How SEO Works for a Local Business (Simplified)

Want to know how SEO works for a local service business? We’ve made search engine optimization easy and simple to understand for business owners who don’t have time to learn it.

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How does SEO work for a local business? That’s the question we’re gonna answer today. My name is Avram Gonzales, the owner, and founder of Digital Harvest, and we’re going to simplify this mystery that is search engine optimization, SEO for you, the viewer. Right now we’re going to talk about what it actually is.

How Google decides who shows up first, second, and third in search results and the two main things that you need to focus on in order to perform better and the search engines.

And so this is the simplified version of this. If you are somebody who’s been doing SEO and internet marketing for a long time, you’ll probably board to tears by this video. This is a great starting point though for you as a business owner to understand what goes into this, especially if you’re having to audit and be aware of what another agency might be doing for your business.

So let’s jump into it First, what is search engine optimization? , there’s a lot of definitions for it, but it, it’s simply put, it’s the process or the practice of helping a website or a webpage move up in the search engine results for various queries, things that people are typing into the search engine looking for an answer.

Google wants to provide a result to the user. There are things that are very much in your control to help influence Google and its decision of where to place your website or your WebP. So that is what search engine optimization is. It’s the practice of achieving just that. Now, there’s a lot of things that go into it, but we’re starting with the simplified version here today.

So the second question is, how does Google determine which websites appear in search results and in which order? Again, there’s a lot that goes into this, but if we break it down to its simplest form, you have to think about what Google’s objective is. Google’s objective is to help the user, the searcher, find what they’re looking for in as little tries as possible.

So they want the number one result to be the best possible match for a searcher. And so how do they decide what are the best results? Well, we’ll start with this side of the equation right here.

It starts with trust. How can Google trust a website enough to recommend it to its users? Two things make up trust. Again, the simplified version of it, the first thing is the relevance. So if you think about it, probably just heard my dog snoring. If you think about it, you were searching for a, a dog trainer and you got a website that popped up for a plumbing service that is not relevant to your.

Right, it is not the the correct result that you are looking for. So Google is looking to make sure that the things on your website are relevant to the searcher who is trying to find the information or your services. That’s part number one that makes up this trust equation. The second one is authority. So that’s the other part of trust. How does Google know that not only is your information relevant in the website but that it is recommended and would be recommended by others? How are you the authority on that information? How are you or your website better than others? So while the equation itself might be simple, you might also be thinking, well, how do you actually achieve that?

How do you achieve relevance plus authority to gain the. For your website to show up in search. That’s where we get to this part here. Two main factors go into this equation. Two things that you have a lot of control over. The first thing is, and you may have heard this before, I’m gonna break it down a little further though, is something that we refer to in the search in the community, the jargon that we use on pages.

What does on-page SEO mean? It means all of the things that go into your actual website itself, so the information on the website, the pictures on the website, the titles that you give, the pages, the experience that a user would have going to the website, its functionality, how fast it loads, the amount of people that are visiting the website and how long they stay.

These are on-page SEO factors. It’s the foundation for your website and it’s the easiest thing to control. So you can learn a lot about OnPage SEO by just surfing the internet, looking up blogs. There’s not very many mysteries left about what really goes into this and how to achieve this as a part of this formula.

The next piece when you combine these two together is how you perform SEO and show Google. That you can be trusted. It’s called off-page SEO. It’s the second part. So off page SEO refers to all the activities that can be taken that are not on your website that would help influence this equation. So one of the most common things that you probably heard people talk about is links or backlinks to your website.

That’s a big part of off-page SEO. It’s links that are coming from other websites that are off your website coming to. , the business directories. Your website might be on the reviews that you might have on other websites. Um, there’s a lot of things that go into off-page SEO. Those are some really easy-to-understand examples that don’t happen on your website itself but influence this equation of relevance and authority and trust.

Think about this authority piece. If there’s other websites or reviews or things that are talking about your website, your business, your. That enhances your authority. Okay? Relevance and authority equals trust. The way that you can achieve that and show Google is through on-page and off-page SEO. That is really the fundamentals of what search engine optimization is, how you can influence it, and how you can show Google that your business, your service, is the most trusted and therefore should be recommended by Google.

A very simplified version. , but bringing it back to basics. If you think about these foundational things from the onset, and if you’re auditing somebody else’s work, maybe another agency’s doing the work for you, if they’re not tackling both parts of this and really thinking about this equation. , then, uh, they’re not gonna get very far with your business objective.

So that’s it for me. Avery Gonzalez here from Digital Harvest. If you like this video, make sure to give it a thumbs up. Share it with other people that might find value in it. And if you’re curious about what it would look like to work with our company and having us manage your search engine optimization, you can certainly visit the link below this video and reach out to us and book a strategy call.

So, Hope you found this information helpful. We’ll catch you on the next one. Thanks so much for watching today’s video. If you like this video, you’ll probably like the rest of them on our YouTube channel. Go ahead and check them out, subscribe for more, and we’ll catch you on the next video. Bye for now.