How Local SEO works at HeyTony
When it comes to local search engine optimization, there are a number of factors that come into play. These factors, or variables, help search engines determine the ranking for your website pages. Although Google keeps the recipe for these variables a secret, they do tell us what some of the variables are. With all of that said, we have our own secret recipe that Google loves. Here’s a look into our process.
Research & Competitive Analysis
The first thing we do is research. By analyzing your local market, we craft a Local SEO strategy unique to your business. We take a look at your competitors and identify any vulnerabilities in their Local SEO strategies.
Once we’ve identified these vulnerabilities, we dive deeper into keyword research. Using tools like Google Search Console, Google Business Profile, and SEM Rush, we identify which keywords you’re currently ranking for, which keywords have the largest search volume, and new keyword opportunities.
With this information in hand, we then move onto step two which is crafting your Local SEO roadmap.
Roadmap
Your roadmap is your Local SEO Bible. We map out 9 – 12 months of strategies and tactics that will help increase your local search rankings. We then break this roadmap down into weekly or monthly tasks.
Since no two businesses are alike, this roadmap is unique to your business. Depending on your situation, your roadmap may include: a website redesign, rewriting website content, adding new website content, building domain trust & authority, technical SEO, focusing on your Google Business Profile, and/or publishing quality blog content.
With this roadmap in hand, the next step is walking you through the roadmap and getting final strategy approval.
Client Review & Approval
With your Local SEO roadmap in hand, we go through every detail to make sure we’re both on the same page when it comes to the strategy and direction.
By giving you a look “under the hood”, you’ll understand exactly what goes into your Local SEO strategy, and why. We believe in full transparency when it comes to the work we’re doing for your business.
Once we’re aligned on the strategy, we get to work implementing your roadmap.
Local SEO Implementation
With roadmap alignment and approval, we being working on implementing month one of your roadmap.
With Local SEO, this involves creating & optimizing directory listings to ensure your business is listed in relevant directories such as: Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, Google, Yellow Pages, several GPS navigation systems, and many other local directories.
In tandem with creating local directory listings, we optimize your site by:
- Increasing page speed
- Optimizing images using next generation formats
- Adding ALT text to images
- Internal linking
- Optimizing your title and meta descriptions
- Adjusting heading tags
- Adding Schema Markup
- Writing additional content for existing pages
- Creating blog content
- Ensuring your website is mobile friendly
Reporting & Optimization
We believe in full transparency when it comes to working with our clients, which is why we give you full monthly breakdown of exactly what work was done.
Why monthly reports? We’d give you daily reports if possible, but due to search algorithms slowly adjusting their rankings, to prevent spammers and give users the best results possible, we have found that monthly reports are the best reporting cadence to show real results.
Included in your report is a breakdown of rank improvements, off page links, and new local seo opportunities for the next month.
With this report in hand, we can determine which optimizations will yield the greatest results in the coming months.
Local SEO is an ongoing process that requires fine tuning. Typically it takes between 9 – 12 months to see real results.
Our Local SEO Results
Willow Dental ranks #1 for 45+ keywords, and #3 for their top keyword in one of the most competitive markets…
2 Waves Beauty Bar ranks #1 for 40+ keywords and #1 for their top keyword.
FAQs
Learn more about Local SEO below!
Even in a smaller city like Hamilton, SEO is incredibly important when it comes to potential customers & clients finding YOUR business. Ranking #1 on Google will bring in an influx of customers, regardless of your industry.
As of December 2020, there were over 15,000 businesses in Hamilton! Now, obviously you’re not trying to outrank ALL of those businesses, but even if there are 15 – 20 businesses in the same category as you, the top 3 will likely be getting approx. 90% of the business that comes from organic search.
Some of you will say “Sure, that’s great, but I get most of my business from Instagram, Facebook, or from paid advertising, why should I care about SEO?
- What has worked in the past, won’t necessarily work in the future. Especially with algorithm changes, outages, and when audiences shift to a new platform.
- It’s extremely dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket. A healthy business will have a mix of marketing tactics.
- People are actively searching for your service or product on Google, they’re not doing that on social media. On social media, they’re “discovering” content, rather than seeking it out.
- You competitors who outrank you on Google could potentially be making lifetime customers, which directly takes away from your growth potential.
- Lastly, if you’re paying to play, you’ll always have to “pay to play.” the minute you stop paying for ads, you’ll stop getting new customers.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s a part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Both of these tactics involve increasing traffic to your website, however SEM includes paid advertising.
SEO
SEO is the process of optimizing your website and content so that you rank organically on search engines. One of the biggest differences between SEO & SEM is that SEO takes time. It can sometimes take up to 2 years to rank on page 1 for a brand new website. Now, that doesn’t mean it can’t take less time to rank. If you’re an established website with a good reputation, ranking changes can happen in as little as a month!
SEM
SEM is the process of getting traffic to your website via search engines. It includes both organic and paid rankings. The main difference with SEM is that you can rank #1 in the paid section of search engines immediately. So while we wait for your SEO to kick in, we can start driving traffic to your website! The downside of doing paid advertising is that you’ll always have to pay to generate business.
Think of on page SEO as anything that you can control when it comes to SEO. On Page SEO happens on your website. This includes any and all content appearing on your website. Examples of on page SEO includes website content, headlines, title tags, images, ALT text, meta descriptions, structured data, page speed, user experience, and more.
Off page SEO is anything that happens off of your website, and is typically out of your control. These are things like domain authority, trustworthiness, backlinks, and social metrics.
When it comes to off page SEO, the biggest factor is backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites back to yours. Backlinks have an impact on your domain authority, trustworthiness, and rankings. There are three main types of backlinks:
Natural Links: These are links given without the website owner doing anything. For example, a dog walker adding a link to a post on your website that points towards an article about healthy dog treats is a natural link.
Manually Built Links: These are links acquired through working with other websites or asking clients to link back to your website. For example, if you contribute a blog post to another website, they may allow a link back to your website.
One way to manually build links is to identify websites talking about your topic of expertise, contacting them, and letting them know you have an extensive post about a topic they’re referencing, but not linking to.
Self-created links: These are links that you create yourself. For example, if you sign up for a local directory which allows a link back to your website.
These types of links are great to build, however if you start a few websites with the intention of back linking to your main website, this is considered black hat seo, which is frowned upon by search engines – and may even get you banned. So be careful!
We have a ton of resources on our site! Here are some pages you might find helpful:
What our clients are saying
Hey Tony has been a fantastic resource and partner. Matt and the Team have helped us to grow our business and improve our online messaging. I recommend the HeyTony team for online marketing services without hesitation
Jeremy Shell
Meems Media
