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In today’s highly competitive digital landscape, having visibility on Google is crucial for local businesses. However, standing out among the competition requires a significant amount of effort.
Many marketers often describe SEO as a complex topic that can be difficult to explain to those without experience in the field. But don’t worry. We’re here to help you understand what your marketing agency is doing to optimize your website for search engines and drive traffic to your business.
To start, it’s important to understand how search engine marketing works. When you enter a search term, Google tries to identify the user’s intent and provides the best possible results to meet that intent. If your website is the solution to a user’s problem, Google will reward it with a higher ranking. This is why it’s crucial to ensure that your website is optimized to meet the needs of your target audience.
Search Intent
In 2023, there are 4 types of search intents:
- Informational intent: Refers to the desire to acquire more knowledge or information about a specific topic or subject.
- Navigational intent: Refers to the desire to locate a particular brand or discover a new brand or website.
- Commercial intent: Refers to the desire to research a product or service in order to make an informed purchasing decision.
- Transactional intent: Refers to the desire to compare prices and ultimately make a purchase of a product or service.
It’s every local company’s goal to rank first for a specific search term since it brings quality traffic to their website that can convert them into clients. However, landing on the first page of search results is a challenge due to the high competition. There are likely many other businesses putting their SEO efforts into ranking in the top spot for the same search query. How can we know how many local businesses are looking for the same keyword?
SEO Keywords
Marketing agencies typically use online tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, etc., to gather information about the search volume for a particular keyword and how many competitors are targeting the same keyword. If there are a lot of competitors and low search volume, it’s considered a challenging situation.
You may hear terms like “keyword difficulty,” which refers to the number of competitors your website is competing against for a particular keyword. Generic keywords like “restaurant” or “plumber” are highly competitive, and it can take over a year to rank on the first page for these terms.
Instead, using more specific keywords, called “long-tail keywords,” like “plumber services Vancouver,” can be strategically more interesting as they have less search volume but lower competition, making it easier to rank on the first page in a shorter time. To target different types of searches, your marketing agency will likely use blog posts and contact pages to fulfill informational and navigational searches. In contrast, product/service pages are optimized for commercial and transactional searches.
Is SEO something you know could be improved in your company? Give us a shout, or visit our marketing agency in downtown Vancouver; we would love to chat.
Please book a free marketing consultation – we would love to see how we can help you grow.