There are a number of variables involved when it comes to your site’s placement in search engine results. The term for this is SEO (search engine optimization). There is no 100% method to ensure that your site is ranked at the top of the results, so beware of anyone who tells you that they can guarantee this. There are however, best practices that should be put in place to help you get there. We take all of this into consideration when developing our sites. Some aspects of a well-developed site include proper meta tags, heading tags and other information that exists under what the user sees in their web browser. One thing that search engines value quite heavily is a steady flow of text content and information, like articles, news stories or things of that nature. When we combine best practices during the development, along with the article content that we provide, we have found that it helps to get our sites ranked very well. Some things that we would do to target specific areas or products would be to pepper extra relevant keywords into the site and adjust the meta information accordingly. Keep in mind though, that if someone were to search for ‘[your service] near me,’ google will take their geographic location into account and favor business that are closer to where the searcher is located. Another challenge would be the density of similar businesses in a specific area. It’s much more difficult to compete again ten companies’ websites than three.
Generally, best practices in coding and fresh content are key factors when trying to get a site ranked highly on google. There are other things that could be done to give you an extra edge, such as ‘claiming’ your business on google and trying to solicit positive reviews from customers (both for Google and Facebook).
AdWords places your website / listing above everyone else’s for certain search phrases that you specify. For example, you can have an AdWords campaign to show your listing at the top of the results if someone searches ‘[Service] in Springfield.’ A major consideration is that this can be costly — particularly if there is heavy competition. You would essentially ‘bid’ to show up instead of your competitors. You might bid $1.50 per click, whereas Bob’s Landscaping might bid $1.75. In this case, Bob’s ad would get preferential placement (for example, time of day). The major benefit of using AdWords though is that it can get you at the top of the results almost instantly, whereas optimizing a site for SEO can take weeks or sometimes a month to start placing your site in a favorable position on the search results. We can design and schedule the ads for you, generally you will set a budget for how much you would like to spend per click and how long you would like the campaigns to run.
