Your search visibility is the key to your business getting calls and leads online with little to no direct effort on your part. There are proven tricks and tactics that can be used to reach your goal of greater visibility on the web. What we have here is a collection of very solid tips to make sure you get far more visibility in search.

Create pages based on your target keywords

This seems like a basic tip, but you just wouldn’t believe how many people still simply refuse to do a little keyword research and build out pages on their website based on those keywords. So do yourself a favor and get your mind around it now. This is the cheapest way to advertise your business effectively today, bar none. Once you get the swing of working with a writer or two and you work through the keywords and concepts you should write for, it actually gets relatively simple. You will need blog posts as well as pages working in combination to cover the breadth of keywords people are searching on in relationship to your business. Think about the path up to hiring a business like yours as well as during and after the sale. What might a person be searching on as they go through this journey? How can you engage them early in the process and answer their questions as well as when they’re ready to hire somebody like you? Take all the stages into consideration and map your content throughout. That’s the beginning of a solid keyword based content plan. This is actually much harder than it sounds and many folks will need the help of a solid SEO web design firm to do it effectively.

Optimize and interlink your pages for keyword variations and LSI keywords

Once you have a page, you need to optimize it for your main target keyword as well as related variations. Don’t just optimize for one keyword anymore. You need to know what other variations somebody might be using to find that same page. For example, if you are a house cleaning business, somebody might search on “house cleaning service in Kalamazoo”, they might also search for “maid service Kalamazoo”. Its smart to optimize for both as well as any other variations. Research your related keywords which is easy to do in the Google Keyword Planner as well as right in the search bar using Google’s autocomplete feature as well as at the bottom of any search result page. Look at those and take note, those are great blog ideas as well as insight into what Google sees as related searches.

Not only should you optimize for multiple keywords on each page, which will raise your possibility to get found on far more keywords, but you should also interlink your own pages using keyword variations as well. Link multiple pages and blog posts using a variety of related variations to your home page or “money” page to help it rank for more keywords. Also be sure to link blog posts back to your service pages, home page or any other page you’d like to rank for a keyword or its variations. You will be surprised how much control this gives you across your website. Spend the time to do this strategically and you won’t be disappointed. Also, it will take far fewer links to rank your site once you have the right keyword and interlinking foundation in place.

Optimize and share your images

Here’s another simple but overlooked one. You have to go in and optimize the images on your site. Google sees your image file name and alt tag as well as other tags and optimizations like a caption that you might do. You can rank your images in Google image search as well as help your pages to be optimized correctly and for a wider variety of keywords similar to the tactic outlined above. Optimize images for variations, especially keywords that you might not want visible to most users on your site. Say you have a budget hotel, well go ahead and optimize your images for the word “cheap” and now you have a far better chance of coming up for more searches, because more people look for “cheap hotels” than “budget hotels”.

Also, if you have some images that represent you well, or are unique to you and interesting, go ahead and share them. There are all kinds of sharing sites for images and you can get some nice foundational links back to your site if you share them on some. Just go with 10 or so to start and see where it takes you. You need the base links across your website to get ready for blowing the roof off with more powerful links later.

Create infographics and share them

Infographics seem daunting. Hard to design and even harder to get the content and data points for right? Well maybe not so much. Look for graphs and charts on blog posts and websites in your niche that you can collect data from for free. Look at other infographics for ideas as well as quotes from industry leaders and authoritative websites. Collect up the data points that make sense for your business and give this pieces of information to a good designer on Fiverr.com or Upwork.com and have them design up something fresh for you. Site your sources in the footer of your infographic and you’re ready to go! Embed it on your site, amplify it with social, and get some links back to your site by sharing it across infographic sharing websites. You shouldn’t need to put more than a few hours and maybe a few hundred dollars into making a great infographic that Google and your users will love. Make sure to share it once it’s built. Do a search on “infographic sharing websites” and you’ll have more options to share and get a link than you’ll be able to handle.

Interlink your Google properties and profiles

It’s no secret that Google loves it when you use Google stuff. YouTube, Google sites, Google Drive, Sheets, Google My Business, MyMaps, Forms, Presentations, Google+, it goes on. Optimize your profile across the Google world and interlink them, embed them in each other and make sure they all end up pointing at your website. if you’re a local business do not miss out on Google My Business (GMB), Google+ and MyMaps. Optimize them and interlink without going overboard and you’ll get some solid links and it will be clear to Google that each of those properties relates to your business.

Use a Google MyMap to expand your keywords

MyMaps by Google is a cool tool where you can build maps of any area with custom markers, text, html, travel paths, shapes, links and media. Create a nice robust map and optimize it for your keywords. Have fun with it and keep going.

Build GMB category pages on your website

If you want to rank for more keywords that trigger Google maps search results, then create more pages that Google sees as related to more categories as well as the searches that trigger those maps results. The content on your website will help drive a wider variety of keywords in maps. The more relevant you can make your website to more keywords as well as more cities, the more chance you have of coming up for those searches. No content = no rankings guaranteed. Build it out and keep going, make a plan over time and keep chipping away at it.

Claim and optimize your social profiles

Social profiles can often provide a nice solid link back to your website to help the visibility of your website as well as your online presence in general. Go ahead and claim and optimize at least Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, if not a few more big ones. Claim your profiles and set up a link or two to key pages on your website. If you’re a local business include your NAP in your profile. NAP is your Name, Address and Phone number which is the key identifier of a local business. Include that along with your links and you’ve helped to solidify your business in the online world in relation to your business address. Score another one for you.

Create YouTube videos, optimize and share them

Here’s another media tip. YouTube is huge and it’s Google and you can post it on YouTube as well as embed it on your website. No brainer. You can also optimize your video title on YouTube and add a description that can include a link to where? Your website of course. Make a YouTube channel, build it up a little and you might be surprised where that video shows up in the search results. There’s far more that can be done with video optimization and ranking inside and outside of YouTube but this is a solid indisputable step for any website and online presence.

Claim and optimize your profiles and citations

If you’re a local business there are a zillion places online where you can claim a profile, get a link, list your name, address and phone number and generally help out your rankings in both maps and organic search results. Go ahead and claim as many as you can and make sure to get your address exactly matching how it shows in your Google My Business listing. In fact make sure it shows the same on your website too. With citations and profiles there are some great tools like BrightLocal.com that can help you do most everything you need in one place. There are a variety of other tools that can help with this as well, but bang for the buck and ease of use, BrightLocal.com is a solid start. You can get robust reports and get a lot done in one place.

Embed a Google+ badge and map for your business

Whelp, are you surprised there’s more Google stuff to do here? One added step is to embed a Google map into your website footer if you’re a local business. This will help Google to be sure which business is yours and that you’re doing all the right things with your online presence. Make sure the map coordinates match your GMB listing as closely as you can so it’s clear that your GMB (Google My Business) is for your business exclusively.

Add service area pages to your website

If you’re a local service based business, you probably want to do business in a variety of areas around you, not just the city where your address is. Once upon a time you could copy and paste a huge pile of city pages with just a title change on each and you could rank for a lot of cities. Those days are long over. Now you have to create robust pages for each city or neighborhood you are targeting and maybe even a few interlinked pages for each target area. Cross optimize for your main service and each city and consider doing it all over again for another service. You don’t have to put all these pages in your menu bar, but Google does need to be able to see them and appreciate the quality and information on them.  

Add your NAP to our website

At this point you’re probably ready for a nap. But I’m talking about your Name Address and Phone Number one more time. I’d like to think that this is a default move in today’s world, but businesses still forget to get their NAP on every page of their website. When you place it there, probably in your footer, your site will have super powers to rank in your main city where your address lives. You probably won’t even have to put the city keyword all over the place like so many folks still do. For your service areas, yes you will need to optimize for them and your keywords in titles and other key SEO areas. But in your main city you can be much lighter with the optimization in most cases. Add it to you page title on your homepage and other key pages if it seems necessary once you see where you’re ranking after a little time.

Build links and promote your website

Once you’ve done all that stuff, it might just be time to build some big time links and fight with the big dogs for some serious rankings. If you’ve set your site up right all the way through and have done just about everything above and more, then links are your next big focus area. A few really great links can go a long way, so don’t get discouraged. Lnikbuilding is a complex topic and endless reams of information are out there online for you. Here’s all I can see in the little space I have left. Make friends. Make friends online. Do cool stuff, make neat content and ask them to share it on their websites. Here are a couple concrete examples for you: do a guest blog post and embed a link back to your website. Support a charity for a mention on their website. Comment on related blogs with a simple link back to your website home page. There are so many more, but if you even just did these few things really well and linked to a variety of those pages you now have, you’d be in great shape.