If you are a business owner looking to hire an SEO company in San Diego, how do you go about selecting the best SEO service for your needs? The process of hiring an SEO company in San Diego for your business should be as thorough as any other hiring process in your business.

There’s more to SEO than just getting keywords to rank high on Google. If a campaign is not done well, any SEO gains you may make in the short term can be lost in just a few weeks after the search engines collect enough data about how visitors are interacting with your web properties and determine that your site is not adequately serving the needs of its users.

To ensure that you give the right SEO company in San Diego your business, make sure the SEO agency meets the following requirements:

More than Just an SEO Company

Most SEO companies sell themselves on their ability to build links to clients’ websites. The problem is that link building, while important, is just a small part of SEO. Besides link building, an effective SEO campaign should include:

• The identification of the ideal customer for your business
• Keyword research to determine the language your ideal customer uses
• Focused content creation to address the needs of your ideal customer
• Website development or redesign to improve user experience and make it easy for bots to find the content created
• Implementation of strategies to ensure that site visitors stay longer on your site and so drastically reduce bounce rates
• Implementation of lead collection strategies to ensure that all qualified leads are directed to a working sales funnel

In short, an SEO campaign should be a fully fledged marketing campaign. As a notable SEO company in San Diego, every time we work with a business our experience during every exercise confirm the above observations to be true.

Proven Results

Without a track record of results, how would you know whether or not the SEO company in San Diego you are planning to hire can actually meet your needs? The best indicator of future success in SEO is past success. In an age where bad SEO can get you penalized by Google, you can’t afford to have someone learn SEO skills using your site. It can prove to be a very expensive mistake.

When looking for an SEO company in San Diego, ask those who send you proposals a list of the businesses they have worked with. They get extra points if the businesses they have worked with are based in San Diego. Working with local businesses gives an SEO company gives great insights into what local SEO strategies work in their city or location. It is something you can only learn through practice and then perfecting your skills by adopting the strategies that work and ruthlessly discarding the strategies that don’t.

How big is local SEO? What are the local SEO services San Diego businesses should be using today? If you want to know how big of a deal local SEO is, just study the statistics surrounding the topic. 78% of shoppers who make a local search on mobile end up buying a product offline. 71% of shoppers say that before they go shopping, they look up local businesses online. Interestingly, when people type in a search engine query looking for local businesses, at least 70% skip the paid results and go straight to the organic results.

If you are currently not using local SEO for your San Diego business, you are missing out greatly. Below are the key local SEO services San Diego businesses should be using:

Google My Business Listings

Google My Business is a service by Google to allow businesses to list their businesses online through Google. Of the signals that Google pays most attention to when determining local SEO search results, Google My Business signals are the most important. In fact, according to Moz, these signals account for up to 25% of all local search ranking signals in 2018.

Link Building

Link building remains a critical part of SEO. No reputable SEO services San Diego businesses trust don’t offer link building as part of their local SEO package. You want to make sure that the SEO service you hire only builds high-quality links from trustworthy domains.

Reviews

Setting up the architecture to get high-quality reviews from fans is one of the critical local SEO services San Diego businesses should use. Google pays a lot of attention on the reviews customers leave for your business. Some of the things Google considers include:

• How many reviews there are
• How often you get the reviews
• The diversity of the reviews

On-Page Optimization

Technically, search engines rank web pages and not websites. When a user clicks a link on a search engine, they are directed to a particular page on a given website. Not all the pages on your website will rank high on Google. You should spend your energy on optimizing a few pages that can rank well.

Google uses page-specific metrics when determining which pages to rank high. These metrics are called on-page factors. Some of the on-page factors that relate to local search include:

• A clear business name
• Presence of an address
• Presence of a phone number
• Use of relevant keywords in titles and other text in the page

Digital marketing has made it possible to make gains in branding and marketing that were only available to big brands with huge budgets before internet usage became so popular. Small businesses can take advantage of the power of digital marketing in San Diego to get new customers, re-market to these customers, and to build brand loyalty.

Digital marketing in San Diego for small businesses as a way to reach new clients and retain them is an avenue that is available to practically all business owners as long as they have an internet connection. Below are some of the powerful ways small businesses can utilize digital marketing in San Diego:

Tracking

Offline marketing offers very limited opportunities to gauge how prospects are responding to your marketing messages. With digital marketing, you can track which messages prospects are responding best to and know in real time how your marketing campaign is doing.

Most business owners don’t use most of the tracking opportunities digital marketing affords their marketing teams. Some of the things you can track include:

• The number of visitors each digital marketing channel is driving to your website
• How much time people spend on your website and the pages they visit the most
• New vs. returning visitors
• Where in the sales funnel prospects drop out
• Your conversion rates – a rate which measures the percentage of visitors that perform a predetermined task e.g. signing up for a mailing list
• The lifetime value of a customer
• How much each click from a CPC campaign is costing you
• The ROI of each digital marketing channel

The more metrics you track, the more information you have to fine-tune your offers, landing pages, products, and other critical things that influence customer buying behavior. Tracking all the important metrics is a critical thing to do if you want to make it big with digital marketing in San Diego.

Personalization of Offers

Did you know digital marketing can allow you to send highly personalized ads to all the segments of the market that you are targeting? You can do this with total accuracy based on the targeting options that PPC providers such as Facebook and Google provide.

Also, personalization can be extended even after a customer has visited your website. Based on their behavior on your website, you can send them personalized ad according to the pages they viewed, the products in the cart they abandoned, the specific store they checked into in San Diego if they made it to a physical store, and according to various other metrics. Facebook and Google particularly offer businesses amazing retargeting options.

For a local business, tracking and personalization can give you the edge over other businesses using digital marketing in San Diego. You will know your local customers like the back of your hands. The data can be easily collected. Once you know how to use the data to drive personalized messages according to the San Diego residents you are targeting, you will be pretty much unstoppable.

If you are a non-techie, the process of hiring a web development company in San Diego to build your website can be intimidating. It doesn’t have to be this way. If you can clearly define what a great website looks like, you can easily communicate all your expected deliverables to the web developer.

Any good website should meet certain minimum requirements in functionality and user experience considerations. The following are some of the features you should pay attention to when hiring a web development company in San Diego.

A Fully Responsive Design

Your website should be able to scale to fit any screen a browser is using. The website should be fully responsive to screen sizes, browsing platforms, and device orientations. A great number of people consume digital content today using their mobile phones. Because of this reality, Google now rewards responsive sites with higher rankings while pushing unresponsive sites further down in search engine ranking pages.

SEO Friendly Architecture

You want to make it as easy as possible for search engine bots to find the content on your site. This means that your site should have a crawlable architecture and easily indexable content. Make sure that there are no rel=”nofollow” link attributes on the links you want Google to follow. If you can’t inspect the site architecture on your own, you can easily hire a freelance SEO to go through the site after the web development company in San Diego is done with your website.

A Logical Navigation Structure

Someone browsing your site should be able to tell where they can find the information they want just after landing on the site. You can have navigation links on the sidebar or at the top. The important thing to remember is that the navigation structure should be consistent throughout the site and categories and subcategories are arranged logically.

Decent Load Times

Page load times affect user experience hence search engine rankings. A good web development company in San Diego should take this into consideration when writing the code for your website. The faster your website loads, the lower your bounce rates will be. This will affect your rankings in search. Google has a dedicated page where website owners can check their page load times.

Small businesses doing social media marketing in San Diego have become pretty aggressive in their push to reach their target audiences. If you want to rise above the noise and gain an edge, stepping away from the computer screen to brainstorm unique strategies to reach your audience may be the most productive thing you have ever done. When you come up with an out-of-the-box strategy and relentlessly execute it, your efforts at social media marketing in San Diego will bear disproportionate fruits.

It is important to remember that even with digital marketing, marketing at its core is about connecting with real people. All those digits and numbers you see on the screen are real people with flesh and blood. If you can find a way to form partnerships in the real world and leverage those relationships on social media, you will be doing something very few people doing social media marketing in San Diego bother to do.

Below are some of the partnerships that can skyrocket your social media marketing efforts:

Targeting the Local Businesses in the Same Vertical

Right here in San Diego, there are local businesses who are not your competitors but who serve the same customers as you. Most businesses just starting out with social media marketing in San Diego make the mistake of approaching their competitors to give them shoutouts in order to gain traction. Even worse, they try to steal potential customers from their competitors’ pages.

What if I told you that you can easily get businesses with your ideal customer to promote your services on social media and have them do it for free? If you run a dog walking business, for instance, organizations that also serve your ideal customers but who are not in direct competition with you include veterinary services, dog shelters, and local stores selling dog food and treats. Instead of begging other dog walkers for shoutouts, approach these non-competing services and they will gladly promote you.

Influencer Marketing

Very local businesses take advantage of influencer marketing. They think it is out of their budget to approach local influencers to promote their businesses. An even bigger mistake small businesses make is not appreciating the value people with modest followings on social media sites can add to their businesses.

You are a local business. The pool of customers you serve is local. If you can find a local who has 10,000 local San Diegans following them, the number of customers they can refer to your business beats the number an out-of-state celebrity with $100,000 followers will. What’s more, the services of the local San Diegan with 10,000 followers are incredibly cheap. You can get a shoutout for less than $100. If you find a handful of such people and build relationships with them, you will supercharge your social marketing in San Diego.