Get a Basic Understanding of SEO in Three Minutes Flat

Do you have a local service business and:

You’ve heard of SEO (search engine optimization), but have no clue how it works.
You think you might need it, but don’t know where to start.
People tell you it’s necessary, but you’re skeptical.
You want to learn more to see if it will help your business.

If that’s you, then before you spend a penny on SEO, first get a basic understanding of how SEO works so you don’t get taken advantage of and you can move your business forward.

Start With Sales Pages

Think of your website in two groups, the sales pages and the education pages.

The sales pages are typically the pages we think of when talking about a website.

They include:

Home page
About page
Services and/or products pages
Contact page

There are two main goals for your sales pages.

Rank on search engines for sales keywords.
Persuade your visitors to buy from you.

For example, let’s say you’re a plumber in San Antonio and you offer both residential and commercial services.

It makes sense than that you would want to rank for keywords like:

Home page – ‘plumbers San Antonio’
Residential plumbing page – ‘home plumbers San Antonio’
Commercial plumbing page – ‘commercial plumbers San Antonio’.

So, the first part of SEO is building the sales pages (the standard website).

Most local businesses build the standard website and stop there.

But they are losing out on opportunities.

Of course, we all want the ‘ready to go’ buyers, that makes perfect sense, but only about 5% of people on search engines are ready to buy right now.

That means, 95% of the time, people are doing research and they are not ready to move forward.

They are still on the ‘buyer’s journey’.

In addition, even if you build your standard website (the sales pages) perfectly, it doesn’t always mean that your pages will show up on the first page of the search engines automatically.

Your competitors are trying to get to the top of the search engines too and they may have been at it longer than you.

So, here’s how to win over the 95% and the search engines at the same time.

Build educational pages….

Grow SEO Traffic With Educational Content

The education pages are the blog posts that answer your customers’ questions.

There are three goals for education pages:

Answer every conceivable question your prospects have.
Build trust with your prospects so it’s easier to sell.
Build authority with search engines, so it’s easier to rank for sales keywords.

The more you educate your prospects, the easier it is to sell your products or services.

The more pages your website has, the more trust and authority you will have with search engines.

With that increased trust, it will be easier to rank for those hard to acquire keywords like “best cat sitter in San Antonio”.

Earn Backlinks

The third piece to basic SEO fundamentals, is earning backlinks.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is when another website links to your website. Pretty simple.

By linking to your website, they are giving your business a vote of confidence and sending a signal to the search engines that your website can be trusted.

It’s a digital referral that makes search engines happy.

The more trusted your website is, the easier it is to rank for both sales keywords and education keywords and that’s where the traffic comes from.

There are three standard places every website should start getting backlinks from on day 1:

Search engines (Google, Bing, Youtube, etc.)
Social media platforms (Facebook, Linkedin, etc.)
Local directories (Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc.)

Once you launch your sales website, register at as many of these kinds sites as possible.

You don’t want to stop there.

Building backlinks is an on-going process.

While you could buy backlinks, the best long-term approach that works is to collect them naturally.

As you launch high-quality educational articles, they will collect backlinks from other websites.

The natural collection of backlinks, builds authority and trust with Google, further improving rankings across your website.

Conclusion

While, there are lots of strategic and technical things to do in SEO, for local service businesses, it comes down to doing these three SEO basics:

Launch sales pages first.
Launch educational articles regularly.
Earn backlinks.

The websites that are the most consistent for the longest amount of time, usually end up with more traffic, leads and sales than their competitors.

Want to get into the finer details? What is local SEO and how does it work?

Want to see SEO in action? How we ranked a local business on Search in nine days.

Want to see if we can help? Local SEO services.