If you have been bamboozled by SEO gurus who have promised to make your site rank highly on Google magically or miraculously by waving an SEO wand that will produce instant results, you’re not alone.
SEO has been such a mystery to website owners who know little about it and who have no background in web development or marketing. The truth is web developers know little about pest control SEO because they know little about the pest control industry.
Your company’s SEO strategy has a low chance of bringing lead-generating results if it is not framed with your buyer persona, their values, and their interests in mind from the very beginning. If you feel you have been scammed by so-called SEO experts, you may want to begin to rethink your overall perspective on SEO.
SEO is not some strategy to trick or outsmart the search engines by hiding keywords all over your webpages to attract leads. This method of bad SEO will only confuse the search engines and result in a Google penalty in many cases. There are no tricks to it and there is no way to outsmart the search engines to make you rank higher.
Instead, think of good SEO as a way to attract, engage, and delight your ideal customers. To create content that attracts them, you must have a good understanding of what search queries they make every day and every night. Creating engaging content like videos, instruction manuals and learning materials, will help ensure they stick around and build trust with your brand. Once the search engines realize that you have built trust by creating a site that helps and educates them, the search engines will reward you with a high ranking.
It is important that you understand how to organize this content in a way that makes it easy for the search engines to crawl and index it. You want to be sure all your links are working properly so that the search engines have an easy time interpreting them during the crawling process. “Crawling” basically means that the search engine does a quick scanning of your webpages to display content relevant to a searcher’s query and lists the content on the SERP (search engine results page) for that query.
During the crawling process, the search engine will scan through links on a webpage that link to other pages to get a full interpretation of the content on the pages and rank the webpages it scans based on their relevance to the searcher’s query. To make it easy on the search engine, be sure to fix any broken links and link all the relevant pages on your site properly and appropriately. It is important to keep only relevant webpages linking together so that the crawler does not get confused while scanning the content on the pages.
After mapping out all your links properly according to the content on your webpages, make sure your headings, subheadings and URLs include the proper keywords to tell the search engines exactly what the pages are about as these are important factors to your site’s ranking in SERPs. Search engines scan content on hundreds of webpages in less than a second and do not interpret content in the ways that humans do. They favor quick and easy-to-interpret titling on your webpages that tell them exactly what the page is about and why it is relevant to the searcher’s query. Be as clear and concise as possible when titling and organizing your webpages.
Finally, be as topic-based as possible when sorting and organizing your webpages. For example, if you make content about ant control, separate the content by types of ants and regional locations, and have a different page for each type of ant and each location. Do not lump content about red ants on the same pages with content about black ants, and do not include ant problems for multiple regional locations on one webpage as this will confuse the search engines’ crawlers.
Searchers do not usually inquire about multiple cities in one search when they are trying to get information about an ant problem, and neither should your webpages lump information about multiple cities on one page. The search engines will only scan the page and determine it is irrelevant to your searcher’s query. In the same way, do not talk about ants and cockroaches on one page. Searchers do not usually lump these concerns in one search query and search engines have a much more difficult time interpreting your content when there is too much irrelevant information on one page. Pest control companies often do this at an attempt to rank for multiple topics at once. On the contrary, you will rank highly for each category of content when you separate content for each of these categories and subcategories and build content for each of them over time.
Now instead of running to the SEO gurus, go and implement the concepts and strategies laid out for you in this article to increase your ranking on SERPs and have a site that operates with great SEO!