There are pros and cons to operating a business in Miami. Miami is a beautiful and fun city, and it’s filled with countless people who could potentially patronize your business. But at the same time, it’s filled with businesses that are rivals to yours – and this level of competition can make marketing and advertising difficult, if not impossible.
These days, most of your customers are going to start with a Google search before researching your business or visiting it. Accordingly, your best marketing strategies will focus on making your Miami business rank higher in those searches.
You can do this with the help of search engine optimization (SEO). But what’s the best way to approach it?
Working With Professionals
If you don’t have any knowledge or experience with SEO, your best option is to work with professionals. It’s going to cost a bit more than doing it yourself, but you’ll be much more likely to see the results you want – and investments in professional teams usually pay off.
For example, you can hire a Miami SEO agency. SEO agencies typically hire and have access to people with different specialties, such as content writing, strategizing, and link building. Alternatively, you can hire full-time team members and/or contractors to fill the gaps in your SEO abilities.
Organic Search Engine Optimization
Search engines like Google typically take hundreds of different factors into account when producing search engine results pages (SERPs). Broadly, these factors can be grouped into big-picture categories: relevance to the query, authority of the target page, and technical factors.
Essentially, Google wants to make sure the most trustworthy sites rank highest; it also wants to make sure each result is capable of answering or addressing the searcher’s query. Your job as a SEO professional is going to be utilizing strategies that help you improve your relevance for target keywords and build your authority as a domain.
- Make technical improvements to your website. The better your website is coded, the higher it’s going to rank. You need to structure your website in a way that search engine crawlers can easily parse, your site needs to load quickly and easily, and it needs to be free of technical errors that could interfere with user experience.
- Optimize your core content for target keywords. Take a look at the content you already have on your website and see if you can tweak it for strategically valuable keywords. The best keywords are ones with high search volume and low competition, meaning lots of people are searching for them but few rivals are competing for them. Obviously, they must also be relevant to your brand/website, or your search traffic will be meaningless.
- Develop new onsite content. After that, you can work on developing new onsite content. Aim to produce original works in line with your overall content strategy, and make them as long and well-researched as possible. It’s a stretch to say that excellent content ranks on its own, but having good content significantly increases your chances of success.
- Promote your content. People may not be able to find your content organically for some time, so it’s on you to make an effort to promote it. Share it on social media, collaborate with others, and consider advertising it if you need the extra traffic.
- Build links. If you want to rank higher, you need more authority. And if you want more authority, link building is practically the only reliable way to get it. The more links you have, and the more authoritative those links are, the better your ranking potential will be. You just have to exercise caution to make sure all your links are organic and valuable for the average user’s experience.
Local SEO
Local businesses that are interested in ranking for local, proximity-based searches should also know that there’s a subset of tactics designed specifically for local SEO.
To get you started:
- Focus on local keywords. Part of your keyword targeting strategy should prioritize local keywords – in this case, “Miami.” Adding pages about your “Miami business” or “[your type of business here] in Miami” is a great way to increase your relevance for residents.
- Fill out your Google Business Profile. Filling out a Google Business Profile is free, it only takes a few minutes, and it could substantially improve the local ranking potential of your business. Be as accurate and consistent as possible, and make sure you fill out every available field. This is also a great way to tell Miami residents what they can expect from your business.
- Earn better reviews. Finally, work on attracting more reviews and boosting the sentiments of those reviews. Local businesses rank much higher when they have an ample number of positive reviews attached to them via Google, Yelp, and other third parties. While it’s usually against the terms of service to bribe people for reviews, there’s nothing wrong with requesting them from your best customers or letting all your customers know where your business is listed.
SEO is a more complex strategy than this article lets on, as it only covers the absolute fundamentals. If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, or using it as a strategy to promote your Miami brand, contact an SEO agency and start putting together a campaign.
