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Taking offline practice online...where to begin with SEO?

by Matt Burns
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi all!

I've been having success with my offline practice and having been a Warrior prior to starting my job, I want to get started with my online approach to my business as soon as possible. I've seen the good I can do in someones life with this line of work (insurance and financial planning) and want to be as busy as possible with my clients.

Every business owners dream, right?

This forum has been really wonderful in helping educate me and I wanted to thank everyone from the War Room members to the recently joined who continually offer advice and general good will!

I am posting here to ask for a bit of that good will in my personal situation. I am looking to rank for many keywords to try and get people to call me for to do their business in my metro city of Houston, Texas. My website is company maintained (in my sig) and I control all the content.

Aside from any pointers anyone can offer, what should I do to begin the process? I'm a bit overwhelmed with all the options. I've got analytics and webmaster tools all set up, and I'm ready to roll.

One question I had specifically, is there a way to see what people are searching on google within a certain city/metro area? IE, people in Houston searching for certain keywords, is there a way to see how many or what keywords these people are looking for?

Thanks again guys. Any response at all is of course greatly appreciated, and if you spot anything on my website that could use some improvement as well I am eternally grateful for your opinions!

Best,
-Matt Burns
#begin #offline #onlinewhere #practice #seo #taking
  • Profile picture of the author punksluck
    As far as I can gather, you are looking to focus your campaign in a specific area right? In that case, the information you can extract from google probably wont show you 'search data' for your industry in the targeted areas it will probably deem the results as 'not enough data' and won't display. IMO I would use the 'national' search terms for your financial service and use those for your targeted areas - ie. 'insurance brokers houston' etc...
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  • Profile picture of the author fasteasysuccess
    exactly if it;s specific city based may not return past or average search results.
    You can definitely make the best of your time and or money be focusing on big term specfic area you work with and targeted and like suggested plug city in.

    insurance agent in x
    x city insurance agent or whatever your doing and even be more specific

    health insurance agent in city state or x city mutual funds agent or 401k agent in x city

    or whatever. The more targeted the better. Press releases, blogs, articles, videos on google friendly sites can be extremely fast and effective if done correctly.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jeff S
    Well, actually Google does give you a bit more information on localized search...use their Traffic Estimator, put in your combination of service keywords, select the State/City you want, and you'll see Adwords data around that:

    https://adwords.google.com/select/Tr...timatorSandbox
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  • Profile picture of the author BradSimon
    Google's Insights for Search is a great research tool for those looking for local demographic search. With it, you can drill down to state and city levels to see how popular a search term is among people who live in a geographic area.

    While this tool does not tell you how many searches are being preformed for the keyword, it does let you know if potential customers in your target geographical area are searching for it. Even if the keywords are popular search terms, if they are not being searched for by people in the local area you are targeting, you may not be able to generate a significant amount of new customers from Local Search.
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  • Profile picture of the author cdn1
    Hey,

    I'd write a bunch of articles that are related to your niche and and see if you can get them ranked with ezinearticles.com for the keywords that you are targeting.

    That way you can get some quick traffic and you can see how long it takes for your articles to hit the top ten. If it does not take very long & you are getting a good amount of traffic, you can simply start ranking your site for those keywords as well.

    It is an easy low risk first step.

    Jason
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