SEO Santa Barbara
Most business owners know that marketing is an important part of business these days. Marketing is important to reach new prospective clients as well as ensuring your brand maintains the good reputation that took years to build.
Marketing can consist of many different items, such as brochures, commercials and many different digital marketing options. If you own a business in Santa Barbara you might have been told you should invest in SEO (search engine optimization) to enhance your online marketing strategy. But the question is do you know what SEO means for your business?
What Does SEO Mean For Today's Business?
SEO is just one part of internet marketing with a single goal to increase your website traffic without paying for clicks. The benefit of improving the SEO of your website is when potential consumers search for something online, they generally think that the sites that show up first are the best, and usually don’t look past page one.
If SEO is not something that you’ve been thinking about, you may have not paid attention to the websites that appear first when you search Google. Just so you know the websites that show up first are not random, it is because those websites have effective SEO strategies.
SEO Strategies
There are 2 major parts of successful SEO strategies that include creating relevant content and technical link building. These are the most important elements to improve your ranking that will bring more traffic to your website turning into leads and then successful sales.
In short, Better SEO strategies equals more revenue for your Santa Barbara business. Making your website user-friendly as well as search-engine friendly are the 2 main goals of an SEO strategy.
In terms of making your site more search engine friendly there are specific techniques that SEO companies in Santa Barbara use to bring more traffic to your website to increase the authority of your local business.
Search engines are always changing and adjusting how they crawl websites to make sure they are providing the most relevant content to the people doing the searching.
The goal of every search engine is to provide the most relevant content so they use search engine algorithms to rank the relevance of the pages of your website and determine the position of every site.
If your website shows up on the first page of Google for a certain search term, the chances of increased traffic over other sites that rank lower than your is very high.
Converting website traffic into business for your company depends on how user-friendly your website is. Ease of use, access to information, aesthetic design, and readability are all important aspects.
Santa Barbara SEO firms will know the best SEO strategies and how to seamlessly intertwine the technical backlinks and relevant content to ensure that both search engines and users are attracted to your website.
SEO for Small Business
You might still be confused about the creative and technical aspects of SEO. To make it as simple to understand as possible, the main goal of SEO is to get a website to rank higher for specific keywords that people type into a search engine.
For example, a local business in Santa Barbara wants to rank at the top of search engines when people from Santa Barbara type in phrases specific to the product or service they provide.
If someone in Santa Barbara has dirty carpets they might search “carpet cleaning santa barbara” If someone in Santa Barbara hurts their back they might search “chiropractic santa barbara”
To figure out what phrases to focus on you need to do keyword research. When it comes to SEO this is one of the most important and high return activities. It’s important that a website ranks for the best and most relevant keywords. Some keywords are much more competitive than others, because many other businesses want to rank for the same term. There are also other keyword phrases that are less competitive and people search more for.
There are many tools that the best SEO experts use, like semrush Keyword Explorer, to determine the competitiveness of certain keywords and also to find additional keywords they might not have thought of.
Sometimes when the keyword phrase is more competitive it does not mean it will be more valuable to your website. You need to decide what keywords are most relevant to bring you the best leads. People that search need to find what they are looking for on your website, so you will convert a higher amount of traffic into business.
SEO Link Building
One of the important technical aspects of SEO, and a cornerstone of successful SEO campaigns used by the best SEO companies, is link-building. Many people have heard that links help rankings, but they do not understand what that really means.
Links are basically a path to other websites.
Search engines are built to determine the importance or popularity of a website by how many quality links are being sent to a website. If your website has high authority backlinks directed to it, Google and other search engines will begin to trust your site more, understanding the relevance and move it up the ranks. Link building is considered to be an art, and it is also the most complex and expensive part of running a successful SEO campaign.
Before a link building strategy is implemented, it is important to do the proper research to determine if a particular backlink would actually help your website. One way to determine the importance and relevance of a link is to see what phrases the page links for; if the keywords are the same it would help significantly.
The best SEO companies will review your top competitors’ backlink profile to find what links are helping your competitors achieve their ranking and set up those same links for your website.
There are many different types of backlinks that can be directed to your website and the best SEO strategy is to build a varied link profile. There are editorial links, provided by sites that want to link to your content; to obtain these backlinks you need quality content (This is one of the creative aspects of SEO that will be discussed before). There are also outreach links; these are created by submitting sites to directories, paying for listings or contacting different blogging websites for backlinks.
An example of generating backlinks is by submitting an article to a website like Forbes and working with the editors to ensure your content is worthy of being published. If you are a chiropractor you can provide content about the benefits of Chiropractic care. Or if you have a cleaning services business you can write an article about why professional carpet cleaning is good for your health and submit it to Homes and Gardens.
Some important creative aspects of SEO come directly from your website. Some of the websites that rank the best are the sites that are easy to use, provide relevant information, are professionally designed and aesthetically pleasing, and provide credible content.
It is important to write grammatically correct, useful content with the same phrases used by the people who are searching for your product or service. Your website content must be original and formatted so it is easy to read with headings that offer some value to the reader.
It is also recommended to use images and examples because these items keep the reader on the page longer, which can improve your website ranking and lead to bringing more traffic to your website.
The content on your website must also be linkable: if other websites cannot link to your content, the search engine might not rank it. If you have great content but nobody links to your content then it might never get read.
With regard to the website itself, it is very important to have relevant title tags and correctly structured URLS to drive more traffic to your website.
Can You Track SEO Progress?
Many small business owners believe SEO as something that is not measurable or trackable. Every business owner wants to know what their return on investment (“ROI”) is. Since every business should be consistently investing in SEO, working with the best SEO companies will be able to provide you with the data to indicate everything is working.
Some business owners believe that waiting, which can sometimes take up to a year, is not worth the expense. However, SEO is measurable and you can see the work of the best SEO Santa Barbara internet marketing agencies. Your rankings, links, conversion rates and content creation is all tracked by SEO experts to show how your website has improved from one on a monthly basis. This investment is definitely worth it because the work is long lasting and when your website ranks well for keyword phrases that fit your business, you will definitely increase your revenue.
SEO can be very daunting for business owners who don’t have a good understanding of online marketing. Unlike a brochure, where the finished product is very tangible, SEO is an ongoing strategy that is hard to conceptualize. Despite the wait, it is definitely worth it and a quality SEO Santa Barbara company can walk you through the details.
Today, most people search Google if they want to know the best restaurant in Montecito, the best Chiropractor in Santa Barbara, or the best Moving Company in Santa Barbara. If you want people to find your business online and have a professionally built website, it isn’t really doing it’s job if it cannot be found.
The strategies used by SEO Santa Barbara companies can take your website and place it right in front of the people looking for you, leading to more traffic on your website and increased profit for your business. Even though the results are not as instant as having a brochure printed, over time you will no doubt see improvements to your business by implementing a successful SEO campaign that will likely include keyword planning, link building, site changes and content creation.
Launch Your Digital Marketing Strategy
The only thing left is to take action. Now that you understand more about SEO for your local business, it’s time to get started writing content. Understanding the difference between SEM vs. SEO would also be helpful. If you need help you can contact Local Internet Space and our internet marketing services team with any other questions you have regarding improving your website ranking. We’re excited to help improve your visibility, leads, and sales, so call us right away for a free consultation