Tips for Getting a Very Small Site to Rank
-
I am working on a very small (two page) site for a client, and trying to rank for some very competitive local terms. The site is www.arlingtonbuilders.com, and our terms center around local cities (like Arlington) plus "custom homes," "custom renovations," etc. I feel very limited in terms of what I can do on the site, and I'm building citations offsite, but I feel stuck.
I'd love some tips for helping them rank better without building out an entire site.
-
Local SEO for big companies often is really bad. great answer
-
Hey, no worries, happy to help!
Try to keep as many of the questions here as possible as it can then help other folks down the road but certainly PM me any sensitive bits and pieces as well.
Happy Friday!
-
This is terrific! I'm going to come back when I've had some time to think and answer some of your questions and see what we can't sort out. I'll PM you then ... there's definitely some private info I'd rather not throw out here, but all of your advice makes for a great starting point, and I'd love to pick your brain a bit more!
-
I absolutely agree, and would love to see them do more. We've thought about setting up photography for them, just because we really do need more images for marketing. They do gorgeous work and it speaks for itself - IF we can showcase it and IF we can get traffic to the site.
I really appreciate your reply, and the fighter analogy! Thanks!
-
Wow... what a great reply.
I am glad that you gave detailed info on "local search".
Nice work Marcus
-
Sage advice as ever my friend.
-
Hey Jess
Don't despair. There is certainly plenty you can do here and in our experience many larger companies are horrible when it comes to local optimisation so the smaller folks can often do well.
Let me try and give you some tips here.
1. The Lay of the land
Possibly the most important thing you can do here is understand the landscape - what are the terms you want to be visible for? What do the search results look like? Are there paid search adverts? Are they any good? Are there localised organic results? Are they any good? Is there a 7 pack or any local (Map) listings? Do the map listings and the organic listings tally (first in maps & first in organic).
By conducting this fairly simple research you can better understand where you need to place your client and what you need to do to get there.
2. The Site
I hear what you are saying re building out a big site but if your client provides several services and they all have different keywords then you really need a page for each service. These can then follow standard local optimisation practices that ensure that the service + location is highly optimised through each page. The big boys probably do this very badly so this is your guerilla SEO opportunity - the pain of a few extra pages here will salve the pain of failed marketing efforts later!
Possibly the only terms are custom homes and renovations but if that is the case make sure the landing pages serve both of these customer types from a search and more importantly user perspective.
A simple homepage title like the below should deal with that:
Custom Homes & Renovations in Arlrington, TX - BrandName.com
If you need more variation then splitting this out to individual pages will certainly help in everything else you do!
3. Paid Search
If your client is hyper local then chances are paid search is your quick and easy win. Your research should illuminate things here but if there are only generic adverts covering lots of terms and loosely matched landing pages you likely have a real chance to shine here. A few PPC adverts within a very tight geographic area with ad groups for each specific cluster of keywords could give you real exposure real quickly. Then.... factor in some retargeting with some nice banner adverts then for a very reasonable budget you can keep your client at the top of the page where most of the commercial clicks will likely end up anyhow and then follow them around the web to build the clients brand awareness (generally, you will get really good exposure with retargeting and a thousand or so impressions for every click at possibly a tenth of what you are paying for search clicks - value for money!).
One other point here is that having specific landing pages will help with the whole search, advert, landing page experience and likely drive up quality score, CTR, conversion etc which all helps.
3. Organic
It's hard to call this without being where you are and searching what you search but from the quick dig I have done I imagine that a well optimised site, well optimised citations and branded content any other third party authoritative domains that you can leverage will likely do well. For instance, if I google "custom renovations in arlington" then I see listings from Yelp, & Facebook dominating the top 5. So... well optimised citations and social profiles look like they could be a good starting point. And of course, making sure the site is 100% dialled in. Think Yelp, Pinterest, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc - all opportunities to grab some front page real estate. Tie this into your retargeting strategies as well and you are starting to drive that all important awareness.
4. Local
Local is more than likely an opportunity and searches from here (UK) seem to localise (show a 7 pack) for "home renovations arlington" etc so you need to get the local side of things dialled in. Rather than rattle on I suggest picking up the local visibility guide from Phil Rozek that covers off all the on and off site things you need to do.
In a nutshell
- ensure google understands the address & determine a NAP
- ensure this is consistent across the web and all citation sources
- get a good business description that mentions the keywords in a nice, natural way and get that on all citations + pictures etc. From here the first result for home renovations arlington is a yelp listing with one star (opportunity!)
- consider whitespark or brightlocal to help with the above
- optimise the site (all two pages of it) for local search - copy, page titles, nap on each page, schema etc
Then... wait, this is not an overnight fix.
5. Reputation
Given the local angle we have to consider reputation. What does it look like out there? Does anyone have reviews? Are they good? bad? I see only bad reviews and not many of them so devise a review strategy with the client. Get 5 reviews on the Google+ local listing and you have 5 gold stars on Google which none of the competition has. You may not be first but if you are the only one with folks saying good things then..
Also, on the bleeding edge, engagement with the Google+ pages seems to drive visibility as well so anything you can do to encourage (not manipulate or fake) reviews and engagement with your G+ local listing will only help (and it can be quite quick so don't discount this).
6. Social
Also, social offers an opportunity to really engage with folks. Get pictures from your client. Offer tips. Demonstrate your (their) credibility and experience. One post a week could help but just optimising those social profiles and listening could be a good start (I know this is not always easy with these kind of clients which is all the more reason to do it well as the competition are ghastly at this).
I hope that helps. I state all of this with the caveat that I am in the UK and started at 5am today which puts me sixteen and a half hours into my day - you can also add a couple of glasses of red wine to that picture. Happy to help here or PM me if you need to keep bits and bobs private.
Take care and don't let it stress you out - from here it looks wide open for your client
Marcus -
....trying to rank for some very competitive local terms... rank better without building out an entire site.
You have a "fighter wannabe" who is skinny, untrained, smokes, weak,.... and he wants to fight the heavyweight champ.
You can give him pep talks and send him into the fight or you can delay the fight and get him ready.
For this client I would explain that fighting on the web is a battle of resources. He ain't got much right now, so don't expect much.
But, you can point out some ways to get some resources and suggest what those resources might be. This company is building lots of attractive homes. Each of them can be a marketing message for the community where it is located and a marketing message for the style of home. Both of those are optimization keywords.
Getting a photographer to visit the homes, take lots of photos then someone at the company who knows about the homes can dictate some information about each photo. Get that together in an optimized page for "Custom Home in East Arlington - Split Level".
These pages serve many purposes. They can be used to market the home. They can be used to showcase great work and demonstrate the range of homes that this company builds. They can be used to showcase a presence in many neighborhoods. They will collect traffic for their keywords. People will pin them on Pintrest, People will share them on Facebook... We like this!... We bought this!.. Yay!... This is beautiful! Subcontractors might refer to them, real estate agents might refer to them. Any builder who does not want that is nuts.... dumb even.
Tell this client. YOU NEED TO DO THIS! If this small investment sells ONE HOME you got your money back many times over.
I put more effort into sellin' stuff for $5 than they are spending trying to sell $500,000 homes. Duh?
-
I'd love some tips for helping them rank better without building out an entire site.
All you can do then is ensure that all on-page SEO is optimized and try to create word-of-mouth traction for external links.
However, if any competitor comes into your niche and does 'build out' the website, they will have an easy time outranking you.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site folder hierarchy 2016 ?
Hi, Would you say that based only on the "folder structure" that "somedomain.com/focus-keyword" has better conditions to rank well than "otherdomain.com/general-keyword/focus-keyword" ? Using Yoast SEO for WordPress when creating automatic XML sitemaps, URLS with subfolders seems to be getting lower priority. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Agguk0 -
301 Redirect to external site
Hi guys, We have a client who is getting their website redesigned through us. They are discontinuing couple of their services which will not get featured in the new site. They are fairly well ranked for these services and my client wishes to 301 redirect these pages to an external site owned by his friend so that they benefit out of the ranking. The question is: Will my client's website's general ranking get affected due to 301 redirecting to an external site? The external site is not spammy or red-flagged by Google (at the moment, at least). Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | RameshNair
Ramesh Nair0 -
Do https sites rank as well as http sites?
2 Questions: Question 1 - We currently have our entire site running on https (the http pages 301-redirect to the https versions). Assuming that the https pages load as quickly as the http versions, is it a problem that the entire site is https? The only official answer I've been able to find is this 2011 video where Matt Cutts basically says "I don't know" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFo4ytOk8M Question 2 - Is there any problem with having half our site running on https only (with the http pages redirected), and the other half (our blog) running on http only (with all https blog pages redirected to the http versions)? Thanks in advance for any input! Justin
On-Page Optimization | | JustinClark0 -
Site is not ranking for a particular keyword !!
One of my site is ranking for all the main keywords except one. This keyword is just a variant of those keywords which are all ranking in top 10 (page 1) in Google. Why is it happening? Does Google punishes site for one keyword. I know competition of keyword matters but other keywords with similar competition are ranking. And even the site is very well optimized for this keyword (titles and site copy without any stuffing) Any Solutions ?
On-Page Optimization | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Canonical Tag for Ecommerce Site
My client has an ecommerce site with over 1,000 products. We have a ton of duplicates because of how their ecommerce system handles product pages. Each time a new product is added, there is a default product page created (/product/12345-product-name.aspx). Each time that product is added to a specific product category, another, separate URL is created (/product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx). The site has over 1,000 duplicates (at least one for each product) because of how the ecommerce system structures URLs. We are unable to have unique content on /products/12345-product-name.aspx and /product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx because both pages pull from the same database. Their webteam informed me that they can't implement canonical tags on individual pages, they must be dynamically added to the site all at once. Thus forcing me to choose all of the default product pages as primary URLs. Both types of URLs are getting indexed and the product URLs that were added to the categories are SEO friendly so I'm leary to eliminate one or the other with a canonical tag or a no index. Suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | DynoSaur0 -
Meta Description Tags and Rankings
Hi there, I have a lot of pages set up on my site but most have no content. If I add the correct meta description tags to those pages, will that help rank for the root domain? I am slowly getting the content added for each page but wanted to see if I could boost rankings in the meantime. http://www.petmedicalcenter.com Example: most of pages under "Services" are blank. Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | PMC-3120870 -
Internal link structure for large site
I am working on a very large directory site which is undergoing a complete redesign. I am considering the internal link structure from first principles. When a site has over 100,000 pages, how do you ensure that each page is linked to from somewhere so that there are no orphans? Trying to get my head around the structure makes my brain hurt. Any tips?
On-Page Optimization | | mascotmike0 -
Small Site Title Tag / Structure Question
Bit embarrassed to ask this question, but will ask it anyway! I have done some quite reasonable basic SEO for clients in the south of Spain with small sites and had reasonable success. My wife and I came to the Pyrenees in the south of France to take over and run bed and breakfast in a lovely old farm and some self-catering accommodation in one of the pastures (with my continuing to do a bit of work for clients too). We are running and developing the place for friends who are away 3-4 years. They had an abysmal site, so we designed one to together: http:www.loubetaspyrenees.com/ (I have given the French version because it's what I am most concerned with - there is an English version in case I can tempt you to a holiday here!) It's been very well received by users, so that's great. We have the place on about 12 agencies amd almost all link to our site, so it serves as a good showcase. Here's my issue (for the French site): It went online 11th Feb and is already doing well for more "long tail" searches, and for more local and specific searches, but is proving slow on our prime search terms. The prime market is French, and they key terms are "Gîtes" for the self-catering accommodation, and "Chambres d'Hôtes" for the Bed and Breakfast. Our key Geographical term for the French market is "Hautes Pyrenees" - it's a departmental area. In Google.fr We are around result 100 out of 600k results for "Chambres d'hôtes hautes pyrénées" and aren't in the first 200 for "Gîtes Hautes Pyrénées". This is a competitive market and we are competing with optimised and long-established agencies but still hope to do better. I know I am losing from poorly constructed title tags cannibablising the results, but cannot see how to solve this: Home Page Title tag: "Gîtes et Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées | les Baronnies" I have two main pages on the Gîtes: Gîte for 2-3 people Title tag "Gîte dans les Hautes Pyrénées pour 2-3 personnes en les Baronnies"
On-Page Optimization | | PeterMurray
Gîte for 3-9 people Title tag "Location Gîte dans les Baronnies Pyrénées pour groupe 3-9 personnes" ("Location" means rental) Google understood the above and put us no 1 out of over 1miillion results for a search for a gite for 9 people in the south west of France ("gite sud ouest 9 personne") And 2 pages for the Bed and Breakfast: B&B in the farm building: "Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées dans une ferme restaurée"
B&B in gite apartments with sitting rooms: "Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées avec salon et terrasse" I am not sure how to handle the titles for the Home Page and for the 4 subpages - sounds silly, but have you any advice on how I might handle these titles better? I thought of using more general terms on the Home Page ("Holiday accommodation in the ..."), but on such a small site (18 pages in each language version) I feel that would be unwise. It seems I must try to find some way of differentiating the titles on the other 4 pages so that i am not cannibalising but where there are so few alternatives I am not sure how! Oh dear, sorry this was so long!0