What's the fastest way to improve Google rankings on search results?

[JPrz26]

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[MiriamEllis]

Hi JPrz26,

I'm hoping you'll get lots of community feedback on this good question. I noticed you chose Local Strategy as one of your tags for this thread, so I'm going to approach your question with the assumption that your business model is local. I'll number some thoughts here for easy reading:

1. Local SEO, and SEO in general, isn't a race. Both are complicated marketing disciplines that take time, and many shortcuts carry serious risks to the long-term health of your brand. Rarely, a brand offers something so phenomenal that it creates an instant craze (think about the recent Pokemon Go phenomenon), making national news. But short of your new local business making global headlines upon opening its doors (your head chef rescues a polar bear from the roof the Metropolitan Museum of Art), chances are strong that it simply isn't going to skyrocket past established competitors in the local or organic rankings.

2. Because of this, if you need to be showing up on Google's Page 1 today, you should invest in Google Adwords for whatever search terms are most critical to your business. Depending on the competition level of your geo-industry, investment in PPC may be a temporary initiative to lean on while you build up the authority and recognition of your brand, or, it may be a permanent aspect of your total marketing picture. A bakery in rural Kansas may invest in 3 months of PPC until everyone in town knows they are the place to come for wedding cakes. Then, they can shut off the paid channel and rely on other forms of on and offline marketing to keep the customers coming in. Meanwhile, a personal injury attorney in Los Angeles is likely to have to keep the PPC campaign going indefinitely for specific keywords, because the market is simply so tough.

3. Once you've got PPC in place, your local business should make the following core investments:

4. Create a publishing strategy that will initially create local excitement about your business and then engage consumers over time on a consistent basis. Create content that informs and converts. Meanwhile, earning links from this over time should grow your domain authority, improving your rankings.

5. Ensure that your business is listed on the major local business data platforms, consistently and completely (a product like Moz Local can take the sweat out of this via automation).

6. Create a guideline-compliant review acquisition strategy that begins to utilize the local public resource of consumer sentiment, prompting locals to promote your business for you, driving new customers and new website traffic your way. Complete the circle by responding to all reviews, both with thanks for praise and offers of help and resolution for complaints.

7. Analyze social media opportunities where you can build the most awareness of your new brand. Remember that social media marketing hinges on participating rather than selling.

8. Begin to build an email database and put email marketing into practice. It remains one of the highest-converting avenues for many businesses.

9. Sponsor local teams, events and organizations to begin building relationships within the community you serve, and coincidentally, earn further links that begin to establish your brand's relationship to specific geographic topics in the Google RankBrain era.

10. Join local business organizations for further networking (think Chamber of Commerce, or industry-specific networks). Continue to build relationships.

Apart from PPC, which you can activate today, none of these things are shortcuts. All of them take time, and you've got to have most or all of these components to begin to compete. Once you've got the basic components in place which your established competitors have already mastered, you'll be doing competitive analysis to identify competitive-difference makers - things that can set your brand apart from the pack. My list represents a start. I hope others will add to it and that it will be helpful in formulating a strategy that begins to get your business noticed as soon as possible, but also as effectively as possible.