302 Digital Marketing - SEO

THE SEO STRATEGY

Understanding its Importance

Search engines are now the #1 source for consumers when they are looking for local services.

Think of your website like a helpful guide—it knows a lot, but only if search engines know where to look. If you want your pages to show up when people search for what you do, each core service page needs a little SEO attention.

The goal? Make it crystal clear to Google (and friends) what each page is about, so they can match it with the right searches.

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STEP 1

Build the Website

A typical Service-Based business website has only 3-5 pages (Home – About Us – Our Services – Coupons – Contact Us). That does not create a lot of indexation or placeholders on the major search engines. Most businesses provide a wide variety of other services. For example, food-service industries may offer catering, meal planning, recipes, to name a few.. By building out the website and creating separate pages for each of these services (combined with city modifiers), the business can get listed on the search engines for each of those different keyword combinations. For example:

Home – About – Coupons – Contact Us

Sub-pages for each service – Austin Meal Prep, Austin Wedding Caterer, Austin healthy eats, Food for Gym Goers, etc. Or For a Landscaper - Landscaper El Paso, Concrete layers in El Paso, Sod in El Paso, etc. Not only this, but each city they service should be represented on your SEO-driven website.

Step 2

Optimize the Website

Each core service page on your site is like a mini commercial—clear, targeted, and made to catch the right eyes. But before those pages start pulling their weight, they need a little SEO sprucing.

The good news? You don’t need a PhD to make it happen. Just follow a simple list of smart, practical steps -- these can make a real difference in how your site shows up.

Here's how to create solid on-page SEO:

Add a unique title tag for each page. Think of it as a name tag—short, specific, and keyword-friendly.
Next, your H1 tag should echo that title.
- It helps reinforce the topic and gives both users and search engines a clear headline to latch onto.
Images matter more than you’d think—name them using your primary keywords to give them an SEO boost.
Same goes for your URLs: keep them clean, readable, and include your main keyword
Don’t forget internal links. Anchor text (those clickable words in a link) should use keywords, and you can sprinkle some smart internal linking in your footer too — it all helps.
Finally, create an XML Sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. It’s basically your site’s map for search engines, making sure they don’t miss anything important.

Once you check off these essentials, your website won’t just be sitting pretty—it’ll actually start working for you, connecting your content with the people actively searching for it.

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three smiling people giving thumbs up, laying head to head in a mixture of cut-out paper social icons

Step 3

Online Content

BLOGS

SHOW YOU'RE THE EXPERT

LINK FROM YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA TO YOUR WEBPAGE

30% of SEO is On-Page type work

The other 70% is Link Building

Create interesting content/articles about your industry –This is probably the #1 source of inbound links because you can write an article about something like “Macros,” and push it out to thousands of article directory sites, each containing a link back to a specific page on your site.

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Step 4

Inbound Links

NOT ALL INBOUND LINKS ARE CRATED EQUAL!!

Going for quality inbound links means starting with association websites within your niche and then branching out from there.

Association Links – Be sure that you have a link to your website from any industry associations that you belong to
- PSYCHOLOGY TODAY for psychologists, counseling
- EATS for food industry association
- Chamber of Commerce
- Networking groups