This article is an example of how easily we can put a page at the top of Google’s search results. It was written primarily by a human, but with the assistance of our proprietary artificial intelligence system. We can do the same for your website. We hope this not only serves as an example of what we are capable of, but also give some valuable insight into the world of local SEO and other search engine rank factors.
Poway local SEO is about understanding the community and its culture.
Poway is a small market for a search engine optimization agency considering it’s basically a suburban residential neighborhood. We don’t go after Poway SEO clients because it’s lucrative, we go after Poway clients because there’s a certain charm about working with people in our own neighborhood. Not only are we headquartered in Poway, but many of us live here as well. It’s just fun to work for companies we drive by every day.
The image above is our owner’s fearless daughter on her winning mutton busting run at the 2019 Poway Rodeo!
The practical advantage to doing SEO for Poway companies is we can meet with them in person. Maybe we’re a bit old-school in this regard, but we find there’s still no substitute for meeting face to face. This is especially valuable for clients who know very little about SEO and struggle to differentiate one SEO agency from another. When looking for an SEO service, sometimes two agencies will propose nearly the same strategy and might even get the same results, but knowing which company you want to work with can be determined within the first 5 minutes of the conversation – but only if you meet them in person. Although meeting over a video call can be effective, you miss the subtle cues that let you know the person on the other end shares the same ethics or corporate culture. Finding the right SEO expert should not be taken lightly as the right online marketing strategy could be the difference between getting no return on the investment vs taking your business to the next level.
Poway Local SEO
You might find it surprising that I’ll admit there is very little added value to doing Poway SEO beyond the ability to meet in person. Don’t get us wrong, we love seeking out the Poway natives on your team and finding out which high school they went to or how they feel about the church thrift shops getting bulldozed for an apartment complex – but understanding Poway culture and demographics are an advantage only for a smaller search engine agency or freelancer who works with small community businesses. At Rank Harvest, we tend to focus on mid to large size corporations that are headquartered in Poway but sales territory is national or global. We do a bit of local SEO for Poway community businesses including charity work, but for the most part our marketing and search engine strategies are overkill for their needs.
Local SEO For Online and National Businesses
Local SEO is not just for brick and mortar businesses looking for localized traffic. One of the ways Google decides where to rank a website is based on trust – is Google willing to trust you with their valuable search engine traffic. Trust is one of the factors in a site or brand’s ‘authority’ which is a major search factor. One of the many ways Google determines trust is by verifying the business has an actual address and real people operate from it. Google is smart enough to understand that ranking locally has no relevance to an online business, but being part of the online conversation within their community adds a certain amount of trust and authority to the brand. For example, people asking Google Maps for driving directions from the San Diego airport to your address in Poway reinforces the strength of a brand’s local presence. Doing local SEO, local marketing and local social media in general, has an impact on search rank even for strictly online businesses in ways most business owners are not aware of. Even simply adding your Poway business address to your website goes a long way.
Quick note on putting your Poway address on your website…
Back to the concept of an online business vs local. An example of a local business would be El Ranchito Taco Shop. El Ranchito relies on local customers and gets basically no business from anyone outside a 5 mile radius. It is important that their Poway address is posted on their website, along with anywhere else possible on the internet so that Google will match users searching for Mexican food restaurants in Poway to their website. An example of an online business would be Runner Crate of Poway that ships running supplies nationally. It is obvious why El Ranchito needs people to know they are located in Poway. For Runner Crate, their physical location might have no significance to their customer, but displaying their Poway address helps Google verify their legitimacy. If your business is home-based, or choose not to reveal your address for any number of reasons, Google will not explicitly penalize you, but will have a difficult time verifying you are who you say you are. It is certainly possible to rank in a local area without Google knowing your address, for example your SEO/content strategy can include the keyword “Poway” peppered throughout your web design or making sure any off site content written about your brand mentions that you are located in Poway. Even incorporating photography of Poway landmarks in your web design communicates location information to Google without explicitly displaying your address or Poway as a keyword. Because more and more search engine traffic is coming from mobile devices, Google has access to location data and will favor businesses in close proximity to the user. Many times, Google will rank a website higher simply by being in close proximity over a site with superior web design or keyword strategy that is just slightly further away.
That was probably a bit confusing to you, but any SEO expert will understand how to use your local address appropriately, whether it’s integrated into your content and social media, or just there to let Google know more about you. An SEO specialist will call this ‘local SEO.’
A Frequently Asked Social Media Question
Every SEO expert gets a steady stream of questions about the role of social media in search engine rank. Most companies use social media as an SEO strategy for content marketing. It might look something like this: write a blog post about a new product or service; post a link to it from social media to drive traffic to the page; offer a promotion. If you have a large audience of potential customers, this can be an effective social media marketing strategy. But it’s also an SEO strategy that affects search results in an indirect, yet powerful, way. Driving traffic to your site enables Google to gather user experience data and make assumptions on how valuable a potential customer finds the information on your site. For example, if the traffic you are driving to your site from social media results in conversions, contact form fills, long time-on-page or low bounce-rates, Google will assume the user found the information valuable and is more likely to give it a higher ranking than a website without these metrics.
The second way social media marketing can be an effective component of an SEO strategy is it indicates to Google if your brand is part of the online conversation or “buzz.” Think of it like this: let’s say your Poway business sells see-through face masks. You could have zero SEO strategy, no content marketing, no social media marketing and a terrible website design – and still rank #1 in Google if your product goes viral and your brand is suddenly mentioned everywhere on the internet. Although this is an extreme example, social media is an opportunity to get your brand mentioned online in a way that generates buzz and excitement. Even if your products or services are not consumer facing, or you feel the interest is not there to generate a social media following – you need to come up with some sort of social media marketing strategy rather than go completely dark. If nothing else, hold a raffle for a free bike at Old Poway Park, or take pictures of your staff making cookies for patients at Pomerado Hospital – a handful of these people will follow your social media accounts and some is better than none.
A Frequently Asked Website Design Question
Every SEO strategist also gets a steady stream of questions about the role of website design on search results. Not unlike social media, website design has an indirect, yet powerful, impact on the search results. Think of website design as the skin wrapped around your content. Although text content is what Google ‘reads’ and cannot independently differentiate a beautiful website design from something garish, website design does indirectly impact search results by encouraging visitors to stay longer and visitor more pages, thus improving the engagement metrics Google uses engagement metrics to make assumptions on how valuable people find your content to be. No matter how clever your online marketing or brilliant your content, poor web design leads to a bad user experience which eventually pulls down your search results. As an SEO strategist myself, I can’t tell you how many times a web design rebuild is required just as much as keyword research, backlinks and every other type of technical SEO in order to get a website to start ranking. A lot of customers were not expecting a website redesign recommendation when reaching out to an SEO company. A web design rebuild is not especially costly for small business, like the standard local Poway area retail shop, but can quickly get into the tens of thousands of dollars for a national brand. At Rank Harvest, we are frequently pulled into rebranding projects to create a website information architecture and navigational framework that is optimized for search, long before it goes to the graphic designer. Again, the reason for this is if your users have a bad experience, no amount of online marketing, content marketing or technical SEO is going to save the site.
What Role do Keywords Play in Local Search?
For most of our clients, converting a non-localized keyword into something more powerful for local search is simply a matter of appending the city or area name at the end. For example, we had a client who owned a local Poway business doing pressure washing. Being a pressure washing expert and not an SEO strategist, he only knew enough about search engine rank to be dangerous. We quickly uncovered in our keyword research that his content was doing nothing to communicate to either Google or his site traffic that he was a local business. Our SEO team quickly incorporated Poway keywords into his content, sprinkled a few more local keywords into backlinks and his social media – and his local search took off like a rocket. Not only is he getting more business from local customers, but his typical customer is now also closer to his yard – saving countless drive hours and gas.
So you made it to the end!
We wrote this article as an example of how effective our content writing is for search engine rank. Any SEO specialist can write an article checking off a list of keywords to include, but Google has become much too sophisticated for that. Although the Rank Harvest SEO team is very hands-on, our clients pay us to get the best results in the shortest amount of time, and AI helps us find patterns in Google’s algorithm in a way no human could never do. We don’t try to trick Google, we simply discover what type of information it finds valuable and provide it to the reader.
To you, our site visitor, this was an informative search engine article about Poway SEO. We tried to include valuable insights into the world of local SEO and why your business address is important. We also touched on technical SEO, along with how web design and social media play a role in search engine rank. Had you not known this was an example of how to rank an article on page 1, it would have looked like any other article on the internet about SEO strategy.
We can do this for just about any topic written in any writing style. And the more competitive the search, the better job our artificial intelligence does of finding patterns as there is more data to mine. So whether you need local SEO, or a national specialist team – Rank Harvest is here to help.