You’re probably aware of Google Ads and Google organic rankings just by looking up things on the search engine every day. Are you aware of the process of what puts specific ads in the top three spots or how certain places rank higher than others? This is the source of constant debate between SEO professionals and has been for some time. There is no simple solution to getting a company ranked organically at number one, nor is there a small cost to getting a company ranked at number one on paid ads. You can throw tons of money at paid ads and rank pretty high depending on the term you’re trying to rank for but on the chance that you’re trying to rank for a more general term (SEO vs. Denver SEO or SEO Company in Denver) you’re going to get bullied by the huge corporations that have millions of dollars they can spend on advertising campaigns. Knowing this, small to medium sized companies have to be a bit more clever in their approach to paid ads and organic rankings on Google.
How is it when you are being outranked and outbid by bigger corporations that you can still take an advantage over them? Truth is, you can’t. Especially with the prominence of Google and the money they make from ads, you’re just not going to beat them out. You can, however, make some simple maneuvers to find more niche words that will help you rank high without the disadvantage of trying to overcome a behemoth of a company, even in highly competitive industries.
Google Marketing
Organic & Paid
Paid
Keyword Research
Keywords are what help Google rank results. There’s a bit more to this but it’s a key component when trying to rank. This is especially true with paid ads. Your best friend in this case is going to be the keyword planner tool that google ads offers. With the keyword planner tool, you can find great insights into what your industry is. Say for example you’re a dog groomer, by typing “dog groomer” into the tool it will product a list of related words that will include average monthly searches, competition level, and the range for the amount you would have to bid to get to the top of the page with each given word (low and high ranges).
The idea behind finding the right keywords as that you don’t want to pick too many especially if you have a low budget, say like $10/day or something. If you pick too many keywords then your low budget isn’t going to win very many bids during the day, therefore, finding less potential customers for you. Personally, I would go with five at max with a shortened budget to maximize your efforts. Luckily Google has options to make your bid strategy more effective if you’ve chosen less words and will learn more over time to optimize your ads to appear to those that are more likely to be converted.
Knowing this, you’re also going to want to go after keywords that are not as competitive. This is a pretty successful strategy for smaller and medium sized businesses. When going with words that are less competitive, it will allow for you to rank higher, faster without having to spend a ton of money.
Targeted Ads
The great part about getting set up with Google Ads is that you can actually connect your account to Google Analytics and with a few quick steps you can get it set relatively easy on your website to monitor your ad’s progress. This offers a great advantage in figuring out who exactly has been clicking on your ads. They will be broken down into categories like age or type of device. This provides a great opportunity of how to restructure your ads to make them more successful. By all means, if they’re doing great already then don’t tamper with them but this is not normally the case for most people that are just starting out with an ad. Most of the time it comes down to analyzing the data after you’ve been running it for a significant amount of time, then reconstituting it to target those that are actually clicking them to increase the effectiveness of your ads.
What you really want to focus on, specifically, is tracking your conversions. Realistically, with so many people on the internet, you’re bound to come across people who are just curious about a product or service you have to offer, sometimes even clicking on it thinking that it may be something else. This can synthetically increase your clicks leading you down the path of thinking that your ad has been successful but if they haven’t bought anything or contacted you about services then you really didn’t win in the end. Focusing on your actual conversions allows for you to properly retarget your ad so that it can get to people who are genuinely interested in purchasing from you.
Direct to a Specific Landing Page
This may be one of the most important aspects of what you’re trying to accomplish with paid ads. Generally, the reason that a person browsing on the internet is going to click on your ad (after doing a specific search) is because they are looking for an answer to a problem they have. When they click on your ad they believe that your company may hold the answer whether it be a specific product or a service. In that case, why not give them want they want immediately so as to make the transition to a sale that much easier for them? You can easily do this by creating a landing page that is specific to the product/service that you’re trying to sell in your ad. If you’re a Denver SEO Company or a Denver web design company then you can create a one page or multi-page landing page that would explain what makes your business different from all the others and shows the benefits of your service. That means if someone is doing a specific search for Denver SEO, they get directed to your landing page that will answer all their questions and at the end they can contact you directly to set up a meeting or get more of their questions answered, eventually, utilizing your services that will help them.
Organic
Technical Functionality of Your Website (Page Load Time)
One of the biggest pushes that Google has made over the last few years is that of page loading speed. You may hear it as mobile page speed but, realistically, your best bet is to make sure your site is as fast as possible on all devices to prevent any unwanted problems from Google in rankings. This will help with overall rankings by device. It’s been found that most people will actually go right back to a search or click off your site immediately if it does not load within 1 to 3 seconds. This applies for both mobile and all other devices (especially for mobile though with data being limited). This has caused a push in AMP pages to lower the amount of data someone uses and the time it takes to load, being that accessibility in some countries is very limited. The more compliant your website is with these “regulations” the more it will help you with getting higher in organic rankings for your field. No longer is having a quick site just a good thing, but a requirement. Technology has grown too much for anyone to have a slow moving site. Even if you’re thinking of it from a side of conversions, then you’re doing yourself a favor by making a site that is easier to navigate with your visitors.
Here’s a few resources that will help with getting your site technically optimized:
Optimizing Site Speed: What You Need to Know
Page Speed Optimization: How to Improve Your Website’s Loading Time
Keyword Research
Keywords are everything when it comes to ranking. Well, maybe not everything but they’re a crucial part. Since the start of Google keywords have been an indicator in their ranking systems, letting them know what exactly each site was about so they could find results that people were looking for. Fast forward to today and the same logic still applies. There’s more that goes into ranking for specific keywords but picking out the right keywords for your niche is imperative to ranking. This doesn’t mean just selecting the first one that comes to mind, instead you have to do your research to find ones that fit the current level of your business. This means that if you’re a small business then you’re best best is to find keywords that are not too competitive. Medium-sized businesses can go for keywords that might be a little more competitive but if they have the resources that could be allocated towards ranking, then they can spend the time and money to start to work their way up the ladder. Much of this research can be done on sites like ahrefs.com or semrush.com. The nice part is you can start with a generalized keyword like web design company and they will provide a list of related keywords but it will help if you can make them area specific like denver seo company.
On-site SEO
This goes along with keywords that you are targeting but the main idea is to put keywords into your content in your site. The key thing to keep in mind here is that you absolutely do not want to over do it when inserting keywords. This was a very big learning lesson some years back when SEO was still pretty new. What the old practice used to be was to add as many keywords into your content as possible with some even being hidden within the HTML. Google caught on and has since started penalizing people for such behavior being that it can alter the search results in a way that people are not getting the best content available for their queries. What you want to do is add maybe 1 to 2 of your targeted keywords onto the content of your page as long as it makes sense to be on that page. Keep in mind that when Google is crawling your site, they’re looking to possibly rank your content based on its ability to answer specific search queries. Those keywords will help you but only if the content itself is actually helpful so just inserting random keywords into it isn’t going to make it more effective.
These keywords are also something that you’re going to want to apply to every page via their meta descriptions and meta titles. Although, these don’t have much to do with your rankings on keywords they can still help. Think of metadata as more of a selling point from a browser’s perspective. This is where you’re going to want to apply some selling language being that Google pulls this data to place on your search results for this page. You don’t want them to be too long though. It is recommended to keep your meta description between 120-158 characters and your meta title between 50-60 characters. Since this is the first impression you get from someone on Google you’re going to want to craft these to be as appealing as possible for potential clients, something that will describe exactly what that page is about and how it will answer any questions.