As a small business owner, you know that supporting local businesses is a big deal. And in Salt Lake City, we love doing that. Local businesses do pretty well here because people actively try to shop small. But because this is a relatively large valley, it’s sometimes hard to know what businesses are out there. Someone who lives all the way out in Daybreak won’t always know what new businesses are showing up in the 9th & 9th area. Those who live in Sugarhouse aren’t always aware of the small businesses that have popped up in SoDa Row. So, how do you make sure that you’re hitting all corners of the Salt Lake Valley?
Social media is a great way, of course. But that can only take you so far. You need to make sure that your website is easy to find. How do you do that? Through our favorite tool, search engine optimization (SEO). As a Salt Lake City based company, we want to make sure that our fellow SLC businesses are as visible as possible. So, let’s talk about SEO together.
A quick explanation of SEO
Of course, we wouldn’t just throw you into all of this without some explanation as to what SEO even is. It’s a pretty industry-specific term and we’re not going to just assume that you know all of that stuff. In all reality, until recently there wasn’t any reason for you know what any of this stuff is. But 2020 has shown that we are incredibly dependent on the internet for so many things, but especially for our businesses. So, let’s give you a quick rundown of SEO.
Search engine optimization sounds complex at first. But if your break it down, it is surprisingly simple. You know what a search engine is. It’s what you use to look things up on the internet. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and a few others (but in all honesty, who uses any search engine but Google?) are all search engines. The idea behind optimizing your site for them is to manipulate things so that you show up on the first page, possibly as the first entry, of a search. But how do you do that?
The best way to answer that question is by explaining how search engines work. Whatever word, phrase, or question that you type into a search engine is known as a keyword (even if it’s multiple words). The search engine uses that to scour the internet for any site or page that has mention of that keyword. They rank it by how many mentions of the keyword is there, how many other words are around it, and if it appears to be useful information. The right balance of mention of the keyword and surrounding words and the most useful information gets to go to the top. There are also other factors that search engines look at (plagiarism, links to other sites, etc.), but keyword is the biggest thing.
How Avant8 can help you boost your SEO
This is all well and fine but managing SEO in a way to see significant results takes a lot of time and effort. So, we wanted to give you a taste of what we, Salt Lake City’s best SEO company (in our opinion, anyway), can do for you.
The first thing that always needs to happen when starting out with SEO is determining what your focused keywords will be. Together, we will help you decide what keywords will help you best. Generally, they are words and phrases that describe your company, but are not overly broad. For example, if you own a coffee shop in Salt Lake City that is well-known for your fancy coffee drinks, your keywords are likely going to be things like “coffee shop salt lake,” “coffee shop latte,” or “good coffee shop in Salt Lake City.” These are terms that are specific enough to narrow things down a bit and are likely search with decent regularity. But if you were to go for something like “coffee shop,” that is just far too broad, and you would be fighting for rankings with Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts.
Once we have all of your keywords figured out, we would form a plan with you to boost that SEO. That plan could look like a number of different things, depending on your company and its needs. Some of our clients have us write blogs kind of like this one. We produce and publish a bunch of blogs for their website every month with focuses on their keywords. This helps out with the SEO because the search engines love to see a lot linked, factual information surrounding the keywords. They also like seeing the keywords in posts that are at least 1,000 words (though we usually exceed that).
Sometimes our clients don’t really have a good business for blogs. That hypothetical coffee shop, for example. There aren’t many blogs that people would be willing to read that we could write from the keyword “coffee shop latte.” So, for those clients we work with them on the content of their website. We help them make sure that their site has the keywords scattered throughout their site in appropriate ways. We may even help them out with their social media. We make posts for them with captions that have the keywords in the caption and in the hashtags.
If you’re a Salt Lake City based company looking to get your SEO moving and have better visibility, then look no further. Avant8 is here to help guide you through the seemingly murky waters of SEO. Though, if you’re not Salt Lake based, we certainly won’t send you away. Avant8 is also a web design company in Salt Lake City, which means we could help you with any of your website needs as well!