Website, SEO, advertizing

[Calendyr]

Apologies for any confusion or miscommunication on my part.

When I say expensive, I mean the cost per click of the word or words. This is more relevant to PPC (pay per click) through bing, google adwords, or another vendor. The more expesnive a word is, the more popular it is. The more popular a word is, the more people who are searching for it...BUT there maybe be people already dominating the word. This can help you shape your overall SEO strategy...but the free keyword planners oftentimes don't have this information.

@Calendyr, I did a basic analysis of your online presence and here's what I'd suggest to improve your rankings...and this goes for everyone trying to improve in this category.

1) Make sure all of your descriptions, listings, posts, etc. have a link back to your website (yelp, google maps, etc). This will increase your credability.

2) Google using keywords like (car wash "your city here"; detailing "your city here"; interior car cleaning "your city here", etc) when you're either using a browser that is different from the normal one you use or when you're signed out from your browser (for chrome users you can put yourself in incognito mode). See what comes up, see your rankings, and see who's ranking above you. There are sites where you can check what keywords and how they're getting higher than you like: Meta Tag Analyzer

3) Your business is already on Yelp whether you like or not...OWN IT before someone else does. Esthetique Automobile - Auto Repair - 2200 Boul Cremazie E - Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension - Montreal, QC, Canada - Yelp For those of you that have been in business for a little bit, chances are its already up there...go to yelp and look it up to find out.

4) As for videos, chances are you can hire a teenage kid from down the street or a guy wanting to make a quick buck off of craigslist to do the video for you. Or you could forget about video and just use the pictures you take along with narration (the narration can be done at a different time after the pictues are taken if time is an issue). But here's the 1 thing that will help you stand-out. Show your face and talk to your customer in your video. People want to know who you are and what you can do for them. It's kind of scary to see a video of this "mysterious detailer" who did this awesome work...but not knowing who they are. Oftentimes when you see a face, you begin to immediately connect with the person...and that's what your customers are looking for.

5) For link exchanges...I went for media outlets (press, local organizations, etc) vs. going to businesses and do a link for link exchange. If businesses came to me and asked, I'd do it, but it wasn't something I invested any time in. Backlinks are NOT the answer to being #1 on google...if you have a crappy site that no one clicks on but have 3,000 back links, it's not going ot work. Back in the 90's it did...but now SEO has changed.

Conclusion: The most important thing you should be thinking about with your online presence and rankings is about showing off your amazing work as much as possible and making it easy for people to find your website, facebook, twitter, instagram...whatever. And if you REALLY want to interact and communicate with your customers, START AN EMAIL LIST...but that could be 10 forum posts on that subject by itself.

Hope this helps everyone! Let me know what you think, PM me, and be sure to continue to ASK QUESTIONS!

Thanks! Will have to take a day and implement as much as I can of these solutions. SEO is so complex. I watched several videos about it and what came out of it is that now a days, social media is dominating the SEO environment. If you can't get people to go to your Facebook and twitter pages it will be difficult to rank high in searches. So yes I will definatelly have to work on the video, pictures and social media content this year.

 

[JeffM]

I am surprised you think that non-WordPress sites are more limiting. In what way? When I tried WordPress 2 years ago I was frustrated because I could not do anything I wanted. You have to use the Template exactly how it is, you cannot move columns or rows without being a programmer. I gave up on it because the things i wanted would not fit in the templates. I looked at 100s of templates and none had a design that I wanted.

Thank you for the list of advice, I will go through them when I work on the website. Some of them I already do but some I have never heard of so this should be very helpful!

The plugins make it very powerful and flexible. There are thousands of two column options for WP. Have you been to themeforest.net to look at templates? You can have a custom template made for about 2k as well.

 

[JeffM]

Thanks! Will have to take a day and implement as much as I can of these solutions. SEO is so complex. I watched several videos about it and what came out of it is that now a days, social media is dominating the SEO environment. If you can't get people to go to your Facebook and twitter pages it will be difficult to rank high in searches. So yes I will definatelly have to work on the video, pictures and social media content this year.

There are lots of factors that determine how a site ranks, there are also algorithms for separate markets. Purchase intent KW's for insurance has very different modifiers then a local detailing website would.

That said social interaction has little effect on how a local biz ranks in the serps, aside from google plus reviews, which do and dont really matter.

I track probably 200 or more KW's for my site and im on the first page for a lot of them, and never post to facebook, you can ignore twitter altogether, and G+ is only relevant for claiming your biz profile.

When you need social interaction is when google is weighing factors like link acquisition, velocity, link loss plus velocity, then it compares it with social shares, retweets, ect. A popular site that acquires lots of links will only naturally have a strong social profile, if not its a possible link purchasing site.

 

[DetailGroove]

There are lots of factors that determine how a site ranks, there are also algorithms for separate markets. Purchase intent KW's for insurance has very different modifiers then a local detailing website would.

That said social interaction has little effect on how a local biz ranks in the serps, aside from google plus reviews, which do and dont really matter.

I track probably 200 or more KW's for my site and im on the first page for a lot of them, and never post to facebook, you can ignore twitter altogether, and G+ is only relevant for claiming your biz profile.

When you need social interaction is when google is weighing factors like link acquisition, velocity, link loss plus velocity, then it compares it with social shares, retweets, ect. A popular site that acquires lots of links will only naturally have a strong social profile, if not its a possible link purchasing site.

May I ask, where do yo find all this information and why/how do you track over 200 keywords for your website?

If you're a local business, there's only probably less than 10 keywords that actually bring in real search traffic. And when I say traffic, it's only about ~1000 searches in total that are made per month.

 

[WashEngineer]

Ok I see what you mean now. What backlinks have been the most rewarding for you? I will need to focus on this next week so any insight would be great. I am thinking about the following types of businesses:
- Body shop
- Garage
- Car club
- Professional associations

Not sure what else. My goal would be to do a link exchange if possible and if not maybe through offering a discount to members type of deal. Aby advice on this would be great too

As far as backlinks go, the more reputable and popular a site that your site is backlinked on, the better your SEO results will be. Example, if you get a backlink to little man's auto shop and he only gets 100 visitors to his site a day...it will be of almost no value. On the flip side if you get backlinked on CNN (I know this is an extreme example) you'll get ranked higher.

What is your goal of working on all this SEO stuff? Is it to rank higher in google or get more customers? My guess is the later and to be honest, I think you're getting too far into this SEO and backlinking stuff. Concentrate on the MOST VALUABLE (based on easiness vs. effectiveness) stuff first and worry about all this technical backlink stuff later when you're going to the next level. It can take a lot of time to see results from backlinks on google and takes away from a lot of your time that you can spend doing more valuable things. What ranks higher than ANYTHING is HOW LONG people stay on your site. No amount of backlinks can help with that.

 

[JeffM]

May I ask, where do yo find all this information and why/how do you track over 200 keywords for your website?

If you're a local business, there's only probably less than 10 keywords that actually bring in real search traffic. And when I say traffic, it's only about ~1000 searches in total that are made per month.

I didnt see this till now, but I offer somewhere around 15 services, I work in 20 or so towns. I keep an eye on service plus town keywords, plus I track my maps listings.

I tried to dabble in affiliate marketing at one time making many websites and playing around at ranking them. Was a failure in that area except for the know how I developed, some of which is outdated at this point.