Winning in local SEO isn’t about doing some magic trick and spiking yourself up to number one overnight. Remember the story about the tortoise and the hare? The idea is simple. Keep doing the right things consistently over time, and you’ll win. You can increase your organic (not paid ad) Google traffic over time by consistently focusing on a few key tactics. That’s what happened last year with one local business we work with. And I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t have much hope for them at times through this process. If you understand SEO, then you know there are internal and external factors that impact your rankings. Internal factors might include having a strong, user-friendly website design and authoritative content in your area of expertise. External factors deal with off-site issues like having a strong backlink strategy. In order to do really well, both of these areas need to be handled well.
What We Could Have Done Better
It was a year of transition for this local business. Over the course of the year, there were three different Marketing leads to work with. The transitions meant different ideas coming to the table regularly, and a need to move slowly on big changes. For us, that meant we weren’t able to pull the trigger on some bigger website changes we felt needed to get done. In particular, it would have helped our SEO chances greatly if we were able to:
- Update the look and feel of the site to a more modern design
- Restructure and streamline the site for user experience and a strong sitemap
- Bulk up thin content pages to show greater authority
The good news is that it looks like we may be giving these things more attention this year. With this stuff not running optimally, we saw improvements in Google traffic, but not as much as we could have.
The Improvement We Saw In Google Traffic
In 2015, organic search produced 4,333 first-time visitors to the website. In 2016, that number was 6,446 first-time visitors. That’s an increase of over 2,100 more people (48.77%) coming through their (virtual) doors! 
This chart might not look overwhelming, but remember the tortoise and the hare? Each month this year (blue bar) represents an increase anywhere from 110 to 280 more new visitors per month than the previous year (orange bar). It represents steady, consistent work resulting in steady, consistent results.
What We Did To Get These Results
Early in the year, we did some initial cleanup and link building, which gave us a bit of a boost out of the gate. Internally, there was some cleaning up of meta descriptions (the snippets you see in search results), and other optimization. Externally, we did multiple tiers of link building and social bookmarking. That all gave us a good start, but the real story is in the consistency throughout the year. Here’s what we did, and all within a budget of less than $400/mo:
- Backlink Cleanup – Before we got into building our (good) backlink portfolio, we first needed to get rid of any old backlinks that were hurting us. We were able to uncover several links that held us down and get rid of them (as far as Google is concerned).
- Creating Social Signals – We have a way to sort of mimic the effect that celebrity social media accounts can have when they share something. These social signals usually have a quick impact by showing the search engines that something on your site is of high social value.
- Contextual Links with Guest Posting – The idea here is to get authoritative websites to write an article about a subject related to you and include a link in the article back to your website. The higher authority of the website, the higher value of the link back to you.
- Advanced Crowdsearch – This is a strategic way of creating some of the other signals search engines look at to determine the value of your site (and its content). When search engines see the value, they bump you up in the rankings.
After the backlink cleanup, we just put the other three items on a three-month rotation. Each month we would do just one of them, and target it at the homepage of the website. After we worked through all three of them over a three-month period, we would start over.
Consistency is the Key
It’s also important to note that if the budget allowed for us to do two or three of these things every month, the results we saw would be greatly magnified. You get out of it what you put into it. But more importantly, the key is in the consistency.
Doing the right things regularly paid off by generating more Google traffic to the website. And if we’re doing our job well on the website, then we’ll be converting those visits into sales leads and then into customers. More on that idea some other time… https://twitter.com/FistbumpMedia/status/816826951105216514
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