You’re a small business owner and you’ve struggled to get where you are today. Even though things are fairly comfortable now, you’ve never forgotten where you’ve been and how you’ve gotten to where you are today. That first dollar you made, that first big sale, long days and nights turn into the stuff that could fill the pages of a book on small business. Everything has added up to where you are today.
You’re doing everything you know how to do and you’re constantly marketing yourself in places where potential clients are. You know that this exactly what search engine optimization does; it puts you in front of potential clients that are searching for your business.
Don’t Get Fooled by Useless Tactics
The truth is that the SEO industry has been selling useless services or things that just aren’t needed for a long time, even if it’s just $14.95 at a time. Here are the main services that you just don’t need for your business.
#1 SEO Scam – Get Found on Google
Get your business indexed in Google. There have been huge companies built on just getting websites indexed in Google. If your business is using a dot com for your domain name then the fact is, you don’t even need to worry about it. Google is a registrar and they keep track of all of the dot com and dot net domain names being registered. If you throw up a website, they will find it.
#2 SEO Scam – Links O’ Plenty
Get 10,000 links to your site for $14.95. If that’s what you think will help your site rank #1 for your search term then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Fact is you can’t get caught up in the “number of links” game; it’s just not a good indicator of quality. Yes it’s true, links play a vital role in search engine optimization but getting lots of them will not necessarily help you outrank your competition. Truth is it’s much more likely to hurt your website than help it. The last thing you want to be doing with your time is emailing 10,000 webmasters and asking them to take down links to your site. It’s a losing proposition.
#3 SEO Scam – Local Business Listings
Get your local business listings all set up from one dashboard. Not this really a scam, unless they tell you how much it will help your rankings. It’s a good idea to be listed in the main local business directories and you can find plenty of lists, but being listed in anything but the top players wont help your ranking much, if any and there’s absolutely no reason to be paying anyone to maintain these for you. On top of that the links are usually redirects which aren’t as good as clean text links to your website which you get from signing up manually. The best way to take advantage of these business listings is to submit to the ones with a high amount of traffic, those that provide value for their users.
Instead of Paying for a Service… Here are 15 Local Business Listings that Will Help Your Business:
Get Syndicated for FREE:
- Acxiom Business Listings
- Infogroup Express Update
My advice would be to submit a listing a day over the next 15 days or so. Make each listing unique and be sure that your business is listed in the best possible category.
What to Look for In Quality SEO Services
If you’re ready to make the leap and hire an SEO company, you can start by looking in your local city. If your city has a population of 200K or more than there’s a good chance that there might be a decent SEO provider nearby. If you live in a smaller city then look to the nearest city with a population of 200K or more to find a good SEO provider. How do you do that? You ask… Well you use search terms to find the best in class. Replace MY CITY with the city you live in, remove the brackets and hit the search button.
“MY CITY SEO”
“SEO MY CITY”
“MY CITY SEO Company”
“SEO Company MY CITY”
“MY CITY SEO Services”
“SEO Services MY CITY”
If you find a company or service provider that ranks well for each of these search terms then you’ve found a strong SEO company. Now you will need to contact them to see if they’re a good fit.
How Do We Know Which SEO Company Is a Good Fit?
We need to make sure they offer high-quality SEO services. Make sure that they will be building plenty of content for your site and off-site as well. They should be offering some type of competitive link building. What I mean by this that your competition has links that you don’t have. You need to get these links if you can, plain and simple. They might even include social media profiles and links in their services. This a value-added service that only increases the validity of your content in the eyes of the search engines.
The day has come to grow your business online and so you’ve decided to hire an SEO company. Now you have a good idea of how to find the right SEO company to help you out.
