31–40 of 127 posts
Can someone post or link to strategies for optimizing for local google seo?
After that comes paying for AdWords to get those reviews in front of more eyeballs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A comment wouldn't be enough, and ideas aren't worth a penny without a detailed execution plan. Honestly if you are interested you have to put the hours and do your own research, then test things yourself and see what you are most comfortable doing/what works for your niche or business. If you're really interested, lets exchange emails or telegram and chat, I would gladly offer some time helping you out (for free ofc…
Do you mostly do content generation, link building, or on-site html optimization.
The new SEO is really branding just over a long period of time. Expect SEO to take 6 months to 2 years.
If it takes you 6 months to 2 years to become prominent in local searches, something has gone very wrong. The answer to the original question is really one of "over how big a part of the internet?" first. Global SEO is a slow process, local SEO should be a matter of months at most, if the site you're optimizing for isn't "yet another one" in a saturated local market.
If you're an ecommerce shop optimizing product and category pages - SEO will help.
If you're a plumber and ranking higher than your competition will bring in new leads & jobs - SEO will help.
If you're an established SaaS company launching a new product - SEO will help.
If you're a brand new SaaS startup - SEO is probably not the best thing to spend money on. That money is likely better spent on PR getting press mentions, and on PPC ads promoting your brand.
The main problem I see many small businesses making is relying solely on SEO to bring them leads while having no other marketing strategy. This may have worked well for them back when you could spam websites to the top of SERPs, but it's not the case today.
The new SEO is really branding just over a long period of time. Expect SEO to take 6 months to 2 years.
How does that work when there are other companies also working on their branding? Why would one company's effort to create a good online brand work better than another company's effort? That is SEO - working out what has a material impact on search rankings and implementing it.
The new SEO is really branding just over a long period of time. Expect SEO to take 6 months to 2 years.
Is that because you need iterations to figure out what Google values or do they just punish new domains?
Depends on the market. Google's move to 'entities' over keywords means broad search seo is beyond the abilities of "2 guys with some adwords experience" type agencies that were popular circa 2011/12. Quality well thought out sites that (theoretically) align with intent fare better. That said, if you're targeting a certain city, definitely still works. Most local sites are poorly optimized.
The changes Google will do to their algorithm will sooner or later be gamed, SEO 'experts' will beat a small subset of the system, Google will penalize them and adapt making it vulnerable to more exploitation.
The search engine is interacted with by humans so no matter what Google does, at the end humans(SEOs) on the other end will try to present their content first the way they see fit for humans.
Yes it does, but a little goes a looooong way to Google. I've also been starting to notice that having custom HTML / CSS is boosting things more than before for smaller sites. Also, even if using JS for SPAs doesn't matter to Google there is a reasonable long tail of other web crawlers that may or may not be helpful to your ends and you'd be surprised at how many of them just use mechanize or nokogiri instead of some…
Out of curiosity, what options beyond nokogiri, mechanize, etc. are you referring to? Something open source, commercial, or custom?
Selenium / headless Firefox with JS running in the browser waiting for things to load / resolve. This is the worst case scenario.
Sometimes you can use a layered approach, first do a normal mechanize request then if the page doesn't 404 you can try to parse it there. If you detect that its relying on infinite scroll try to run the JS command via Ruby Racer then if that isn't [semi-]automatically possible put the URL in the "requires full DOM queue" all of this on a bunch of code that lights up different servers to evade log analysis. Some URLs are behind a CAPTCHA, and some people will then add those urls to the "Use a human to do the work" queue, but I've never really felt right about doing that. To me a CAPTCHA is basically someone saying, "no seriously, bugger off" plus I don't want have some poor soul waste their life copying and pasting text. It's easier to just convince a client that last 0.01% of data isn't worth getting.
What's really funny is the meta game that stores have. There is no "price" any more for many of these people. There is "the price you happen to see" and they use a bunch of tricks to try to figure out if the traffic is real or not because they know that other places are dynamically setting their price to undercut them by some optimal amount.
It's just an arms race, but you know what arms races are really good for?
Arms manufacturers.
Instead, write 'honest' content. Write it well. Write it for humans. If you find yourself adding content in hopes the search engine will pick it up, that is a short-term gain for long-term pain. Do have your title match your content. Do try to write unique phrases that are applicable to your content. And try not to copy/paste content around your pages.
Do all that, with clean markup, and your SEO will be good enough to beat out local competitors. (Even if agencies tell you differently.)