keywords where there are the best opportunities to rank highly. While these initial keywords are our focus, we track hundreds of keywords and report to you regularly where you rank and where we’re seeing upward movement.

What is Google PageRank™ and how does it affect my site? How would you address improving our PageRank™ with Google, and other search engines that calculate the number of quality inbound links to our website?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

PageRank is basically Google’s measur of how much authority a site has. All of the search engines do some level of weighted link analysis which helps to sort the sites competing for a given set of searches.  If there are two sites that have the same content on them, the one with more back links should rank higher in the search engine rankings.

But, more links aren’t always better.  The page rank of the links plays a large role in how well a site will rank.  Basically, the more links a site has from other important links, the better.  If a site with 10 links has links from Harvard, Emory, NASA, The Pentagon, and other high page ranking sites, and another has 100 links that are nothing more than free directory links, the 10 back links beat the 100.  To improve PageRank, it’s important to focus on trusted inbound links that are looked at by the search engines as authority sites.

10. What changes do you make to our site to increase our rankings? Will we see these changes?  Will you change the coding on our site?
We normally optimize a number on-page factors; including the title and description which are not easily seen on your site but are important in rankings and how your site appears in the search engine results. We also normally optimize the content of your pages and other page elements like the  heading tags, which signals of important text for the search engines.  We don’t normally completely rewrite the content or change the structure of your website unless it is blocking the search engines from indexing your site.

12. What kind of reports will we get and how often.  Will you explain the reports so we have a clear understanding of the output?
We report both rankings and traffic.  We’ll send monthly reports by email interpreting the data we’ve collectd and are readily available to go through the data to explain anything that is not clear.

13. How many pages will you be optimizing in our website?
We will optimize all of the pages.  The search engines rank pages of sites, not just the main page so every page is important and needs to contain everything the search engines need to rank them highly.

14. Can you assure us that the optimization strategies and methods that you use are safe and won’t get our site penalized or banned?  We use strictly white hat techniques that meet the criteria of Best Practices for the SEO/SEM Industry?
We don’t do anything risky. Our techniques create natural looking links that boost rankings over time.  We post content in the form of articles, press releases and blog posts.

These questions should give you a good feel and clear picture of whether or not the SEO company you are considering is the company you want handling such an important task.  You might be surprised at the answers you’ll get from some of the fly-by-night SEO firms out there that use unscrupulous methods to inflate rankings that don’t stick or could get your site de-index (removed) from the search engines altogether.

As more and more people turn to online search before more traditional forms of finding small local businesses, many business don’t yet even have a web site.  The world is changing right in front of us at such an astounding pace; 85% of people now search online first when looking for local products and services.  And 61% of those people make a purchase or in-store visit within 24 hours.

Being able to be found online will become more and more important for retailers and businesses of all kinds in the coming months an years.  Companies will be expected to be found online and by mobile.  With the proliferation of smartphones, people use their phone to find local businesses and socially interact and always have their phone with them.

So how do you use local search for your business?

The first step is to be sure your business can be found.  Optimized submission to local directories, internet yellow pages, and 100′s of other directories can allow your business to be found more easily in the first page of the search engines.