SEO On A Budget Best Practise
My last post on the essential SEO services for successful local SEO was dismissed by some people as bull shit, due to me going off track with bigger picture life stuff and being vague about some intuitive techniques I EFFECTIVELY use. I was having a bit of fun with the hacking situation I guess, and likely taking some vital SEO services for granted by not breaking them down to a finer detail.
On this post I will be more specific about methods I have used over the last 8 years providing effective local SEO for small to medium business owners in Scotland.
Most importantly, hopefully provide some useful tips for other small business owners, marketing managers and newer SEO consultants that have been effective for small local websites vs bigger budgets with the odds stacked against you.
(Still) Essential SEO Services
On my essential SEO services blog, I listed these 12 aspects of local SEO that if done well are the fundamentals to ranking well locally.
These 12 essential steps still hold weight, however, below I will break down each one a little more to help you understand why they are important and how to best implement each step.
Please note, there are other aspects of SEO and I could easily list 100 steps. One of the reasons I listed these 12 is to help you avoid any time wasting tasks, ensuring you spend all of your time working on your site sending the correct signals to Google that will make an impact.
There are steps to doing this effectively, certain things to prioritise when you just take over a listing as signals you want to send to Google about your website and business.
Rich content that is consistent with the information on your website is important. Adding important links, using the posts features regularly and building up your customer reviews are all essential.
Especially important if you are new to a website niche, you need to know early on what your bigger keywords goals are going to be so you can structure your site and content towards this.
Looking for opportunities for long tail keywords, featured snippets and auto fill keywords on Google search, especially prevalent on mobile search all contribute well.
Officially your pages should have a meta title of under 60 characters and a meta description of under 160 characters.
This is important more in terms of meeting recommended guidelines, more unofficially, you need to STAND OUT. If you can find a title that stands out on the SERP and has your main keywords you’re winning.
It may sound obvious but always look at the top 3 websites when doing any competitor analysis. The goal should always be to either match or out-do, or if you’re too many years and millions of pounds in budget behind, find another angle to compete.
You should be looking at their header titles (especially h2 headers), the word count, keyword density, number of links and their link sources.
Effective use of headers, word count, keyword density and variation, sales conversion layout and Ill organised sky scraper content are all essential.
There are other deeper things to look at as well that can be found using audit tools and things like surfer SEO.
Link building, types of links and link relevance alongside volume, social media signals, traffic signals and more to make Google notice your site, page or new blog.
Essential to ensure your pages index and that you can track your sites performance.
Image file name, alt title using keywords with plenty variation are all essential.
Make sure to get your image size compressed and optimised to improve your sites speed.
You should have an internal linking structure, where you use a variation of different anchor texts and highlight to Google what the mosts important pages of your site are. (this should also be the ones you want to rank.)
It’s not always best practise to have a page or a new blog perfect the first time around.
If you can make a page solid but leave some gaps or content that will need updated at some point, this is always best so you can let the page index on Google, settle a bit and then improve the content to improve its ranking.
Enhancing content is a quick fire method for new rankings instead of creating new pages and even sites.
Use some form of site scanner or audit tool that will flag things like typo’s, broken links, broken images, ensuring the site and all content are secure with https:// with cloudflare are all vital.
Especially important for large sites with a high number of pages.
Reducing your sites file size, compressing and re-sizing images plays a big part in your website speed.
Google Business Profile
Due to the higher returns, I have spent a large percentage of my time and energy understanding and focussing on ranking my clients and lead generation websites on the Google Map Pack.
Only companies who rank well here can understand just how HUGE an impact ranking strong on the maps has for your business and level of online enquiries.
There are many documented examples of local companies less especially in the United States, who base a large percentage of their business model around their Google Map listing.
Google Maps Rankings - What Works?
There are various factors to ensuring the Google Map Pack produces results for your business.
You have to ensure you rank well for various keyword variations and not just one keyword! (like some exact match keyword listings will provide)
You also have to ensure your listing looks credible and has enough customer reviews to compete. Appearing is just half the battle, its proven that over 90% of people choose the result with the highest reviews first, with over 70% only contacting the first company they find.
There are tonnes of factors that send signals to Google that your Business Listing is the best or one of the best local results that their user will be happy to find.
In 2024 local SEO companies can impact the Google Map Pack more than ever, with more regular movement than in the past.
Here is a list of the ranking factors in order of importance. (leaving any out is simply not an option!)
- Business Name has a keyword – There is no getting around it, this is huge! On the other hand, once you rank a business without a keyword in the name, it won’t budge easily! Google set the quite antiquated rules on this one, it is what it is, you either have an advantage or you need to use other methods and skill to rank.
- Business Location especially in a city or a business with a city centre location (near the metro centre of Google Maps). Again there is not much you can do about this if you are on the outskirts of a City, or worse yet a neighbouring village or local area. Although in some more extreme examples of companies looking to maximise results from the google Map Pack
There are steps to doing this effectively, certain things to prioritise when you just take over a listing as signals you want to send to Google about your website and business.
Rich content that is consistent with the information on your website is important. Adding important links, using the posts features regularly and building up your customer reviews are all essential.
Especially important if you are new to a website niche, you need to know early on what your bigger keywords goals are going to be so you can structure your site and content towards this.
Looking for opportunities for long tail keywords, featured snippets and auto fill keywords on Google search, especially prevalent on mobile search all contribute well.
Officially your pages should have a meta title of under 60 characters and a meta description of under 160 characters.
This is important more in terms of meeting recommended guidelines, more unofficially, you need to STAND OUT. If you can find a title that stands out on the SERP and has your main keywords you’re winning.
It may sound obvious but always look at the top 3 websites when doing any competitor analysis. The goal should always be to either match or out-do, or if you’re too many years and millions of pounds in budget behind, find another angle to compete.
You should be looking at their header titles (especially h2 headers), the word count, keyword density, number of links and their link sources.
Effective use of headers, word count, keyword density and variation, sales conversion layout and Ill organised sky scraper content are all essential.
There are other deeper things to look at as well that can be found using audit tools and things like surfer SEO.
Link building, types of links and link relevance alongside volume, social media signals, traffic signals and more to make Google notice your site, page or new blog.
Essential to ensure your pages index and that you can track your sites performance.
Image file name, alt title using keywords with plenty variation are all essential.
Make sure to get your image size compressed and optimised to improve your sites speed.
You should have an internal linking structure, where you use a variation of different anchor texts and highlight to Google what the mosts important pages of your site are. (this should also be the ones you want to rank.)
It’s not always best practise to have a page or a new blog perfect the first time around.
If you can make a page solid but leave some gaps or content that will need updated at some point, this is always best so you can let the page index on Google, settle a bit and then improve the content to improve its ranking.
Enhancing content is a quick fire method for new rankings instead of creating new pages and even sites.
Use some form of site scanner or audit tool that will flag things like typo’s, broken links, broken images, ensuring the site and all content are secure with https:// with cloudflare are all vital.
Especially important for large sites with a high number of pages.
Reducing your sites file size, compressing and re-sizing images plays a big part in your website speed.
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