Websites are a major business investment. Besides the fact most businesses need to pay an outside designer to design and build their site, a website is only as good as the information it provides to a user. Business owners building a site will need to put time and effort towards creating content, and they can see great benefit from creating quality content. After spending the time, effort, and money on a new site, it can be disheartening to see your local business represented on search engine results pages by listing sites such as Yelp! and Insider Pages. Unique visitors to your site are unquestionably valuable, but the goal of an SEO campaign is to get your business found, not to specifically cultivate new visitors for you site. Good SEO tactics will help drive visitors to your site, but business owners should be ready to embrace a top spot on the results pages whether that result listing is their home page, a contact page, blog post, or even an Insider Pages listing.
Business owners should embrace a listing site’s page with their information earning a top spot on a search results page rather than trying to combat it. As search engines work to improve their local search results, sites that list local businesses information will further solidify their top spots on search results pages. These sites have such high rankings because they are massive—Google has indexed about 24.5 million pages on yelp.com—and because they are constantly being updated with new user reviews, new businesses, and new features that the site is offering. These sites are not a business owner’s direct competitors and rather than stress over the company’s site being beat by its merchantcircle.com listing, an owner should embrace listing sites as an SEO tool. Listing sites give owners a space to post more of their content online, another piece of online real estate that can both rank well on a search results page and give a user the company’s information, and, most importantly, the company’s website gets a valuable backlink that sends both users and search engines to the business’s official site. This link will provide a powerful PageRank bump to the official business site, as a link from such a large and well established site counts as a vote in support of the content that a company’s site provides.
It is also no cause for concern if the contact, “about us”, or any other page of a site beats the business’s home page on the search results listings; in some cases this can even be a boon. If a business’s site is getting results like this, it is a testament to the quality and design of the site. The search engine was able to fully crawl, index, and include pages of the site that were at least one link deep. Not only that, but it liked the content of this page so much that it is willing to highly recommend it to its users a good source of information on the search that the user just performed. Search engine algorithms are built to get answers to users as quickly as possible; a search engine will consider it a success if they can direct their user straight to the most relevant page on a business’s site. Business owners should too. Not only is this a testament to the design and crawlability of your site, but it also shows that the content you are producing is working.
SEO strategies and tactics are designed to get a business appearing on the top of the search results page. The effectiveness of an SEO campaign can be tracked by analytics tools, but statistics like unique visitors and page views do not tell the whole SEO story. Boston Web Marketing customer service reps understand that good SEO depends on many factors and will help your site get found, whether that means your new clients and customers are coming from listing sites, finding compelling blog posts on your site, or landing squarely on your home page. We will work to make sure your website can be crawled and indexed so that search engines do not miss any of your valuable content and we will help build links back to your site with high quality listings that build both your online presence and the cache of your website. There is no SEO silver bullet, but Boston Web Marketing builds your SEO arsenal so that you will have several tools working to get you found.
-Andrew Wise
If you are interested in more SEO techniques or would like to hire us to manage your reputation online contact us at: sales@getfoundquick.com or call 857.526.0096.
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