If your like most small businesses, you are concerned with increasing website traffic in order to increase sales for your business. The idea of sending thousands of potential clients to your website seems like sound business decision. Start here by assessing where your current website SEO stands in comparison to your competitors with my free web grader service.
The honest truth of the matter is that most businesses in the Reno area do not have enough people in the area searching for the products and services your company offers to warrant a shot gun blast approach to internet marketing you will often see for sale with other local SEO company websites.
The most popular keywords searched in the Reno Nevada areas are:
- Hotels
- Casinos
- Restaurants
- Things to do in Reno
- Events
- Weather
- Weddings
- Homes for sale in Reno
These are the most searched terms for our area, but there are tens of thousands of searches done each month for services like Plumbers, HVACS, Handyman, Car Sales, Life Coach and many others.
These keywords can easily be ranked on the first page of Google, IF, SEO is done properly. Google has over 200 steps that need to be updated with your domain name, your website and web page code in order to be listed in Google via SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is the art and science of taking an existing website and cleaning up the code used to create the website to better match the requirements that Google and other search engines require to be listed within their search engine. This is only part of the success formula for website marketing.
SEM (search engine marketing) is the art of marketing your website in a way that search engines see your website as an authority in your field. SEM is an ongoing process where as SEO is usually done 3 times or so per year, to keep your website up to date with Google’s SEO Algorithm changes. Code that used to be seen as safe (white hat SEO) optimization practices can become Black Hat (illegal SEO) over night.
What are examples of Black Hat SEO?
- Buying back links to your website. Example: Buy 5000 backlinks by tomorrow for $20. This could sound like a great idea once you understand that links from other websites you’re your website helps to boost your rankings quickly in search, but, keep in mind, Google now actively searches for websites that implement this black hat SEO trick and bans them forever. This is not worth the risk.
- Buying website views to your website. Example: Send thousands or even millions of visitors to your website
this month for $45. Google loves to see traffic on your website. This tells Google your site is worthy of more traffic. The catch now is, that if you have lots of traffic to your website and no conversions, you guessed it, your website gets banned. If you flag Google bots that you are inflating your website traffic, you will reap those painful consequences. Keep an eye on your website stats every week. Make certain that your SEO company did not buy fake website views to trick you into thinking you’re getting lots of real clients on your website with their fake work. ***Link how to spot fake website traffic.***
- Does your website have thousands of back links or referral traffic from a spam site? Or from some cheesy directory in Asia or another country? This is a telltale sign of fake SEO work.
Website Helpers has a good article on Black Hat SEO tactics that can destroy your online reputation with the major search engines.
- Invisible text. Don’t put white text on a white background. In fact, don’t put even very light yellow on a white background. The engines aren’t stupid; just because the colors aren’t exactly the same doesn’t mean they can’t figure out there’s no contrast. Yes, there are clever ways to try to fool Google about what the background color actually is, but Google is probably aware of most of them anyway, and I won’t cover them besides.
- Cloaking. Google knows what’s on your site because periodically its automated robot called Googlebot visits all the pages in its index, and grabs all the page content so it can analyze it later. Cloaking means showing one page to Google bot and a completely different page to real human visitors. Google despises this aplenty.
- Keyword Stuffing. The engines want your pages to be natural. Finding every place to cram your keywords onto your pages — or worse, including a “paragraph” of nothing but keywords, especially if they’re repeated ad nauseum — is a big no-no. Do you consider pages with lists of keywords to be high quality? Neither does Google.
- Doorway pages. A doorway page is a page built specifically for the purpose of ranking well in the search engines and without any real content of its own, and which then links to the “real” destination page, or automatically redirects there. Doorway pages are a popular choice of some SEO firms, although Google has cracked down on this and many webmasters saw their pages disappear from the index. Some SEO firms call their doorway pages something else, in an effort to fool potential customers who know enough to know that they should avoid doorway pages. But a doorway page is still a doorway page even if you call it something else. Some engines may decide that an orphaned page is a doorway page, and if so then the page or the site might suffer a penalty.
- Spam. Spam has a special meaning with regards to SEO: worthless pages with no content, created specifically for the purpose of ranking well in the engines. You think they have what you’re looking for, but when you get there it’s just a bunch of ads or listings of other sites. The webmaster is either getting paid by the advertisers, or the page is a doorway page, with the webmaster hoping that you’ll click over to the page s/he really wants you to go to.
Read the full article here. https://websitehelpers.com/seo/blackhat.html
What are the current, known safe, white hat SEO tactics that will increase your website traffic in a way that boosts signs ups and sales on for your company?
Posting use full FAQ’s, How to Articles and web tools for your website views are a great way to build up traffic.
Being an active and helpful member of the top 3 social media sites your customers frequent.
Participating in local events that help the nonprofit community.
Generating news worthy events.
Having clean code built to the latest SEO standards.
Implement a conversion call to action on website pages. Example: sign up for our email here, buy this now…. download this free e book.
White hat SEO is all about being a good neighbor, useful services and information. Gaining press mentions and playing the SEO game fairly.
Search engine marketing includes multiple resources and tools that help rank your website in the organic search engine results as well as the sponsored ads at the top and bottom of the search engine results page. Integrating social media campaigns that accelerate social mentions, back links to your websites and actual clients coming in through your door.
With Googles latest update, it is extremely important to keep your visitors engaged with the content on your website. Google tracks how long these viewers are on your website clicking around. This tells Google that your website is interesting, helpful and a good resource to rank high in search.
Internet marketing is a collaborative effort of working with social media, content creation and optimization to meet SEO standards. Internet marketing is an ongoing effort just as traditional marketing requires updated information, contests, coupons, sales…promotions to keep your customers satisfied and with your business front and center.
Look at other successful internet marketing campaigns and learn what was done right, and where you can improve upon.
Lindsay Kolowich | @lkolow wrote a great article on examples of successful marketing campaign.
15 of the Best Email Marketing Campaign Examples You’ve Ever Seen
1) charity: water
When people talk about email marketing, lots of them forget to mention transactional emails. (Download this free offer for all sorts of email copy templates. email copy templates.) These are the automated emails you get in your inbox after taking a certain action on a website. This could be anything from filling out a form to purchasing a product to updating you on the progress of your order. Often, these are plain text emails that email marketers set and forget.
Well, charity: water took an alternate route. Once someone donates to a charity: water projects, their money takes a long journey. Most charities don’t tell you about that journey at all — charity: water uses automated emails to show donors how their money is making an impact over time. With the project timeline and accompanying table, you don’t even really need to read the email — you know immediately where you are in the whole process so you can move on to other things in your inbox.
2) BuzzFeed
3) Uber
Read the full article here.
Increasing website traffic is simple. Provide useful content, do the right thing, and be consistent. Learn more about SEO Services here.
Reno SEO, Marketing & Web Design
450 Sinclair St, Reno, NV 89501
(775) 870-0488
www.RenoWebDesigner.com
