Am I doing something wrong?

The pure quanitity of search results regarding a certain keyword is no secure benchmark for the strength of the competition. If you want to know how really hard the competition on your keyword is, try the Google Keyword Tool.

The keyword search tool also says my competition is high

I am just trying to promote a website for my own local service business. Things aren't going too well so I thought maybe IM would help me reach potential customers that I wasn't reaching before.

PS: If anyone wants to help me, PM me and let's work something out.

It's really hardcore mate. Getting to the top of Google isn't that hard (although it requires a lot of work) but there're some proved methods on this forum that work every time.

Hi,

If you want to learn how to do keyword research correctly then I suggest you go and take a look at The Challenge.

The Challenge

I am not affiliated with Ed Dale or The Challenge I just think that this is a great resource for new people and best of all it's free.

Lynette

1.2million is not that much. With some effective DIY SEO, You can easily appear on 1st page of google. I created a small free analysis about your website and sent it to your PM.

Everyone here is really helpful. I can't thank all of you enough for your willingness to help.

I may be using the wrong keywords, but I don't know. Like I said, I am new to IM. About a month ago, I didn't even know what SEO stood for, but I'm learning more and more every day.

Richard - We do have a pretty big time difference, so hopefully Rosetrees and I can find a time that works for both of us.

xenergy - I thank you for your analysis - I have yet to receive it, but will keep my eyes open.

Well, specifically I am in the "san fernando valley" - even more specifically north hollywood, but I also work in burbank, glendale, hollywood, van nuys, reseda, tarzana, encino, arleta, northridge, granada hills, studio city, sherman oaks, la crescenta, and a few others I can't think of at the moment.

Should I be concentrating more on specific neighborhoods and try to create seperate pages for each one?

And yes, I am a plumber.

Thank you Richard!

Oh, and if anyone on here needs any guidance in plumbing related topics, feel free to PM me and I'll try to guide you through whatever it is you need to do, repair, modify, etc.

Hi,

Yes, you definitely need to focus on local keyword terms. If you look at a keyword research tool like Wordtracker you'll see that in the US it is very common for people to type in searches that include their home town or state. You'll have far fewer searches than you would for generic keywords but a fraction of the competition and as I'm sure your site shows your location then Google will love your site as a natural fit for those local keywords. So provided you optimise your pages properly, get the SEO right with tags, robots.txt file etc (get that done really cheaply at fiverr.com), Google should look favourably on your site.

Good luck. Folks'll always need plumbers!

Alun

Information in this thread is a bit misleading.

For the record:

The number of results in Google for a search term has NOTHING to do with how hard or easy it is to rank for

To know how hard a term is to rank for, you need to look at the stats of the first 10 pages.

Look at:

Keywords in title
Backlinks
Anchor text of backlinks
Keywords in domain
Theme of website

Etc..

Number of search results is completely irrelevant. You can find search terms with 50mil results that you can rank for overnight but are not getting searched for so its pointless.

Yes. Your chances of ranking for keywords are to do with the number of searches made (not search results) plus the number of sites competing for those searches. What you could also do is take a look at the sites on the first pages of the keywords you want to rank for and look at the keywords they're optimising their site around (via the view/source button). Spyfu.com is another good resource for checking out the competiton, and it has a free as well as a more powerful paid version.

Alun

@ Richard Van, sorry to post in here but I can't send PMs yet.

Please email me at info@articlemagnetism.com

As it related to this SEO topic, I will paste my reply here:

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your reply.

So for the basic package for example, we research and write one unique article on the topic of your website.

The article is search engine optimized for a keyword relating to your topic but with low competition to allow us to rank it highly.

We then spin this one article at paragraph and sentence level very thoroughly to generate 400 unique versions which all make complete English sense.

Each article will then contain 2 backlinks back to your webpages (we can spread it across multiple pages if required) and they are posted to 400 high quality article directories including Ezine Articles giving you a total of 800 backlinks.

All backlinks are guaranteed so we create many more than 800 in reality and send you a report of at LEAST 800 that have been approved.

This process is repeated every month for as little as $19. I hope this is of interest to you?

Thanks,
-Ally

So if I were to break it down to more specific neighborhoods, can I have a seperate "index" page for each and market them each as a separate website? Or maybe I can create a subdomain for each?

What's the right move?

Anyone have any more input??