By hiring an SEO company for your business in Irvine, you increase the likelihood that you’ll be better placed in the SERPs and that you’ll get more site visitors. But some SEO companies are more experienced than others, and you want one that is extremely efficient in some fundamental areas.
Today we’ll look at three of those areas and explain why they matter so much from an optimization standpoint. When you’re interviewing SEO agency candidates, be sure and make these points of emphasis.
Enticing Descriptions and Meta Titles
You want your domain name to be perfect for your company. It might simply be the company’s name, or it might be some descriptive term that perfectly epitomizes what your business represents. What you never want is to have a domain name that has nothing to do with your Irvine-based company.
The same is going to be true for your meta titles and descriptions for each of the pages on your site. There should be unique meta titles and descriptions for each page on your site, and if there isn’t, that’s the first place that you’ll want your SEO company to focus.
Ideally, the descriptions and meta titles should contain keywords, for which your SEO company will have to do research. They should lure search engine users into wanting to click-through to your site. They should also not exceed the length allowed by Google. If they are too long then Google will truncate them, so your Irvine SEO company needs to be aware of that as well.
The meta title and tags should also sound natural. If they don’t, then it’s probably likely that you tried to stuff them with keywords, or perhaps if you farmed out the work, then they were written by someone who was not a native English speaker. Make sure that you have an SEO company that can correct these common mistakes.
Polish Your Existing Copy
There is a thought sometimes by businesses in Irvine who hire a new SEO company to tell them to add content to your website as quickly as possible. You might feel like a lot of new material will mean more visitors to your site, because they’ll want to see the new blogs that you’ve posted, or whatever else it might be.
While it’s great to get some new content on your site, it can be equally helpful to tell your SEO company to polish the material you already have. One thing to remember is that longer does not always equal better. Every page on your site is not going to justify a 2,000-word essay. You may only require a couple of hundred words, just so long as you make those words count.
Different pages might warrant different lengths and styles of content, but here are some hard-and-fast rules of which your Irvine SEO company should be aware.
There should be at least some copy on every page. Some of them might not require very much, but there should never be a page that has images and nothing else.
There should be one H1 tag on each page. The H1 tag will often be the same as the meta title, but there’s nothing that says that it has to be. The H1 tag will serve as the page’s heading.
Spelling and grammar must be correct. Any sloppiness in this area will not reflect well on your company and brand.
Do not shoehorn keywords into your copy. It’s vital for you to use keywords, but your SEO company should also understand that they must be inserted in a way that seems natural. Sticking them in the middle of a sentence where they don’t make any sense is frowned upon by Google and could get you penalized.
Your SEO company should also know to use H2-H6 tags wherever they are appropriate. These can be thought of as the subheadings on your page. They create a hierarchical structure for each page just as you are building one for your site as a whole. Remember that anything that contributed to the orderly look and feel of your site is to your advantage.
Citation Gathering
The existence of citations on the web for your business and its website are going to be very helpful to you. Because of that, you need your SEO company to work to cultivate those for you. Keep in mind that Google uses off-page SEO factors as one of the ways it ranks your site.
The way your SEO company can get you citations is to make sure that your business is listed in places that are relevant to it. Don’t just assume that because your business has been around for a while that it’s going to start being listed in local directories. Often, you must be proactive to make that happen.
Citations often come in the form of NAP, or name, address, and phone number. Some of them have more information than that, but NAP is the basics, and often that’s good enough to get you website visits or more customers for your brick-and-mortar location.
Your SEO company should make sure that you’re on Google My Business first. Then you should look to other popular listing sites like Thomson Local, HotFrog, and Acxiom. Just be sure that your business is listed in the right category for each of these, and that the NAP details are consistent and accurate across each one.
The Irvine SEO company that can be the most useful to you is the one that knows how to go about these optimization chores expediently and skillfully. Often, getting more site visitors and customers in your store locations isn’t about posting a barrage of new content to your site. Instead, you should be focused on optimizing what is already there, making sure that it is crawlable, and becoming as visible as possible everywhere online where customers in your niche are likely to be spending their time.