So many entrepreneurs who think about using local SEO marking for their Colorado Springs business get obsessed with tricks and tactics. That is really foolhardy.
Let me explain why.
Look at how devoid that is of my competitors. Hard AF to beat the snippet and the lower results worldwide as they are SEO sites with thousands of pieces of content… But there are 0 map results for this in Colorado Springs. No one comes up. This might be Google, but I’m willing to bet my competitors aren’t that interested in it because it’s seemingly so hard to rank for a keyword like this as it’s basically your site vs. the most authoritative sites in SEO marketing.
Local SEO = Your Focus Should Be On People, Not Search Engines
Google and other search engines are fixated on one thing: getting users the best possible results for users. Google is a business and they have many customers, but a main one are the people who use their search engine.
So let’s think about this for a second. What are search engines in the business of delivering?
In this sense, information. Information is something that can be helpful or not helpful for people. The less helpful the information, the less authoritative that information is.
This means that search engines really are in the business of knowing what is the best possible result for someone whether this is for “pizza Colorado springs” or “dog groomer near me” or “how did the big bang happen”? For each result, a search engine wants to return, in order, the best results to the last results. This means that to win the SEO game longterm (what you want, right?), you need to be the best result for each possible search. (More on this in a bit.)
Tricks Are Temporary At Best, Punishable At Worst
Search engines in many ways are similar to AI. They will discover tricks and tactics and use that against you in their ranking decisions. Just Google “Google slap SEO”. It destroys peoples entire incomes. Short term gains are cool, but I don’t think you bootstrapped your business just to lose a big chunk of revenue for some short term gains. At least I hope not (if so, call me (719) 425-9166 and I’ll help you setup way better “cash machines” than SEO glitches).
Believe me or not, but here is a Google engineer talking about making sure that your content is top quality and not thin or adding no or little additional value. Like if I tell you that all the apples I sell are $1 a pound, it’s not very helpful to tell you the price of each apple variety: they are all $1. Google has created an algorithm they believe accurately measures the quality of your business entity in general as well as each of the specific sites, profiles, and pages. (It’s rather complicated and still somewhat secret.)
Tricks Are Often “Taught” Once They Have Become Less Effective
Think about it. Why would a marketer sell a program teaching a method they’re using to trick Google knowing that teaching it will likely end its usefulness?
Often, people do this once it’s no longer working. And the really unscrupulous learn about it somewhere and sell it without attribution. Generally at that point though, it’s about to be useless.
This happened to me several times! The first is the most hilarious to me. I’ve been into SEO for the past 13 years. There used to be a neat time where you could just post a couple hundred articles on Ezinearticles.com and sell affiliate products and make a decent income.
I happened to get into it slightly after this method was basically worthless. But I got all the training programs and was just so excited. You see, I’m a philosophy scholar — I write quickly. And I was just stoked that I was going to crank out money like an alchemist that learned to make straw into gold!
But my efforts were futile. I followed the (dumb) advice I got to go after a big niche and they recommended weight loss. So, I did it. I followed several programs thinking I was so smart. And after writing several thousand articles, I realized it wasn’t quite so easy.
And it’s only gotten less easy since.
But hey, if you wanna learn the hard way, just buy some programs on the Warrior Forum or get some course on “black hat SEO”. Good luck to you. But I personally would recommend you donate the money to charity and just try random marketing methods you find on YouTube than buy anything from the Warrior Forum and black hat tactics can be helpful for situations where you may want to lower the reputations of a site… (like reputation management or something). But I don’t really recommend doing that either: just making a point that those things are not helpful.
What Is The Best Way To Think About Local SEO In Colorado Springs?
You want to focus on UXO, user experience optimization. Focus on your customers’ needs and wants and values. And stay on it for awhile. It does take time for most businesses to see direct returns from SEO. It’s getting rarer and rarer to be rare. And while this may seem disheartening at first, think what you can do to be the best choice for your customer right now?
Make your stuff simple to understand and as good as you can make it without going overboard. (People, me the most, screw this up a lot: your best is what it is right now with no additional training. Start, figure things out, then improve to “as good as you can” actually make in reality.) Focus on your customers. And the real benefit here is that this is what actually makes you money when people see your content.
This can be frustrating sometimes as it seems like you’re just whispering your message into a vast canyon hoping someone hears it… I get that. It sucks. But you have to step out of transactional thinking. Each piece of content is not going to move you 3% closer to the goal. It’s going to do whatever it does. The content writ large as a dynamic system is what gives you “authority” and “trustworthiness” and demonstrates your “expertise”, which is what Google is really after (E-A-T) when determining your local SEO score.
What you want to focus on is slowly, but surely putting out good content or having someone focus on it for a week or two to jump start you before slowly, but surely putting out good content regularly.
And you need to keep in mind that what you’re doing is making things your ideal customers would like. After that, keep in mind that you’re also slowly building the “trust” Google has for your website and Google My Business listing by making as many possible pieces of relevant, good content as possible (not nearly as time consuming as it sounds).
Then, add your really polished stuff after you’ve figured out a bunch of things about making content. (And at that point, you’ll actually know how to make good content that will be successful for your specific business’s local SEO marketing!)
You’re OVERTHINKING IT — STOP IT!
I find an alarming amount of people get stuck at this point.
Perfectionism is an emotionally complex way to procrastinate. You pay for it literally in missed revenue and customer satisfaction.
And I do not care if you disagree with me: you’re wrong. There is no way to be better than you are. It’s impossible.
— That’s the topic of the next blog post: “Perfectionism is Procrastination” —
But you may be asking now, “What is the best way to do local SEO?” I find the best approach for local SEO is a three-fold strategy…
How do you do this? We will cover this in a future post: The Local SEO Strategy That Works In Colorado Springs
