Local Search: Helping Google Find Your Business
Search engines need content from a website in order to better locate a business. In simplistic terms, if you are in Kansas City and you want to find a barbecue place, your search words will probably be “barbecue Kansas City.” You wouldn’t want to put just “barbecue” because you’re going to end up with barbecue restaurants from one end of the country to the other. This is known as a local search and is the one most used by search engines today. There are definitely exceptions where you might be in need of a company that sells nationwide, and that’s a whole different strategy.
Shortcut Content understands that fresh content is vital to any search engine’s capability to locate and access your website. It is no longer enough to get your website done and then let it sit idle with nothing new added for long periods of time. Google will take note that your website is virtually “dead in the water” and if one of your competitors is adding fresh content to their site frequently, Google will then give search preference to your competitor. Your website needs a pulse to demonstrate it’s alive, it’s active and it still current. This is where a blog can be instrumental in serving as a means to not only communicate with your customers, but also a way to let Google know you want to be noticed.
Another big plus relating to blogs comes from creating content that’s closely related to the subject matter at hand. If you are an expert on that subject matter, blogging becomes a big credibility builder for your company. Customers may come to your site strictly because they know you are an industry expert.
Phony Baloney Bait Linking
I think most people who conduct searches with any regularity have encountered the above problem, where our search lands us on a website that actually has nothing to do with what we were looking for. It’s annoying and time consuming, and this is known as search engine bait. Think of the guy out there fishing in a stream, using bait on the end of his line to reel in a catch, and although this might be great for the fisherman, from the fish’s point of view, it’s pretty bad news.
Search engine bait may work in the short term, but since it isn’t what someone was really looking for, it’s only good for the ones dangling the bait out there. In the last 12 months, there have been some major upsets for these entities attempting to use bait. Google has changed their algorithm in order to get rid of a lot of these sites that were heavily dependent on search engine bait. Most were simply trying to increase their traffic or get someone to click on an ad, and Google realized this was counter-productive and pretty much halted it in its tracks.
Provide Google and People What They Need
What all this means for anyone doing searches is that you now stand a very good chance of Google providing you with exactly what you’re looking for, which is why companies and those in business for themselves need to keep their sites updated with fresh content. Google has no way of finding you through any other means other than updated material which utilizes target keywords, and Shortcut Content provides clients a way to streamline their blogs so that the content stays current and clients relegate very little time to this process.