So, you’ve just made some content for your site. Great. Your next likely step will be to make sure that it’s SEO optimized so you can maximize the number of eyeballs that it can come across, right?

But SEO isn’t just done and dusted when you insert the necessary SEO keywords or align your content with the right tags. It’s something that you can keep on improving with every aspect of your content.

And what’s the best way to do that on the webpage with lots of written content? The answer is images. That’s why we’re taking a deep dive into some image SEO tips that always come in handy.

Represent A Thousand Words

Virtually anyone can understand the importance of an image. It’s there to explain something that might not be easily said or understood with a lot of words. It also serves as a way to vary the flow of the content to keep the reader’s attention.

That’s all great from an editorial perspective. But you might find yourself asking how SEO plays into all this. The answer is relatively simple. See, search engines aren’t just about typing in queries anymore. They’re much more than that. These days, you can use image search to find content related to an image.

With the advancement of search engines like Google, it’s only a matter of time before image SEO becomes the new norm. That’s why it’s always helpful to get your foot in the door early.

Choose Wisely

Just as you can explain something using different words, you can represent something using different images. Just because two images fit your content’s text doesn’t mean they will deliver the same kind of message.

Whether it’s thumbnail image or one of the embedded images in your content, they will all play an important part. It’s the same for how someone might pick up magazines because the cover enticed them.

A good image will not only bring in more audience to your article; it might even get them to stay there. An enticing embedded image might just be the catalyst for someone to stop skimming through and actually pause to pay attention to the content itself.

Give It a Name

Giving your picture a name other than its default filename may not make sense on paper. But it really makes a big impact when your SEO results come back.

Google itself lays credence to it just by how their search engine works. While Google has the technology to scan images for a rough idea, it’s the file names that really clue in the algorithm to what the images are about.

The best part about this is you don’t have to go all out with stuffing in keywords. As long as you have a good enough description of what’s in the image, Google’s machine learning will take advantage of it. DSC00160.jpg might seem good enough to you, but it’ll really matter if you take the time to name it mona_lisa.jpg.

Optimize the Image

Sometimes, what’s more, important than whether or not you have an image is whether or not it can load properly. It seems like such a small issue, but it can matter so much in the grand scheme of things.

There are a few different file types you can go for when it comes to images for a web page. The most common ones are JPG, PNG, and GIF. Each of these has a different way of storing visual information. When choosing the format for yourself, you have to pit quality against file size.

In a perfect world, we would all want our images to be the highest possible level of quality they can be. But this can be counter-intuitive for webpages.

Higher quality images may not load as quickly or fail to load entirely. If your audience doesn’t have high-speed internet or use mobile data to view your content, they may get the raw end of the deal.

That’s why it’ll be crucial to make sure that you have the right file size to speed up your load times for your webpage and deliver a better experience overall.

Scale Appropriately

When you design a webpage, the goal is always to make it so that it all fits in nicely together. But if your image is too large and shoots off your borders or is too small to see, then that’s a problem. The key to managing your images is to scale them appropriately to fit the dimensions of your webpage.

Keep in mind that this will change depending on the kind of device used to access your webpage. Someone opening the webpage will have a much smaller screen resolution than someone opening it on a computer.

In cases like this, it’s helpful to have images in different resolutions and sizes that can be changed out on the fly. You can do this fairly easily with WordPress, where it’s done most of the time automatically.

Add in Final Touches

Once you have everything set up how you like it, you can go ahead to put in the finishing touches to your images.

The first thing to do is to reduce the file size of your images further. This can be attempted using Photoshop or any other editing program. You can compress the image using optimization algorithms that can drastically reduce the image’s file size without bringing in a big difference to the quality, where it will make a difference in your load time and audience retention.

Another important step is to add in title text and alt text for the image. Alt-text is the descriptive text the user will see if the image doesn’t load for some reason. Whereas Title text is the text that you get when you hover the cursor over an image. Both of these will be the final stepping stone to make sure your SEO sits where it needs to for your desired image.

All the different types and scopes of businesses need Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but service-based businesses find it more difficult to survive in the digital competition. For such businesses, designing a functional SEO strategy is the key to establish strong online presence, credibility, and audience trust. SEO comprises of several functional and visual elements which are significant for a service-based business to gather more traffic and increase chances of conversions.

A few such elements include focused keywords, meta descriptions, great user experience, faster loading pages, and alike. All of such factors add to the strengthened position of a service-based business among the competitors.

Following are the detailed reasons for why a service-based business needs SEO:

1.    Content Marketing

Service-based businesses mostly focus on their brand awareness through content marketing. While it seems to be the easiest marketing strategy, it needs a lot of effort to be really effective. As a business, you need to pay great attention towards the keywords your competitors are emphasizing on. It becomes important to include your services, locations, and other such factors in your content.

It requires good content marketing and SEO skills to incorporate these keywords into basic content as well as meta description, titles, and headlines, etc. Also, SEO tells where you should place what type of content. As an emerging trend, service-based businesses are also creating visual content such as images and videos. It is important to maintain a balance between written and visual content on your web pages.

This way, SEO contributes greatly to content marketing. It helps shape your strategy and make improvements according to changing trends in service-based business industry and digital environment.

2.    Structuring your web pages

As a service-based business, you must know that it is not possible to incorporate all your information, services, contact, and reviews on a single page. Your website needs to be divided into several web pages. As each of those pages has something new to offer, it should be well-structured.

A well-structured website allows ease of navigation and greatly adds to user experience. SEO dictates how web pages should be structured, how much information should be delivered, how to describe your services, how should negative space be utilized, and how should your offer navigational pathway. All of these are simple and basic SEO requirements, which, when incorporated, deliver beneficial results for service-based businesses.

3.    Simpler URLs

Here’s another significant benefit that SEO renders for service-based businesses. It helps design simpler URLs. Such URLs are easy to search, locate, and understand. Simply by clicking on a URL, you know where it is going to lead you.

This is especially important when establishing marketing and ad campaigns. As internet users click on URLs you have provided, they are most likely going to convert into potential customers.

For example,

www.abcservices.com/services/kitchencountertops is a simple and easily understandable URL. As the user click, he knows what kind of services he is going to come across. As SEO asks businesses to follow such practices, all of these simple things add to the overall better usability and sales.

4.    Effective link building

Link building is a critical factor that SEO puts great emphasis on. However, most people think that link building is important for product-based businesses only. It is time to realize that service-based businesses can equally benefit from link building. This enhances the need for SEO for service-based businesses.

Through link building, you can introduce your business and the services you offer in a better way to your audience. A number of bloggers and content creators write and produce content on different types of services. Linking your web pages to such an informative and productive website can make your business reach a wider audience. While the content offers benefits of a particular service, your business can deliver the needs.

Moreover, link building helps you establish credibility among content creators that attract more traffic and have more followers. This way, it helps in brand awareness and credibility.

5.    Increased traffic

One of the major concerns of service-based businesses is that they do not attract high traffic. And so, it isn’t very easy to generate leads and get conversions. As traffic is the first step, SEO helps focus on the traffic you receive.

Through focused keywords, good layout, easy navigation, and effective marketing campaigns, SEO increases your ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). As you rank high on a search engine, more visitors will be coming to your web pages. This increases the traffic by large, which in turn enhances your leads and conversions.

6.    Data collection and analysis

SEO offers effective and comprehensive data collection and analysis. It compels service-based businesses to gather and interpret data through Google Analytics and other data analysis tools and software.

As product-based businesses have a great focus on these tools to improve their sales, service-based businesses can also increase their profits by adopting such tools.

As you gather, interpret, and analyze data, it explains where your website needs improvements. Also, you can run several tests that SEO recommends, such as A/B Testing, that offer valuable insights into the final results of a campaign even before you launch the campaign.

7.    Better customer service

Last but not least, customer service is an important aspect of a service-based business. Visitors judge service-based businesses over the reviews and testimonials their customers have to offer. Better your customer service, the more the number of customers you attract.

Without excellent customer service, you might receive enough traffic, but you will never be able to get enough customers. Thus, SEO is important to manage your customer service and make it better every passing minute.

Final Thoughts

SEO has great importance for service-based businesses. From content marketing to customer service, it plays a crucial role in managing your web pages, content, traffic, conversions, profits, speed, reviews, and whatnot. If your business is service-based, it is time you start focusing on a sound SEO strategy. It delivers better profits and a higher ROI. This way, you can stand ahead of your competitors.

The digital environment follows a faster pace. Your business operating in this environment needs to be innovative, updated, and trending all the time. It is important to know the current market trends, learn about the preferences of your target audience, and stay keen regarding the position and performance of your competitors. At the top, you need to be aware of your internal performance to maintain high quality.

Traditionally, all of this has been not very easy, but today, Search Engine Optimization Calgary (SEO) is here to make things easier and productive for you. As a business owner, having a sound SEO strategy is all you need for enhanced business progress, larger profits, and higher ROI.

Even though SEO consulting  is only a process to decide your search engine ranking, it can act as an effective tool all along. Knowing how it works can help you greatly. Before that, you need to know when your business needs SEO. Following indicators determine if your business now needs SEO to progress further:

1.    You don’t know how much traffic you are getting and from where

While your business website has maintained a presence online, you must know how much traffic you are getting and from where. Businesses work every day to increase the traffic on their websites. It allows more visitors and, thus, more conversions. If you do not know the size and demographics of your traffic, it’s time you take help from SEO analytics.

Various SEO tools such as Google Analytics helps you know your traffic, audience, and their online behaviors, especially regarding your website. You get to understand and improve a lot of things such as bounce rate, click-through rate (CTR), and whatnot.

2.    Your search engine ranking is declining

If you observe your search engine ranking is declining and you have fallen to a lower page, your business is in dire need of SEO. It is important to learn about the requirements of SEO and fulfill them to maintain your search engine, and keep improving it.

Various SEO requirements such as great content, visual content, better user interface, faster loading speed, internal and external links, etc. are important to comply with.

3.    You are getting lesser leads and conversions than before

If your business experiences lesser leads and conversions all of a sudden, it is likely due to abandoning SEO requirements. As long as businesses focus on SEO, lead generation and conversions take place at a good rate. A decrease in the rate means you should focus on SEO more than ever before.

4.    Your content is outdated and unattractive

Search engines prefer updated and engaging content. In this fast-paced digital environment, great content is what attracts your audience. If your business content is not updated, images and videos are not added, and you are not getting enough traffic, your business performs poorly.

Keeping up to the SEO requirement of captivating and topnotch content is significant. If yours is not, hold up to SEO. Know what SEO demands and update your business website accordingly.

5.    You have not worked on link building until now

Link building is another important thing to do for online businesses. It is a means to interdepend and interconnect with other businesses, blogs, and significant online websites. There are two types of link building, internal and external. Both are equally important to attract and engage visitors.

If your business has not worked on link building until now, learn how important it is for SEO. As you expand the reach with link building and establish a strong online presence, SEO comes into play. It recognizes your efforts and improves your ranking. However, link building is a bit tricky. You need to be careful when implying and choosing web pages to link. SEO analyzes the linked pages carefully.

6.    You have not established reviews and testimonials on your website

A good way to know regarding the performance of your business is by establishing reviews and testimonials. It is critical to allow visitors and customers to leave feedback. While a positive review establishes your credibility, a negative review makes room for improvements. Either way, it is beneficial for your business.

Moreover, it is a crucial aspect of SEO as SEO believes in gathering customer feedback. It increases your accessibility and helps you hold onto an effective SEO strategy.

7.    You do not have a proper plan to follow

Establishing a business and running it in this online world are two different things. Running your business takes more effort and focus. From marketing to sales and customer service, you need to have a proper plan to follow. Without a guide, you cannot do well in this competitive business environment.

If your business does not acquire a plan, it is best to create a sound and practical SEO strategy. You can find the flaws and limitations of your business through any SEO tool, a software or a human expert. Without an SEO strategy, it is difficult for your business to have a reputable online presence.

8.    Your social media marketing campaigns do not bore fruits

If you allow your content to be shareable and have created several social media marketing campaigns, you must be expecting good results. However, if you do not end up with one, know that you lack somewhere at SEO. With increasing competitors and toughening business environment, it has become important to focus on SEO. A focused SEO strategy is the one that is linked to all the domains and aspects of your business. Having that created will end you up with sweet fruits.

Final Thoughts

It is easy to know when your business needs SEO. All you need to do is keep an eye on the performance of your website. With rapidly changing trends and online business needs, you never know when someone takes your position. Staying aware of everything that’s happening in the online world helps you shape your SEO strategy accordingly. This way, you comply with SEO needs and requirements really well, which, in turn, delivers higher profits and ROI for your business.

Matching your local SEO Services to your business type can become a simple and streamlined process, if you could follow some of the guidelines from search engines like Google. The first step starts with the keyword research and content preparation. You need to search for the standard keywords and phrases that have least competition and searches per month. Then you need to group them with relevance to your business, products and service categories. Then you need to create your content around these keywords and phrases.

• Avoid too much of focus on keywords and concentrate on the content value.
• Use only those keywords that are relevant to the content in the web pages. You could use the others in your blogs, social media pages and other content based links.
• Avoid over-stuffing of keywords and balance the flow of information in the content.
• Use the keywords in combination with the city ad street names in the content. Specify the address, phone and add the location map to the web pages.
• Use synonyms to standard keywords around it.
• Make the content conform to grammatical, contextual and relevancy standards of Google.

Google My Business Standards – Listing and Indexing

• Web-Pages: Avoid filling all the information within few web pages. Your website could have as many pages as the number of products and services you offer. Make sure of adding pages for About, products (landing sub page), photo gallery, customer listing and testimonials, links to YouTube videos, service page (landing sub page) and the sitemap (most important page). You need to include the Name, Address and Phone (NAP) of your local business location in every page along with the link to the location map (preferably on the Contact page). Your home page should connect to all the pages and the sub pages may have interlinks with each other and to the home page. The users should able to navigate from the sitemap to every page and vice versa. You need to use Hypertext links between the pages apart from the drop down menu. This is because the search engines can’t see the menu in the web pages. Index the site on the search engines including all the pages with the sitemap. You could use XML coding and design for the sitemap and automate its updates whenever a new page is created or the content in the existing pages is edited. Make the pages responsive in design and conform to Google standards for text color, font, back and fore color, image size and clarity etc. The images should have main keywords relevant to the specific theme in the image Meta-data like title and descriptions. You could follow the same guidelines for the page title and Meta description.  Google says it has stopped looking into the Meta tags and back links. But still you could add them just to be on safer.
• Keywords: Add relevant keywords to the product pages along with city name, street name and other related words and phrases. For example, you can add the keyword Italian Pizza + in + Great Western Highway + Sydney + Australia. You could specify the local address and phone number in the same paragraph or the next. Similarly you can use specific keywords for every product and service page in the same manner. This approach increases the page visibility and page ranking, since every page relates to the specific products and services of your business. The other key element you need to add is your business name at the beginning of the keyword. Include your business name in the Meta descriptions.

Content Quality – Relevance and Continuity

The content quality plays a key role in attracting your potential audiences. It is important to keep the sentences short, relevant and simple. Avoid exaggeration and use of too many adjectives. At the same time you need to project the uniqueness of your products and seo services.

• Client Testimonials: Adding client testimonials to every web page (relevant to the context of the page) can enhance the readers’ trust considerably. They can attract more number of visitors to the specific pages. The page ranking and rating will naturally move up.
• Images and Videos: The images and video links you add to the pages need to be relevant to the text content of that page. For example, you may write about the technical specifications of a washing machine in a page. Make sure the images show the genuine parts diagrams (or pictures) of your product. Avoid borrowing from stock photos and use genuine photographs. You may need to hire a professional photographer. Follow the Google guidelines for the image size, resolution, color, magnification levels and other parameters accurately. Follow the YouTube guidelines for your videos and make it look professional in its approach. You can also add a transcription of the videos on the linking page and insert the relevant localized keywords into that content.
• Text Content: Break the text content into smaller and readable paragraphs. Add infographics and tables wherever required. Real time technical and statistical data can make the content relevant and interesting. You can expect the search engine ranking and customer rating to move up further on the scale now.

Social Media Connections – Inroads to Local Audiences

• Social Signals: Social signals are the views, likes, shares, reviews, comments and the ratings from the audiences in the social media. They could be related to the social media pages, blog content, website content, videos etc. Quality and relevance can generate more number of views. The audiences will share the links only when they like it. They may also write reviews and post comments. These parameters will naturally increase the page and site ranking in the search engines.
• Blog Links: Create genuine blogs with original content for the products and services listed on your website. Make sure you write only about the technical perspectives and user experiences, along with links to and from authority web pages. Once this part is achieved, the local SEO automatically gets connected to your business type.

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How using Longtail keywords benefit your Do it yourself SEO

Longtail keywords are perhaps better thought of as a phrase or a short sentence rather than a keyword. Longtail keyword are over three words in length and can even be as much as five.

These keywords give a much more specific search pertaining to the website they are used on, this is because the combination of the words together is less likely to appear elsewhere on the internet. If you think about this in the way in which a code with more characters is harder to crack, so will a combination of words be more specific to that particular website.

Longtail keywords also provide the searcher with much more relevant content for their search. If an individual was to search the keywords “car rental” they may get a car rental service which doesn’t operate in the area they are visiting, if however the same individual was to search “car rental in Iceland” which is a Longtail keyword, they are more or less guaranteed to get what they were looking for.

In this way, the use of Longtail keyword can lead to both an increase in traffic and an increase in revenue.

Your traffic will be increased because it will give you a lower amount of competition for that specific phrase. The competition for the term “car rental” is very high, however the competition for the keywords “car rental” followed by your location is likely to be lower and will drive traffic to you. Your ranking in a search engine is much more likely to be increased if you use search terms which are specific to you.

The traffic you will also drive to your website will be of a much higher quality; this is because the people who have entered that search term want the specific service you provide, that’s why they have entered it into a search engine. These people are much more likely to be pleased with the results of the search and are far more likely to actually want to spend money with you.

Don’t  Obsess about  driving in Traffic
It’s no good for a person to be directed towards your site, only to find what they were presented with when they got there was not what they were expecting. This is just a waste of the potential customers time, your time and a waste of bandwidth. It also makes the internet harder to navigate and may even damage the business prospects of companies who are not in direct competition with you. In other words, nobody benefits. It might leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that your web traffic is up, but that’s all it is, it hasn’t led to a sale or any benefit to your business. All you have done by attracting someone to your site who doesn’t want to be there is successfully annoy someone.

For this reason, Longtail keywords just make the internet a more pleasant place for everyone who uses it. You manage to attract someone to your site who is likely to want to spend money with you. The customer is also happy because they have found what they were looking for in a timely manner.

The key to using Longtail keywords is the exact same principle as any keyword, You should thoroughly research the term first and take into account how much competition these keywords have.

You should not be too obsessed with how many searches that term receives. What you are looking for the most, is searches with a very low competition. If this search term applies directly to your business, these people searching that term and finding you will be far more valuable than using other keywords.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t aim for the term to be well searched, but don’t get too caught up in how many searches the term has received. Concentrate instead on how relevant the search is to the services you offer the customer.

To do this, think of terms that a person may be looking for if they would wish to find your business. In cases where you offer a niche product or service then this may mean that you will find it very easy. It will be very straight forward for you to find terms not often used by other website.

In the case where you offer a common product

For example:

You are a web design company and the internet is obviously not an unusual place to find a web design company.

you will have to put more thought into separating yourself from the competition. What you could do in this case is to think of services you offer which may be more uncommon.

If you specialize in web design for small business, then “web design for small companies” may be a fantastic and relevant search term, with low competition for you.

Adding your location is always a good thing to do, there are many web design companies on the internet, there may not be many in your local area for example “web design companies  in red Deer” as a longtail Keyword .

You may also want to combine services you offer.

For example:

“Web design and SEO”. This term is likely to have far less competition for searches for the individual services alone.

If you are smart, with a little bit of luck and you do your research, you could by chance happen upon a phrase which will massively increase your revenue and even make you head and shoulders above all of your competitors.

To sum it up, Longtail keywords have the potential to bring in more people who actually wanted to find you, if you offer niche services, or services in a specific location, you could benefit from using them a great deal over using traditional terms. What’s more, every extra hit you get on your website is far more likely to translate into increased revenue.