Small business SEO / social media advice......

[The Dog House (Watford)]

Hi there,

We run a dog walking company, The Dog House Watford, and we wish to increase our SEO to gain more traffic / new customers.

Our organic ranking places us on page 2 of Google under the search term "dog walker Watford". This is not good enough. We are thinking of maybe investing in a combined SEO / social media package, but what should we be looking for from any company who offers to do this?

We are happy to "invest" in this kind of service to see a future return, but as a still relatively new business, we do not have bags of money to be spending on a suggested "guarantee " of results.

All advice and even recommendations for be very welcome.

Many thanks

 

[bizzyrizzy]

I would recommend to add a blog section in your website and blog 300+ word articles once per week themed around your location while you look for a combined SEO / social media package. Also nice website you got there.

 

[WhizzPeople]

I would suggest you the following:

• Definitely need more content
• Fix your meta tags
• Ask local business for reviews (backlinks)
• Local SEO! Local SEO!! Local SEO!!! http://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo

All the best.

 

[The Dog House (Watford)]

Hi guys,

Thanks so much for all your suggestions. There are areas of our website that we know we need to focus on (a blog for starters) which we hope would make a difference. Has anyone experience of using a "one stop shop" for SEO / media and blogs?

 

[fisicx]

Yes. don't do it.

Only blog if you have something to say and it's something others will find useful and are searching for. Social Media is great if you want all your friends to 'like' you but it won't help your ranking. SEO is a skill the basics of which you can learn yourself in a few weeks. Take a look at Ray's excellent course: http://www.freshbananas.co.uk/

While the three areas should be part of a holistic whole they do have different outcomes. If you want to rank on page one you have to work at it, there are no easy shortcuts, if there were all you competitors could do the same and you would still be on page 2.

 

[The Dog House (Watford)]

Thanks fisicx,

We appreciate your thoughts. It all feels a little like wading through mud, trying to find the holy grail...... I guess our main aim is to get potential new customers to find our website first - without them being able to see us on page 1, there is a large amount of business we are missing out on. We believe our website design is far better than our competitors, but with out customers finding it, it's useless!

 

[leveldisc]

I would be extremely careful about "one stop shops", particularly on a limited budget. You could get short term gains, but creating long-term problems. Your site should rank well because it deserves to.

Engage with your target market in your area. Don't be contrived. Don't write articles for the sake of it, write them because they are interesting and local dog owners would be interested.

What about developing a dog walking guide for your area ? This is relevant to your market and adds value to your site. Talk about it on social media at the right time. E.g. if its raining tweet about good places to walk a dog when wet and mention your guide.

Councils and local business support groups often run free or cheap digital marketing courses or seminars. I would look into that first before employing agencies.

 

[fisicx]

We believe our website design is far better than our competitors

How do you know?

However, it's easy to get visitors to your site: advertise. That way you will know if people like the site (because they will be picking up the phone).

If you want to rank well you need make all sorts of changes to the site - I'd even suggest that the theme you have chosen isn't helping. If you want a review of the site join UKBF as a full member and post on the website review forum.

 

[ethical PR]

Agree with Fiscix - concentrate your budget and resources on advertising your services locally for example through vets and pets shops, and online.

At the same time go on the Fresh Banana course and learn how to optimise your site as a longer term investment to growing your business.

In what way do you feel your site is better than your competitors - does it attract more visitors from your target audience? does it convert better?

Creating content like blogs is just a distraction focus on offline and online target marketing, perhaps a Facebook page (if it's a medium used by your target audience) and populating your website with regularly updated content of interest to those with dogs who need your service.

 

[Jason L]

but as a still relatively new business, we do not have bags of money to be spending on a suggested "guarantee " of results.

Yes, no SEO professional can guarantee results as it's google/bing/yahoo (and their algorithms) that decide how to rank a website - the firms that do guarantee particular keyword placements you should normally steer clear of – or at least really understand what they are proposing to do for you and how they will be doing it. Working with a bad SEO firm can cause a lot of trouble for your site.

I agree with the suggestion to get at least a basic understanding of SEO before engaging anyone. However, as with all outsourcing the reason you do it is so that you can free yourself up to do other things – so nothing wrong with hiring someone when the time is right. In my experience, trying to do everything yourself can hold back the business.

Look up on site and off site SEO – off site is essentially link building. A good way to do this is to generate really good content and promote it – ideas like leveldiscs:

What about developing a dog walking guide for your area ? This is relevant to your market and adds value to your site. Talk about it on social media at the right time. E.g. if its raining tweet about good places to walk a dog when wet and mention your guide.

. Also, PR can get you really good backlinks - can you generate any news stories that could be used for a PR push – e.g. surveys about dog walking behaviour etc.

On site SEO looks at what you can do on your website to optimise it for the search engines – things like SEO friendly URLs, title tags, use of canonicals, redirects, internal linking. It’s important to get these things in place and relatively easy (depending on how your site was built!) as you control them.

Another thing to look at might be AdWords – showing your ads to a specific geographic area (Watford, Hertfordshire). Bing Ads too although not sure if the volumes will justify the time investment.

 

[Rapid Web Designer]

We started off (& still part-time run a pet-sitting business) which we ranked on page 1 and that's how we started to learn web design and SEO. We now run an SEO business which helps small businesses. Organic SEO is always the winner both in costs and clicks, plus always use the Google maps/business listing, but a Google ad campaign is always a great back up. You shouldn't be spending more than £40-£50 per month on ads (by our experience for most small local businesses). You've crept onto page 1 for the search you mention by the way but if you're not in the top 5 you'll hardly get any benefit.

 

[LowPrices.uk]

Have you added yourself onto Google Maps properly using Google My Business? If not, I would do that.

https://www.google.co.uk/business/

 

[Ideaswise]

What Whizzpeople said. Make sure you're on local Google. Try and get some reviews on Google too. Make sure you mention dog walker/walking/walking and not just Watford but Hertfordshire etc.

 

[InternetMarketingPlatinum]

I would recommend to add a blog section in your website and blog 300+ word articles once per week themed around your location while you look for a combined SEO / social media package. Also nice website you got there.

What if they have nothing to blog about?

 

[InternetMarketingPlatinum]

Have you added yourself onto Google Maps properly using Google My Business? If not, I would do that.

https://www.google.co.uk/business/

This^^^

 

[The Dog House (Watford)]

Thanks for all of your suggestions. Some of these we have already actioned but there are certainly others than we can work on.

As web design / digital marketing is not our "area", it's interesting how opinions can differ between those of you who work in this field.

Thanks for all your input.

 

[iiisark]

Hi,

To rank on top of SERP's you need to make your website stand out from the crowd. In other words - make your website better than your competitors. As some others already suggested - add enough quality content to your site. The good old cliche "Content is king" is still valid and always will be. Apart from good content you need to make a proper on-page and off-page SEO. In terms of on-page seo there are many things you can do but the basics are:

1. SE frinedly url's
2. Unique and descriptive meta tags
3. Proper internal link structure
4. Add social sharing buttons
5. Make sure you have your most important keywords inside you page content. You can use them many times, but with different variations. It is important to do not stuff keywords - text must contain keywords but also must be readable.
6. Offer value to your visitors, e.g you can offer a free dog walking quide which will bring more authority to your site. It can also turn into a link bait and you can build natural links with no effort.
7. Make SEO for your images. For exmaple an image named: "dog-walking.jpeg" with alt text: "dog walker Watford" can rank on top of Google images and can lead to a sale. Optmisied images are also beneficial for overall website SEO.

There is a lot more your can do for on-page SEO but i don't have enough time to cover everything.

In terms of off-page SEO:

2. Participate in communities, related to your niche, e.g Pet forums & blogs. If you make regular contribution and establish yourself as an expert, you can get relevent links and visitors to your site.
3. Add your website to a local citation sites with decent quality ( business directories like Yelp,FreeIndex,Yell.. ) .These sites can also bring both - relevent users and high qulaity links ( Yell is on 1st page of Google for: "dog walker Watford" by the way)
4. Esbalish your brand on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Include Facebook likebox on your website and start posting interesting content on your social profiles at least 3 - 4 times a week.

These are just basics but for low competition niche (like yours) should be enough.

Hope that helps.

 

[FreeRangeWeb]

Why not post loads of useful articles about dogs in your blogs and link some of them back to your main dog walking page (using a variety of different keywords). This way you are providing interesting content while still promoting your main business. You will never run out of things to write about dogs!

 

[searchangel]

I used to have a dog blog and I used to do well with traffic.

Create a blog. Don't follow the generic "300 words a week" advice. These are people who literally just listen to what others say and don't test things out themselves. You'll start writing your generic blog posts and realise after about 4 or 5 months that it hasn't helped one iota.

What I would suggest is set up a video blog to make what you're doing more personal. Make videos of the walks you are going on (put them on Youtube) and optimise them correctly, use Schema (will explain what this is if you don't know. PM me if you want to know). The desired effect from this is that when someone searches for dog walker in Watford, your video will appear before any of the text results. Please note that there's no guarantee that this will happen, but if it does, you have an edge over your competitors.

Another good way to bring traffic, and hopefully, rankings to your blog is to create a guide to a number of different breeds. Focus on the popular ones first (Labrador, Spaniel etc). Instead of writing 300 words, make it the definitive guide to this kind of breed online. Don't just explain their temperament, age etc, find images and cute videos of them too. Use Facebook advertising to target owners of specific breeds and promote your posts about said breeds on there.

A third way, because I'm feeling in such a giving mood today, would be to set up a page on Facebook called something like "Watford Dog Lovers". Use targeting to build up your likes (ask me if you want to know how) but don't yet mention that you are a dog walker. Once your page hits 100, you have a nice community of people - some with websites who could link to you, some who will be happy to promote your service. Offer prizes for people, such as a free walk or grooming for referring you to a friend.

You are lucky because when it comes to online marketing, you have so many available avenues that someone who is running a company that makes paving slabs doesn't have. And best of all, you can mostly do it yourself without spending much money.

 

[UKSBD]

Have a look at how one of the other members here does it http://www.bdws.co.uk/

You won't find much better than that.

 

[searchangel]

That is such a cool website. OP - take a note of this!

 

[fisicx]

You have no idea how many iterations it took to tget there. Jamie is a good bloke, give him a call OP and he will tell you all about the endless reworks it took to get where he is today (and the thousands of visitors he gets).

 

[neils3]

There's some really good advice in this thread.

Getting your site in shape for local Google is def your next step. Low hanging fruit is to sign up to Google My Business (if not done already) and get your business name, address, phone number added to your website, I would place it in the footer at the bottom. This should be consistent across all sites your business appears, i.e on Facebook use the same name, address and phone number.

 

[searchangel]

By the way, the Theme that the other guy is using for his website is the Elegant Divi Theme. It's probably the best Wordpress theme for people who don't know how to code. I would recommend getting something similar so you can design the site yourself.

 

[tyler web design]

The first thing you should do is run a website audit to see how well your site is optimised and is performing compared to your competitors. You can then build a more focused SEO strategy that will ultimately save you time and money. <removed>

And definitely, definitely,definitely get on Google My Business!

 

[InFront Digital]

Some of the best tips include:
* Regular and engaging content with your auidence - keep them coming back to your site and / or blog.
* Making your website user friendly - limiting numbers of clicks to a page, site speed, appropriate headers and title tags etc.
* Social media.

Most importantly like anything in business or purchase shop round for what suits you best!

 

[tmanoj]

Social Media is great if you are an SME, it is low risk, low cost and doesn’t take up as much time as you think. Here are six uncomplicated Social SEO tips you can easily start implementing today:
1. Optimize your social media profiles
2. Optimize your social media content/updates
3. Build links by making your content shareable
4. Use Pinterest
5. Sign up for Google+ and spend 10-minutes a day on it
6. Create a Google+ Local listing

 

[InFront Digital]

Another tip......

In your blog, give articles about yourself too: how your company started, and changes happening, plans for the future etc.