Making local SEO work in Jacksonville

While the competition to be the top SEO firm in Jacksonville remains fierce, most local businesses won't need that level of SEO investment to come out on top for their keywords. A focus on the basic and essential aspects of your website may be all that is necessary to boost your organic search rankings and organic traffic from highly motivated potential customers.

Keys to Local SEO Success in Jacksonville

So you want more web traffic for your local business? The good news is that the basics are often good enough. Here are some of the classic keys for success when it comes to ranking through local SEO.

• Improve loading speed
• Fix or remove missing files and assets
• Register with Google Businesses
• Produce fresh, unique content
• Review existing content for updates

When it comes to the technical side of SEO, it is critical that web pages load quickly and without any missing files or 404 errors. Slow pages lead to high bounce rates and low user engagement, so even if it wasn't effecting your search engine result position (SERP) it is still effecting your conversion rates.

Visitors will appreciate the quick response of your server, and so will Google. If you can find a local web host or one nearby, you'll get even better speeds due to geographic proximity.

It's also important to verify your business with Google's business listings. This will help put you on the map, both literally and figuratively. Verified businesses are eligible to show up in Google's map results box - although you're not guaranteed a prominent listing just for existing.

And this brings us to the big secret that isn't really much of a secret: content is the most important part of any SEO campaign. Once the website is working well on the server side, the most critical step is the development of fresh and unique content that is structured so that users and search bots alike can discern exactly what it's all about. Pictures are good and video is better, but each post should have an absolute minimum of 300 words attached to explain what the other media is about.

500 words is better and 1,000 better still, but that doesn't mean to ramble on about irrelevant things or repeat yourself. Get to the point as much as possible while striving to be comprehensive. Stay on topic, but don't be afraid to branch out a little bit toward related concepts. Take advantage of internal linking opportunities and make sure all of those related posts and pages are connected through hyperlinks.

Then once your content is in place, don't forget about it! Facts become obsolete and details change - your content should also be updated to stay relevant even if it was published long ago. It's also important to ensure that existing content doesn't violate the standards for good content set out above: watch out for keyword stuffing, unnatural link profiles, and scraped content. These "shortcuts" can end up costing a lot more than they save, in the long run.

What's Missing? 

The obsession with backlinks. Don't get me wrong: backlinks are great and they're powerful, but most people who set out to "build" them just end up with junk links and/or unnatural link exchanges.

Editorial links are the strongest signal by far, and you can really only earn those with high quality content published with a regular and consistent frequency.

Based on my experience, a combination of technical SEO auditing and a commitment to new content is all it takes to dominate the local search results. So what are you waiting for? The traffic is out there, you just have to claim your share!