Columbus Local SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website to rank high on search engines for a relevant set of keywords and/or keyword phrases. SEO involves on-page and off-page optimization. It is important to understand that these days, SEO is not just the process of keyword stuffing your web pages. Doing so will not help your search engine rankings and it may even lead to your website being penalized or banned. Columbus Website Design provides both on-page and off-page optimization for your website.

Why is SEO important?

Today, top placement on search engines is critical to the success of almost any website. If your website is not on the first page of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for your targeted keywords, your site will go unseen by potential new customers and existing customers. Most of our clients request natural (AKA organic) search engine rankings of their website to help curb the cost of advertising services such as Google Adwords which is a Pay Per Click (PPC) form of advertising. Ranking your website naturally allows you to benefit from free, targeted, ready-to-buy, traffic from the search engines.

How we enable you to be competitive on Google

Our Search Engine Optimization process will help your website rank higher and more prominently for the targeted keyword phrases of your choice. We customize your website to be Search Engine Optimized using proper, time-honored, white hat, methods and techniques.

Things like unique title tags, descriptive image ALT tags, clear link title tags, link anchors and meta data tags are all examples of on-page optimizations that we use and Google recognizes.

We don’t stop there. Going futher, we code custom robots.txt files, research keywords suggestions for you, and research competitors to create suggestions on how to rank better than them.

These are all small examples of what we do to go beyond the basics of Search Engine Optimization and how we get your website to rank higher and increase sales and conversions.

How we optimize your website for higher rankings

Did you know that when your website goes live on the Internet, it is not guaranteed to be included or displayed in Google, Yahoo or Bing search engines? In their eyes, it is up to you, the website owner, to make them (the search engines) aware that your website exists and to prove you’re worthy of ranking in results and maintaining your website’s content to keep it fresh, relevant and of value to visitors.

Our complete Search Engine Optimization services do just that for you.

We will notify Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines that your new website is live to the world and ready to be indexed. We’ll prove to them your worthy status and get them to dispatch their crawlers to index the content of your website.

What is a crawler, you ask?

This is how search engines have functioned from the very beginning. A search engine crawler (AKA spider) is a piece of automated software that visits your website. It will visit each page and index the content to determine the most appropriate, relevant and reliable keywords and keyword phrases that your website should rank for when users are searching for it. It will take into account over 200 ranking factors in as little as a few milliseconds visiting your website.

So, how long until I see ranking improvements?

The amount of time until a new website can be ranked on Google can be anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. In our experience, we have noticed our client’s websites being ranked on Google in as little as a week and as long as six months.

However, this does not mean that your website will jump onto the first page over night. If your website is brand new, meaning Google has never indexed it before, it will likely start out on the 10th, 20th or 30th page of search results and will then need to grow from there.

This is how Google ranks new websites to prevent spam and scam sites from populating their results. It is in Google’s best interest to deliver the most relevant and reliable results to its visitors so you must wait to prove your worthy status. This period of time is called being in the sandbox.

The good thing is that there are a number of ways that you, as a new website owner, can help it grow and we will be glad to develop a custom plan of action for your SEO project.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is optimizing your website to rank for keywords that include a geographic reference.

For example, if you own a plumbing company in Columbus, we help get the website rank on Google when someone searches for “plumbers in Columbus” or “Columbus Ohio plumbers” or “plumbing contractors in Columbus”.

Each of these keywords will display different results and it would be beneficial for your business to rank on the first page for each of them.

This enables you to be competive with other local plumbers in Columbus area. Local SEO is typically only beneficial for companies that only offer services locally.

Going beyond the META tags

Meta Tags used to be the go-to solution for optimizing a website to rank high on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). However, those days are long gone and you can no longer optimize any website by implementing just meta tags. Your website needs to provide great user-experience to your visitors by offering them educational and useful content not designed or developed for search engines. Creating a website that is informational and educational in nature will ultimately help you gain rankings in SERPs.

Rich Snippets (microdata, microformats and RDFa)

Rich snippets are increasingly becoming more popular on Google’s results pages. These small amounts of data are displayed on Google’s search results as a few lines of text that appear under a search result. They were created to increase the user’s experience and give them an insider’s look into what the page is actually about and if the page is relevant to the keywords they are searching. Rich snippets can appear in the form of user reviews, the name of an author of a blog post, products with pricing information, names of businesses, the address of a business, phone numbers, recipes, events, lists of music and more.

Let us help you compete on search engine results pages. We can create a custom SEO audit on your existing website or create a custom plan of action for your new website. Give us a call or request a free quote online today to get started.

What kind of results can I expect?

Typically, we will improve your website’s rankings in as little as two weeks.

However, it is impossible to predict the results of Search Engine Optimization and you should never trust an SEO firm that guarantees their results. If they are guaranteeing their results, they could actually be selling you Pay-Per-Click (also known as PPC) services which is not the same as natural or organic SEO services that Columbus Website Design provides.

I’ve heard of Google Adwords, can you help me with that?

Yes, Google Adwords is great for getting instant views to your advertisement. We would be happy to help you setup, optimize and track your campaigns.

We have ranked thousands of websites for competitive keywords in local and national markets on Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines.

We look forward to helping your website gain a competitive advantage on search engine results pages. Contact us today for a free quote.

Do you have any testimonials I can read?

Yes! Stop by our testimonials page for a list of satisfied customers who hired us to rank their websites on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines.