Kansas CITY SEO and Website Design

STEP #1 : Figuring out what keywords you need to rank.

Our absolute first step is figuring out what people are searching for in Kansas City. There are a bunch of tools available to us to accomplish this goal.

1. Google Keyword Planner
2. ABC Method
3. Competitive Analysis.

Google Keyword Planner

One of the easiest ways to get ideas and actual search metrics is by creating an account with Google Ads (Formerly Google AdWords). Google Keyword Planner is a free tool, but you will have to set up a google advertising account to use it. Because our strategy includes Google Advertising as well as SEO (Search Engine Optimizations), we will need an account with billing setup anyways.

We are going to walk through this entire guide setting up our Google business page for Kansas City. It is important to remember that these principles are universal need to be applied to any business. Roofers, Dentists, Chiropractors, anything you could be in business for.

To gain access to the keyword planner, we need to set up the free Google Ads account. The Keyword Planner is a free tool associated with the Google Ads keyword targeting tools which are used to pick what search phrases to advertise on. Don’t worry; we will be getting into that in a little bit.

First we visit the signup page and click Start Now to begin the setup process.

We are presented with a relatively straightforward setup process. First, we need to hook up to a google account, don’t worry though if you have a Gmail, you already have one.

I would suggest setting up a separate Gmail account for your business purposes. It will present an option for you to do this on the signup page.

After you set up your new business account, you’ll see a page that will try to walk you through the process of setting up an advertising campaign. But right now, we need access to the google keyword planner, so we are going to skip this step.

Find the “Experienced with AdWords?” button and click it. (I know, you might not be experienced with Google Ads right now, but if you keep reading our blog you will be in a bit.) 

After you click “experienced with AdWords?” you will be presented with a page that looks like this.

Now you will need to click on “Skip and create a campaign later.” That will skip past all the google ad setup, and put us on the google ad dashboard.

But first, they want to attempt to seal the deal with your business a bit further. The idea behind this is because this is probably the highest friction spot of the entire sign up process.

The dreaded “Enter your billing information” step.

Don’t worry though, Google is super secure, and we haven’t set up any ads, so your account will not be billed a dime.

But they want you to enter your information so as soon as you start advertising, there are fewer barriers between you spending your money on their ad service.

Confirm your business information, and then you’ll be redirected to a billing setup page. Unfortunately, we don’t have any screenshots of this because of the sensitive information involved, but you are a smart business person, and I’m sure you can figure it out.

After you finish the billing setup, you will finally reach the dashboard; now we can get to work figuring out what keywords we want to try to rank our website on.

You can find the Google Keyword Planner by clicking the wrench in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

After you click on the wrench with the label “Tools” under it, you should see a drop-down menu.

Directly below that, you will find our treasured free SEO tool. Keyword Planner is almost always the first place we start when we start when determining the viability of an SEO plan.

This step is crucial because it doesn’t matter at all if you rank #1 on a search phrase no one is searching for, and that’s precisely what happens if you pick the wrong keyword.

When you open Keyword Planner, you will be presented with a couple of options.

Go ahead and click on Find keywords, for right now. Later on, after we use some of the other techniques if you want to run specific searches on keywords, you can get forecasts and search statements.

You will need to come up with three primary searches that you think someone could type into google to find your services.

Here is a quick, easy way to get search ideas if you are having trouble. Ask a family member or friend to sit down at a computer, and open up Google. Observe them and ask them to type in whatever they would if they were looking for whatever it is you do.

In our case, we are trying to rank for Kansas City SEO.

We entered “SEO Kansas City” and “Kansas City Website Design” as well as “KC Search Engine Marketing.” Of course, these are just guesses, but by entering these phrases, Google can predict exactly what type of searches we are looking to find.

Remember earlier when we clicked “Find Keywords?” This tells Google that we aren’t interested in just our searches that we entered, but instead that we want to know what others are searching for.

Now, in our example we have the entire state of Missouri selected, but in your situation, you might want to select the specific region where your potential customers live.

You can do this by selecting Locations from the menu at the top of the keyword planner page as shown in the image below.

There are pros and cons to selecting an entire region vs. a specific town, and you should do both searches to get a better feel for exactly who, and where people are searching for your services.

Now, we’ve got a list of actual search phrases that real people are typing into google. Before we pick our primary keyword that we want to target, we should make a comprehensive list inside of an excel (or google sheets) in our case.

Google Keyword Planner allows you to see the average monthly searches, competition, and the rough advertising cost your competitors are paying out for specific keywords.

If you see one which has roughly 10-100 searches, You know you are onto something good. In our case “Kansas city SEO company.” That keyword is worth $50 a click in some cases, and that metric means there are competitors RIGHT NOW, paying up to $50 a click to drop a user who searches that keyword onto their website. 

That keyword we know has a very high buying intent. 

Buying Intent means the level of interest someone who searches that keyword has, of hiring or buying your products and services.

Our next step is to compile a list of the keywords that are most likely to bring paying customers into contact with your business.

We use google sheets, but you can use Excel spreadsheets or even paper, pencil and ruler! You need to create a system that will help you keep track of exactly which keywords you are interested in, and in what order you want to try to show up for each one.

Here is a link to a handy google spreadsheet template we created just for you. Just click here to download. 

Below you can see the result for the top ranking keywords that we are going to try to rank. It’s important to note that, if there are a low cost, decent searches, and high buying intent, you’ve discovered a gold mine.

These are keywords that you can rank on moderately easy.

Finally, this brings us to an important point, SEO takes a lot of work, but it can bring you tremendous results. The bar is so low in most smaller communities that with minimal effort you can show up first and as the most professional.

It can take months to do, SEO has never been an instant gratification sport. But like most things that take time, it’s worth it.

ABC Method & Suggested Results

One of the problems with Google Keyword Planner is that it uses “Keywords” specifically. Most of the time you can use keywords and search phrases interchangeably, but in some instances, it’s essential to make a slight distinction. Advertising is one of these critical cases, and the other is keyword research for SEO.

A keyword means specifically “Key Words” that can be part of a wide range of search phrases. A query is a specific search that someone types into the google search engine.

Sometimes queries that could be very useful don’t show up inside of Google Keyword Planner. But you can still find these by using the ABC Method as well as scrolling to the bottom of a search phrase in google and seeing the suggested search terms.

For example, after searching for SEO Kansas City, we see a bunch of search examples in the related searches. These could be useful for our purposes because they are queries that others have searched for.

We do one more search, for Website Design Kansas City MO. This gives us a couple more terms which we can use for our strategy right now, and in future SEO efforts. Make sure to the extra terms to your spreadsheet you downloaded above.

Now we have some really good ideas for future pages and content within those pages.

This kind of research can show us interesting ranking opportunities as well as potential business opportunities. For example, below I can tell there is an interest in graphic design in Kansas City. (Obviously,) but I know that if it’s showing up for a search about website design, the number of searches for graphic design must be substantial.

It would be totally worth trying to rank for down the road, so we will put it in our future page ideas.

For now though, because of the variation of searches for Website Design and SEO we know there is definitely a market for SEO and Website Design services in Kansas City.

There is one more thing we should do before moving onto competitive analysis. To search with the ABC method, you type in your service, followed by each letter in the alphabet. Write down each keyword opportunity that interests you, and then use keyword planner to determine the viability of each one.

This method can expose hundreds of opportunities for your business and help you get inside the head of your potential customers.

Competitive Analysis. 

Our last keyword analysis ties directly into step two. We get incredibly familiar with what our other competitors are up too,

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Sam Walton, the famous entrepreneur who started Walmart, did a lot of competitive research, in fact, he even was arrested at one point in time for crawling around on the storeroom floor of a competitor in a country he wasn’t also doing business in then.

Why? because he was curious if they were doing something that he didn’t know about yet.

Competitive research is the battleground of Google Marketing, and our weapons of war are analyzing tools. We will be getting into doing more competitive analysis when we get into step #2, and we will discover ranking opportunities as we check out what they are doing, and how they are doing it.

We know one thing by now though, the primary keyword we want to rank for is Kansas City SEO. When someone decides to search something with a city “Kansas City” in our case, paired with a service “SEO,” we know that they are most likely interested in hiring someone to help them with SEO services.

If we follow these steps and write a long, easy to read and high-quality piece of content, we will eventually rank for that keyword. That search phrase will bring lots of clients needing SEO and Website Design Services, which we will happily provide for them.

STEP #2 : Find out what level the competition is at.

There are a lot of powerful competitive analyzing tools to help us figure out exactly what our competition is doing. By using these tools, we can figure out which keywords, directories, and strategies they are using.

In the spreadsheet you should have downloaded earlier, there is a competitive research tap at the bottom.

Before we can do research, we need to figure out who we are competing against. Now, remember this isn’t necessarily your local competition. We are looking for who we need to compete against to gain the rankings we want.

In smaller communities, you could be fighting against websites that have zero interest in your business or potential customers. In most of these cases, it shouldn’t be challenging to rank over them in google. But even if they do rank above you, because they aren’t offering the service or products you are, potential customers searching for what you offer will generally ignore them.

First, we do a quick google search on our primary keyword to see who we are up against. In our case, we are looking for SEO in Kansas City.

I’ve gone ahead and highlighted all of the META descriptions that Google is taking into account when positioning these competitors.

Please note that while these descriptions do have a massive impact on where you rank, it’s the most significant impact is in actually drawing the visitor onto your page. It’s your content and website design that will determine how long a visitor will stay on your website.

This is the first big SEO concept that we need to take into consideration. Google is interested in providing the best user experience and value to their searchers. Googles business revolves around having the best answers, for any question anyone might have.

This means that if you want to rank first on google, you need to be providing the best answers and information available. This will help naturally push your ranking to the first spot because you will be focusing on the most important ranking factor in all of SEO. The User. 

To determine the viability of ranking on the first page of google for Kansas City SEO, we need to check what the top 3 ranking websites look like.

The first on our list is KCSEOPRO.com.

We know from looking at their website, they only have 1,206 words on their homepage. Which, is very good. (No surprise, they are one of the more reputable companies in Kansas City providing SEO services.)

This means if we want to rank above them, we will have to do some severe SEO work and build very high-quality content. In other words, write the best content and provide the best answer.

Now, we need to go into a bit more detail on their strategy to determine precisely how much work we need to do to rank above.

Here are the free tools we generally use to do competitive research.

• SEMRUSH
• MOZ Link Explorer
• MOZ Local SEO
• SimilarWeb
• SpyFu 
• WordCounter

SEMRUSH – Competitive Research

SEMRUSH is an extremely powerful tool for figuring out what your competitors are up too, you can setup an account by visiting https://www.semrush.com/

The thing to note about SEMRUSH is that with the free plan, you only have a few searches a day to check out your competition.

So use them sparingly and only one search per competitor. As it is, unless you want to pay for the full account (which I would highly recommend if you’re going to do your own SEO) you will have to split up this setup over multiple days and perhaps even weeks.

We enter the top ranking site on google into the search bar and begin our competitive research process.

From our overview, we can tell that they aren’t doing very much if any paid traffic. We can also tell that they are getting roughly 588 views from organic search traffic. That is fantastic traffic that we want to get a chunk of.

We can also tell that they have 9.2k Backlinks. Many of them are probably coming from clients, directories and blog posts on other websites.

In your niche, you probably have far less competition because your competitors won’t know SEO. It just so happens that ours know it very well, which makes it even more fun.

Who doesn’t like a good bit of competition?

This means we are going to have to build content longer than 1,500 words and will need roughly 10,000 backlinks to outrank them.

Not an easy task, but doable.

We also see they have developed their own WordPress plugin, which they are using to gain Backlinks to their website as well.

We also get verification that Kansas City SEO is a GREAT keyword to rank for.

MOZ Link Explorer

Link Explorer shows us more details about precisely what we are up against. From a quick search with Link Explorer. This tool is free to use and can teach us lots of useful information.

We enter the domain into link explorer and select root domain. We want to get an excellent overview of exactly how much ranking power they have.

 With this fantastic little tool, we have discovered they have 10.8 thousand links. They are ranking for 114 Keywords, and have 296 total domains linking to their website.

Pretty impressive stuff. 

We can tell that the majority of their domains referring to their website are in the 1 to 30 range on domain authority. This means low-quality links.

That should make it a little easier to rank higher if we concentrate on high-quality backlinks.

Taking note of their current strategy, it might not be disadvantageous for us to put writing a book and developing a few plugins on the schedule as well.\\\\

MOZ Local SEO: How Citations effect our Kansas City SEO keyword

When trying to rank on the local SERP (Search Engine Results Page), we need to have a lot of pieces in place. Consistency is key to success in ranking on Google’s local search.

Thankfully we have MOZ Local to show us exactly where we lack in consistency. It also shows us opportunities for where our competition might be lacking in the consistency arena.

Once again, isn’t our end-all tool for finding opportunities to outrank our competitors, but it is a GREAT place to start.

We will be getting deeply into MOZ later so that we won’t worry about it too much right here.

SimilarWeb: What about other people ranking for Kansas City SEO?

SimilarWeb is a beautiful tool for checking out where the most traffic is coming from. The only problem is that It only works when if your competitors have decent traffic coming through.

With a quick search on the SimilarWeb tool, we can uncover useful statistics. For example, they are receiving roughly 4,500 visits on their website a month. The traffic share is also very interesting, most searches in any other industry will come from mobile traffic.

But as far as KC SEO is concerned, 94.98% of the traffic is coming from desktop searches.

This means that we will need to make sure our desktop experience is especially excellent.

We also see an opportunity as far as visit time is concerned. If we can keep our visitors on our website for longer than a minute thirty-four seconds, Google will take that as a signal users are enjoying our page more.

Which means higher rankings for our website.

Interestingly, they are picking up 20% of their traffic from the United States, followed by Brazil and India.

One thing I noticed, is that they’ve had a very similar drop in traffic from India as well as the United States. There isn’t a way to figure out why this is right now, but I’m going to keep it in mind in case I find something as we do our research.

Looking at the channel overview, we can see that a vast majority of their traffic is coming from direct search. This isn’t necessarily uncommon, but there are only a few reasons why they would have a direct with that high of a percentage.

In typical situations, I’d say they might be using a bot to send fake traffic to their website. That would boost their rankings as long as Google doesn’t catch them doing it.

But I happen to know they have written a book on marketing, and it probably is a significant factor in driving traffic to their website.

This would result in a substantial direct search spike above the rest of the traffic mediums.

If SimilarWeb is to be trusted, it doesn’t look like there is a lot of email traffic. This tells us we might not want to put a significant focus on email marketing right away.

They are doing a small percentage of Paid Search advertising, but compared to the Organic Search it is moderately insignificant.

This is a good sign for us because if we can show up for Kansas City SEO, we should get excellent results for that keyword.

As we look from the referring websites, we can tell that a vast percentage of the traffic must be coming from their WordPress plugin.

Another good sign for our SEO target keyword. From the top search terms, we can see that Kansas City SEO is one of their primary focuses to rank on. At first, it might seem like a pretty small percentage, but we know from our previous research that it’s a keyword with a high buying intent.

This adds to our confidence in ranking for this “Kansas City SEO” keyword.

Remember if you get stuck at any point in this process feel free to reach out to us and ask any questions you might have. We are here to help you, and we want to see you experience success with your SEO in-devours.

Out of these search terms, it’s interesting to note that there isn’t a CPC (Cost Per Click ) on Kansis city SEO, which although it is a misspelling, has the same level of buying intent as Kansas City SEO.

Both those terms would be desirable keywords to advertise on and end up being moderately cheap to do so.

On the other hand, WordPress Developer is a prohibitive cost per click to advertise on, especially nationally. It’s possible they are advertising on that keyword, but for now, we don’t have to worry about fighting over that ranking.

After compiling all these details, we can move onto making a strategy to market our business using google.

STEP #3 : Make your strategy.

No war can be won without proper planning, and ranking 1st on google is very much a war. We’ve been compiling a bunch of material on our competitors ranking on google, and we have everything we need to start ranking in Kansas City for SEO search phrases.

First, we know that SEO is going to take some time and effort. But there is a market for people looking for SEO services in Kansas City, so it will be worth the time and effort to build a web page specifically to rank on that website term.

In your case, you are going to want to evaluate if enough people are searching for what you offer, and if there is then, you should continue with an SEO strategy.

The harsh reality for a lot of business owners is the simple fact that almost every city and small town in America has a market for users ranking on SEO. Nearly everyone has smartphones now, and searching on google is the new phone book.

If you don’t make google marketing a strategy for your business, you will be forced to eventually, (or forced out of business.)

It is a lot easier to hold your already ranked page at the top than to rank an entirely new page. So if you adopt a robust Google marketing strategy now, you can be ahead of the game if no one in your community is doing it yet.

Our strategy for Kansas City SEO is going to be a mainly content-based strategy.

For your business, there is probably going to be fewer pages ranking well for SEO. This is because your competitors probably aren’t SEO experts trying to rank for the #1 buying intent search in Kansas City.

This means you can probably get away with writing a piece of content, that is around 1,500 words long. We, on the other hand, are going to write the most comprehensive article we possibly can on SEO and Google Marketing, that is what you are reading right now.

We also need a good strategy to build backlinks. This will include sending pictures to real estate agents, asking for backlinks to our website, in addition to writing guest blogs linking to this very page.

By focusing on high-quality local backlinks, we will need less to rank competitively.

In the meantime we will also start advertising on some of the keywords, keeping our bids moderately low to keep our expenses down.

It’s important to schedule a 2 to 3 hours a day to work on your SEO strategy; now I know that could be an exhausting amount of time to set aside, which is why you should contact an SEO agency like us to do it for you. #shamlessplug

If you are interested in hiring us, click here to set up a discovery meeting. 

STEP #4 : Building your website.

We’ve had a philosophy that has formed our agency. Currently we offer website design, seo and other marketing programs, but Not to long ago we were a purely website design company. That worked pretty well for us financially speaking, but I saw many owners spend thousands of dollars in website development and not experience success. We shut down our website production and restructured our company.

We needed something else, and that is why we started offering marketing services.

See, a website by itself does about as much good for your business as a poster in the middle of the woods. *Spoiler, that’s not a lot.*

You need to get your website in front of people to actually grow your business.

The philosophy that drives our business is this. A website is like an engine, and traffic is like fuel. You can have the best fuel in the entire world, and a broken engine won’t do you any good. On the flip side you could also have a Ferrari and with no gas you won’t be going anywhere.

You should invest in a great website, but make sure to save time and money for marketing as well if you truly want to experience success.

When it comes to SEO, there are a few factors we want to include. Hubspot has a great article on elements every website should include. I’ve linked to it here.

But SEO wise there are some things we want to focus on. We will discuss the top three in detail here, but if you want a full comprehensive listing you can find it on unamo’s page here.

When we are focused on raking a website, there are three main signals we work on to start. Speed, mobile friendly signals, meta and title optimizations. 

Google knows that mobile phones accumulate over half of the internet traffic on the internet today. They also know that most phone networks really suck at this point in time, and cannot deliver huge websites at the lightning fast speed consumers are demanding.

This means we need to drop our website size, while speeding up the delivery of the content.

We can do this by using software like Photoshop, and Imagify to optimize the photo and multimedia content. We can speed up delivery by using a CDN, and turbo hosting to deliver content even faster. Plus, by utilizing browser caching  we can make sure that the visitor only has to download the website once. This should arm us with enough content on building a website to get you started.

Or, of course you could simply contact us and have us build one for you.

We even run specials from time to time, where we throw in a website design if someone wants to try out our marketing program.

Contact us to find out if we are currently offering one of these specials.

STEP #5 : Register your Google My Business listing.

Your next step will be registering your business listing on Google. This is a straightforward process that is an absolute must if you want to be running a business in the 21st century. In fact, it’s so essential that there is a reasonable probability your business is already listed on Google.

It’s a directory site that adds any business they feel confident enough to list. Regardless of if you want them to or not. What you do have control over, however, is how professional you appear online.

The first step in that process is verifying your address. This is done via postcard or if you are lucky through phone verification.

Your Google My Business might already be listed. This could be either from a previous owner, marketing company or maybe Google just automatically added it. If this is the case, you will have to reclaim the google my business page.

First, we need to check if it’s just an automatically added listing. If that’s the case, it should be straightforward to claim the page again.

Look for your listing, and if you see the magic “Own this page?” it means you can claim it easily.

If your listing doesn’t have “Own this business?” showing up on the listing it means it’s been verified. That means you will have to re-verify the hard way.

To reclaim a lost listing, you will first need to visit the google my business homepage.

After you visit this page, click setup now. You will then be presented with a search bar where you can enter your business name. *Note, this is the same process for setting up a brand new location.

Enter your business name, and then click on the correct listing from the drop down that will appear. After that click next and you’ll be presented with the next step.

If you recognize the email, it is far easier to get whoever has that email to send you access. Just click on request access, and then reach out to the owner of the email and ask them to give you access.

More than likely, you won’t recognize the email, and you will have to request for Google to re-verify the address. Go ahead and click on “Report a problem” and follow it down the rabbit hole.

STEP #6 : Google MY Business.

After getting access to the Google My Business listing, you will need to make sure you add the correct categories. This is one of the biggest SEO mistakes we see businesses make. Thankfully it’s super easy to fix.

Now, click on the pencil and edit your categories in order of most importance. The primary service we provide is Kansas City SEO, so Internet Marketing Service is going to be the first category for us, followed by Marketing Agency and so on.

If you don’t have the correct categories set, your business won’t rank correctly on the local Google listings. Categories are one of the most significant factors Google uses to understand precisely how you want to show up, and what you want to show up for. If you don’t have your service correctly listed on this, your SEO isn’t going to work very well for reaching your customers in Kansas City searching for what you offer.

Optimizing Your Google My Business Information

When you set up your Google My Business page, the first SEO step you should take is making sure all of your information correct. Write a killer description that goes into detail about precisely what you do, and explain what sets you apart from the competition. Make sure your hours are correct and list every service you offer along with pricing.

Do I have to list pricing? YES, because customers LOVE transparency.

Now, I understand some businesses have custom pricing. But, you can list your hourly rates along with a description of precisely what you do.

We’ve listed our services and pricing, some of our custom services that aren’t packaged are priced hourly. This is honest, upfront and helps potential clients to get a good sense of exactly how much they will have to pay out to work with you.

This saves you, and your potential customer time. Otherwise, they would have to call you, find your pricing and then call your competitor and find their pricing. After that, they still have to do research to decide which is the best company to work with for the price.

This wastes your time and your customers time. Your prices aren’t going to change just because they asked you over the phone, and your competitor’s prices aren’t going to change just because they asked you over the phone. The only people that will have a problem with listing your pricing in this way are people who want to charge different pricing based upon how much the potential customer can pay them.

We fundamentally disagree with this practice, which we believe lacks integrity and stinks of dishonesty.

Customers should pay for the value you offer, not what they can spend. Now, that being said we do offer discounts and you can too, but list those on your website. This will not lose customers and will bring you more customers. When a visitor sees your pricing, they become what is called Anchored. Once someone is anchored on a price, it’s possible for them to appreciate a discount or sale. This is why Walmart has the regular price listed on most of their sale tags.

You can use the services menu to anchor your potential customers on a price and then sell them on your sales. Plus if you know you are cheaper than your competition, you will stand out when you could have potentially lost the business because they wouldn’t have otherwise contacted you.

Photos and Videos

You should also make an effort to add an abundance of photos and even videos about your business, service, and products. You can also include team member photos along with proper branding and advertisements for your business.

Photos receive some of the most views of anything on your listing, so it’s important to make sure they are both impressive and professional. They will do a considerable amount of the heavy lifting convincing people to work with your business over your competitors.

In addition to these factors, there is a correlation between businesses ranking highly and having more photos than other companies. We’ve never seen any company have a problem of adding too many pictures to their business page, as long as they are professional and actual images from your business. *No stock photo spamming.

HOW Citations affect SEO.

Citations are places on the internet where your business name, address, and phone are listed together in one place. There are thousands of citation directories, and unfortunately, many of them have your business listed with the wrong information. Most of these citations pull their information from sources called aggregators. This means if you can correct the main aggregators, you have a great shot at taking care of 95% of the random listing errors your business has bound to have accumulated.

This doesn’t mean you’ve fixed everything though, and there will be a nearly never-ending stream of citation editing and building.

You should continuously be building citations for your business name, address, and phone. The more citations you have, the more credible your business seems to google. Because Google wants to show the best, closest result to the searchers, they factor in your credibility as they build the snack pack for each search result.

The snack-pack is shown below.

The only way you will show up in the snack pack above a competitor, who is closer to the person searching on Google, is by building your online credibility. Google has to think you are both more relevant and trustworthy to the point they feel it’s more important than the difference in distance.

NAP Consistency is also vital to performing well on the snack pack. There are hundreds of directories and websites which could have your NAP listed, so here are my favorite tools to help you figure out where your information might be recorded incorrectly.

The Hoth Local SEO Tool

Moz Local SEO Tool

Both of these are fantastic SEO tools that show you exactly where your business may be listed incorrectly online. Once you have a good idea of exactly where it’s listed incorrectly, you can boost your SEO by cleaning up a few of each every single day. 

This will have a severe positive impact on your SEO and is a practice you should either hire out to someone else or become committed to scheduling a significant portion of your time every week towards fixing.

Collecting Reviews.

Collecting reviews is crucial to your success on the Snack-Pack side of local SEO. It can be challenging to get customers to leave reviews on your local business, especially if you are a service-based business without a physical location.

In most cases, you will actively have to ask for a review from your customer to get one. Even then, you will likely have to teach them how and where to leave the review.

*IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT REVIEWS*

You should never, ever ask a customer to leave a “good” review. Ask them to leave an honest review.

This is for two reasons.

1. It leaves a bad taste in the customer’s mouth.

2. It can cause severe SEO and legal trouble dings if Google and other legal authorities get wind of this fraudulent practice.

You should always ask for an honest review, and then handle the situation if they leave a negative review.

Reviews are critical to local SEO because they factor into the credibility of the business. As we discussed earlier, Google is interested in providing the best possible result to the searcher. Their product is providing a good searching experience to their user. If your business has a significantly higher review ratio and velocity you will outrank your competition even if they are a little closer to the searcher.

Collecting reviews, and encouraging customers to leave reviews becomes a high priority when this is taken into account. Thankfully, there are a couple of tools from a company called white spark that are particularly effective when it comes to requesting reviews.

https://whitespark.ca/review-handout-generator/

https://whitespark.ca/google-review-link-generator/

These two tools are a great place to start for generating a significant source of reviews for your business. I suggest posting the full sized handout generator next to a register, on your business doors and even on waiting area tables. Make it very apparent in high traction areas where individuals are likely to see it. Feel free to hand them out as well!

If you are in a business that collects emails and/or phone numbers, texting or emailing a review link can be particularly useful.

Responding to ReviewsW

With the above tools in place, you should have reviews rolling in at a high velocity. That means you will need to have responses in place for different situations. You never want to respond to a review in the heat of the moment; you could say something that could do irreversible damage to your business.

You will get bad reviews, every business does. It’s a fact of life! Some people are out to cause problems and be pills. Even if you have the best service and product in the world, you will still get bad reviews.

In fact, if you aren’t getting bad reviews, you probably aren’t doing enough to market your business, and haven’t carved a big enough market share.

You need to respond to positive, and especially negative reviews.

When responding to positive reviews, thank the customer and let them know you can’t wait to see them again. This makes them feel happy and cared for, emotions you want to be associated with you and your business.

The tricky part is always responding to negative reviews.

Probably the most asked question we get regarding negative reviews is “How do I remove this bad review?” Unfortunately, the answer is you probably can’t. But thankfully there are a couple of things you can do to help manage bad reviews.

The first step on a negative review is to report it as inappropriate hate towards your business. This way, if the review is overly hateful towards you or your business you at least have given Google has a shot of removing the review. You should always use this as a first step, especially if you know there is something funky going on with the review. An ex-employee for example.

The next step is to drown out your negative reviews with positive reviews. If the majority of reviewers love you and what you do, then eventually the naysayers will look crazy.

That’s the ultimate goal, make those who give you one star seem like the exception rather than the consistent result.

Remember to respond to these reviews, calmly and ask them to contact you over the phone so that you can make their situation better. Once they’ve had a good experience, you can even ask them if they would be willing to update their review.

Properly managing your reviews can make you shine above your competition, and builds an extremely favorable business reputation.

STEP #7 : Website Ranking Factors

Creating Content

Website content is the lifeblood of SEO. It’s how Google knows who you are, what you are and how much you know. The better the content on your website, the higher you will rank in Google.

There are literally thousands of hours of content to consume on SEO to learn everything, so we are just going to cover the basics in this section. If you really want to take a deep dive into SEO you should first visit googles best practices and learn how to read SEO optimization from the horses mouth itself. [Click to visit]

There are a few different things you need to do on your website to optimize your content specifically for SEO purposes. You never want to write content specifically for search engines, instead write your content for the visitor and then optimize it for search engines afterward.

This will keep you from writing spam content that doesn’t help anyone.

Ultimately your website should provide a better experience for your visitor than your competitors.  That means it should be fast loading, nicely designed and contain the answers to the questions being searched for.

Be sure to take the time to go in-depth on analyzing the content of the top ranking sites on the keyword you want to rank for. This will help you to reasonably know what you need to do to show up above them.

Every page on your website should try to be around 1,000 to 1,500 words long. On more competitive terms you may have to write even longer content. Long-Form content does exceptionally well on Google because it has a higher chance of answering the user’s question, has more keywords embedded in the material, and requires more time to consume.

All of these factors end up meaning more time spent on the page, and better user experience. That, in turn, means your website will rank higher on Google.

Backlinks: How they help us rank for Kansas City SEO

Because authority is a major ranking factor, (because Google is trying to provide the best result possible) the more websites you have linking to your primary domain name, and individual pages/articles the better. A Backlink is essentially another website that links towards your content or website in some way.

The different types of backlinks manage exactly how much trust flow you receive from the sites linking to you.

A do-follow link is much better than a no-follow link, whereas an image link can in some cases be more valuable than a simple inline text link. (Though there is some argument on this point.)

The ranking and authority of the site linking to yours also matter immensely. In some cases, a website with a higher spam score linking to your site could even hurt your rankings.

There is a way to report those links if you do get hit with one of them. You can disavow links through the google search console. By disavowing links, you are telling Google that you don’t appreciate that site linking to yours and would like them to remove it from consideration during SERP ranking.

Building lots of high-quality backlinks is a SEO process called Link Building. Link Building takes a lot of time and effort but is one of the major aspects of SEO that needs to be completed. There are a lot of ways to build backlinks and techniques and strategies differ between industries.

Here is a really informitive article from MOZ on exactly how to build backlinks for your SEO purposes.

STEP #8 : Alt Tags and Images.

When you are writing your content, it’s easy to go crazy with formatting and to make your website look pretty. But you should also be focusing on the content structure as well. 

We are going to get into a bit of coding that relates to SEO, but it’s pretty simple and very relevant to the subject of SEO.

Every web page should have one and only one <H1> tag. Inside of the WordPress content editor, you will see it listed as Heading One. An H1 tag means your site title. 

Generally speaking, except for certain situations you should only include 1 <H1> tag on your web page, and idealistically it should be the same H1 across your entire website. 

Next, you should have at most 3 to 4 <h2> tags. This is your page title, and you can use it to mark the differences in significant content changes on your website inside of a traditional page. 

For example:

In one section of your website you are talking about services, and then right after you start to talk about your company history. In this scenario, it would make sense to put an H2 tag at the beginning of services, and another H2 tag is talking about your company history.

You can have multiple <h3>’s and <h4>’s without any problem. Use them to break up the content to be more readable. Not only will this help your visitors understand your content, but it also helps the search engines as well and is generally a great practice all around.

You should always include your keyword in your H1 and H2 tags. This shows Google that you are incredibly concerned with ranking for that particular keyword, so much so that you produced content exactly around that keyword. After your H2 tag, you should follow it up with a <p> paragraph tag containing the keyword in the first 150 words of content. This shows a high level of relevancy towards your target keyword because it makes it into your websites introduction.

Generally speaking, spicing your keyword through about 4% of your content is a good practice. You shouldn’t create spam content or articles though, because it’s more than likely your website will be dinged, and you won’t have any hope of ranking for your ideal SEO keyword.

For example, our keyword for this page is “Kansas City SEO,”  and hopefully, it didn’t look out of place anywhere on this page. You may have noticed it because it was in the headings at the top of this blog post, but ultimately we didn’t want to use it where it wasn’t appropriate.

Instead, we created content that naturally requires utilization of the phrase “Kansas City SEO.” This allows users to talk about the search phrase while answering the question someone putting that into Google would be concerned with asking.

Generally speaking, a person would only search “Kansas city SEO” that phrase in two instances.

1. They are interested in hiring an SEO agency in Kansas City, which we are and make very clear at the beginning of the page. Or 2. They are interested in learning about SEO. 

Hopefully, if we have done our job correctly, both of those needs are met with the content we’ve provided on this page.

STEP 10. Google Analytics

First of all, congratulations on reading this far. You have all the information you need to go forth and start ranking well on Google. But wait, before you go there is one more thing you need to learn!

How to track your results!

Google Analytics is by far the easiest to use, most accurate and powerful analytics system on the planet today. At least in our opinion. It’s the industry standard when it comes to analytic software.

Because it can be somewhat complicated to install, and this article is already long enough as it is, we’ve attached a video below that will walk you through the process of establishing google analytics into your website.

Setting up google analytics is extremely important because without seeing the results of your effort, you are likely to quit and never come back to finish the job. 

SEO takes time, and it requires a lot of effort up front. The payoff is huge after you experience success with it, but until that point, it’s easy to become discouraged because you aren’t ranking #1 yet and your phone isn’t ringing. This is why you need to keep close track of exactly how well you are doing.

When I look at our analytics, I’m very encouraged because I see an ever climbing graph that shows our traffic is rising every single day. This keeps me focused on crafting helpful content that real people like you will enjoy. 

Another benefit of having Google Analytics set up correctly, is being able to test different ways of writing content. Experimenting is the bread and butter of the marketing world, and SEO is no different. Without having your numbers written down to compare, you won’t be able to make the informed decisions your competitors that do have their numbers down are able too.

What to do next?

After reading this, you are bound to feel a bit overwhelmed. There is a tremendous amount of information to be found on our website. All of it is written to help you be ridiculously successful with marketing your business. We provide Kansas City SEO services, and we would love to help you build a marketing campaign that will last long after you’ve stopped spending money developing it.

But you are a professional entrepreneur with big goals and lots of things to do. Which is why I’d like to invite you to sit down with us, to go over exactly what we can do for your business, relatively cheaply.

If you are on our website right now, you are experiencing the proof. We practice what we preach, and we generate leads and customers through the same techniques we want to use for your business.

But I would offer a word of warning, and we only work with one business in every niche per service area. This means if you want to work with us, you can have confidence knowing we won’t work with any of your competitors.

But, the flip side of that coin is that if your competitors hire us first, we won’t be able to work with you.

So reach out to us below, we would love to bring new business and life into your business by helping you genuinely crush Google Marketing with SEO, PPC, and Website Design. Your potential customers in Kansas City are waiting for you to take action, so what are you waiting for?