How to Get a Local Keyword on Page 1 of Google in 2 Months

TM Blast is now a New York Company, so I’m optimizing the website for New York keywords. Initially, I was in Boston, Massachusetts, where I had top rankings for many SEO words. In September 2020, I moved my business to upstate New York, and I’ve been optimizing the site since. Here is how I’ve gotten my site on page 1 of Google for the keyword, NY SEO Expert.

 

Check out Local SEO Solutions for additional tips and suggestions for better rankings. Also, I provide NY Local SEO for clients as well.

 

Google my Business + Bing Places for Business

Getting on Google my Business and Bing Places for Business was my first SEO priority. Search engines display local listings based on a users’ IP address, and one signal is from Google and Bing Places for Business. I bought an office in October 2020 in Saratoga Springs, New York, to set up my headquarters. Basically, after two months of getting my site on both of these directories, I began showing up higher in search results.

 

Outside of the directory listings on Google and Bing, I’ve been optimizing the account a bit. One example of Google my Business optimization is to specify where I serve. Being in upstate New York, I listed off a handful of nearby towns and cities in the Google my Business listing to give Google additional signals of my local rank.

 

Local Directory Submission

Paying money to get a link and a featurette on a website is not a bad thing. While paying for some links is against Google’s quality guidelines, like paying for thousands of links from a link farm, others are alright. One example is getting a link on a local upstate New York directory for digital marketing. The link itself is a NOFOLLOW, so it does not pass any link juice to my site. However, I chose to pay for the listing because it is another space for my business to be listed and gives additional signals to search engines that TM Blast is in New York.

 

Updating Internal Links

Using Screaming Frog, I can crawl my website to see how I internally link content back to my homepage. It turns out I had plenty of pages and blogs on my site connecting the phrase “Boston SE” back to my homepage. To help give Google and Bing more insight that I’m a local company, I updated the internal links to showcase New York instead of Boston.

 

Optimizing Images for Local Search

Image SEO is something many people overlook when coming up with a digital marketing strategy. Images help break up your content and give users a better viewing experience, but they can also help with your SEO. I optimize my photos by making sure the file name and ALT tag match with the content. You can watch this video below, where I go over this marketing strategy in detail.

 

 

Optimizing the Content for Local Search

When it comes to optimizing the content on any website, I use ClearScope and SEMRush. Clearscope offers a powerful and easy-to-use interface to let me know what words to include on the page. From there, I throw my new content in SEMRush to see if there are any additional words and phrases I should include on the page. Since no one SEO tool is perfect, I use multiple tools to find additional content opportunities. 

 

Writing is incredibly difficult, so when I offer SEO to clients I hire my writers to write. They fully understand how to match the tone of any website they work on, so the content fits in perfectly. They are familiar using ClearScope, so I know that the content is also ready from an SEO perspective when it is ready.  Below is a video on how to use ClearScope for your website.

 

 

Competitor Research

Since my business is new to upstate New York, I spend time looking at the competition. Examples of competitor research include reviewing other websites’ backlinks, content, images, price, and more. Most of the time, competitor research does not change my SEO strategy, but I track my competitors’ traffic in SEMRush.

 

Competitor research is one of the services I provide in my marketing service. Understanding what competitors share your keywords is an excellent way of developing a strategy to overtake in the SERP. If you want to learn more about this tactic, you can check out the competitor analysis video below.

 

 

Next Steps

Getting to page 1 of Google for a local keyword is an achievement, but it’s not the end game for me. Getting to the top three positions in Google means about 10% of the monthly search volume will go to my site, so that is my next goal. Having that keyword enter the top of page one of Google will mean more high-quality traffic to my site, which means more leads. I still have more work to do to move that term up higher in Google, but it’s a start.

 

Conclusion

SEO takes time to see results. Moving a keyword from page five to page two of Google looks great on a report, but does not mean traffic You have to be patient and trust the process to see your results’ return on investment ultimately.

 

If you are looking for a Free Website Analysis of your site, you can request that on the contact page. If you know someone interested in SEO please send them my way to earn a commission. TM Blast offers the Best SEO Affiliate Program on the web, where I give 10% of my earnings to you each month for that new client. Feel free to check out that link to learn more about the program! Finally, you should check out the SEO Workshop on the site to get over an hour worth of material to learn about digital marketing!