How to Skyrocket Your Rankings for Local Customers in New York

[This article was written by Joseph Dyson.]

SEO optimizes the way your website communicates with Google and its bots to secure a higher rank for it on search engine results.

Good communication with your target customers and Google when it’s indexing your website means you rankings in Google’s algorithm improve—and SEO is key the key to it all.

You may be wondering how you can take your New York-based business’s website game to the next level.

Fortunately, we’ve compiled a comprehensive guide to help you better navigate the world of SEO.

1. Improve the “dwell time” that visitors spend on your website.

Dwell time is essentially the amount of time that visitors end up staying on your website.

If you have a low dwell time, what this communicates to Google is that your visitors were not particularly fond of the page they visited on your website.

Increasing your dwell time also has the added benefit of reducing your visitor bounce rate.

One way to do this is to embed your site with rich imagery, in the form of embedded pictures and videos. YouTube videos embedded on your site from your YouTube page have the added benefit of not only increasing your dwell time but also improving your rankings as a whole.

The reason for this improvement in SEO is that YouTube is owned by Google. So if you are creating videos on YouTube and creating a web of links between your website and Google, you are favoring one of Google’s owned platforms.

When you do this, your site is rewarded with an increase in its rankings on the SERPs for your keywords.

2. Increase the page loading speed for your web pages

Viewers, especially New Yorkers, can be impatient when it comes to website wait times.

You can bet that if your site is too slow, not only will Google notice but your visitors will also bounce from your site in a New York minute.

The rule of thumb is that if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you’ll have trouble retaining anyone who visits your site.

And when people leave your site in hoards, Google will recognize the lack of popularity of your site among users and downgrade it from its current rankings.

To measure your site’s loading time and get helpful recommendations to reduce it, you can use Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool.

3. Focus on keyword intent

In addition to making your site load fast, analyzing your potential keywords for intent is a great way to boost your rankings and also inevitably improve your sales and revenue.

If your intent is to make sales, make sure you focus on keywords that have commercial intent behind them rather than, say, that of information-gathering.

For example, targeting key phrases with the word “free” in them, even if they have a high search volume and/or competition on Google, may not ultimately help you accomplish your goal of making sales. This is because the searchers’ intent here is to find something to help them solve their problem for free, which if you want to make sales is not your product.

So because it’s a mismatch, they bounce. This, in turn, negatively impacts your SEO.

On the flip side, if you target searchers with commercial intent, they might look up terms like “cheap cookie cutter near me” or “affordable cookie cutter nearby.” In this case, supposing you sell reasonably priced cookie cutters as your business model, you will want to capitalize on these searchers because they are your potential customers who will bring you revenue.

4. Write for humans and optimize for search engines

You can follow all of the SEO practices in all of the books but remember that the main goal of SEO is to make it easier for users to find quality content that applies to them.

It is by no means a substitute for good communication and good content.

So if your site is written poorly, even if Google’s algorithm understands it somehow, if it reads badly for a human being then you’re not going to have high click-through rates or conversions.

SEO clears the path. Think of it as a traffic signal in New York that’s stopping cars regularly so that people walking can get to where they want to go without obstructions in their path.

That’s basically what New York SEO Services do—traffic control.

Following through with this metaphor, your business is on the side of the street that people are trying to cross over to. While the traffic signal can help stop the cars and create a clear path for visitors like SEO Services can, it is no substitute for your New York-based business lacking a clearly readable sign board, or a catchy slogan, etc.

You get the picture.

Write your content for humans to understand because they are the ones making their own purchasing decisions. Optimize your content for search engines. This is like hiring a technician AKA SEO Services to fix the traffic light in front of your store.

5. Write High-Quality content

Writing in a way humans understand is great. Solid communication is key. Now let’s talk about what you need to communicate to them.

People stick around on a website for one reason: it provides them with value.

This is the “secret sauce” of high-quality content. This can look like creating detailed guides to help teach a searcher something they are seeking solutions for, creating high-quality lists and recommendations, crafting graphs and data to present to a viewer to help them understand a topic they are interested in better, etc.

For more information on how to create high-quality content, be sure to check out our blog Why Content Driven SEO Is The Ultimate Digital Marketing Strategy For 2020.

6. Utilize image optimization

Not a lot of bloggers and businesses take advantage of this secret backdoor to include more keywords in your blog without falling into the trap of keyword stuffing.

You can include an image description and alt text at the back end of each image that you use on your website.

You can literally use each image to double your efforts to optimize your site and hence rank for specific keywords.

7. Geographically target keywords

Don’t forget, if your business is based in and operates out of New York, and your target audience is also in the same state, then you want to specifically target keywords that are performing well in your region when you look them up.

A keyword may be performing fantastically broadly in the US, but it may have next to bubkis in terms of search volumes and competition in New York.

So aim at your target well and shoot, New Yorkers!

Author Bio:

Joseph Dyson is a Senior Account Manager at Search Berg—a digital marketing company. He specializes in offering expert New York SEO services and backlinking services. Over years, he has helped a myriad of businesses to skyrocket their rankings and conversions by implementing results-oriented, actionable SEO strategies in New York. He frequently contributes to the Search Berg blog.