Orange County SEO is now in the summer season! If you’re considering your business advertising and marketing for summer and you plan to invest in search engine optimization and marketing, now is the time to get started in your SEO strategy for Orange County and all geographic markets. Typically, a solid placement in a competitive environment such as Orange County SEO markets are, requires anywhere from one to six months (sometimes longer) depending on the level of competition.

I specialize in SEO for real estate and other small business. You can see that I rank #7 on Google for small business SEO expert, and around position #4 for Orange County Photography (a very part-time endeavor) Although I’m far from the top ten or even fifty photographers in Orange County, my capabilities in SEO place me in the top ten for Orange County photography related searches.

Contact me today for your spring and summer SEO needs.

The best cars and best SEO are both built by hand.

Marketing, online advertising, Orange County SEO, real estate, SEO, SEO Expert, small business, Summer

Before you start any kind of SEO campaign, do what the SEO experts do first. Research. Steve Wiideman, the number one SEO expert calls this the Analyze layer in his fourfold SEO model. Analyze what your market is. That’s likely already done on an informal basis- you know what you’re selling or providing as a service and you know where you’re offering it, right? Next is a little bit of art and applied intuition. Your market may or may not be typing your product or service directly into search engines. What if they aren’t? You have to be creative in tying together, your product or service to their need and then present it where they are looking for a solution to that need. A person who needs to sell their home is probably never going to type listing agents into Google. My office is on the border of the city of Fullerton. You may think people in Fullerton who are selling their home may be typing in something like best real estate agents in Fullerton or any variation of agents in Fullerton, but you can check the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and quickly find out they are not. In all of Orange County with a population of 3 million, people aren’t looking on the web for listing agents. They are doing research on the market, however. People are looking at what’s trending all the time. The results in the Keyword Tool show that people are typing in one phrase more than many others for the Fullerton market, “Fullerton homes for sale.” Agents who have done their homework know this, thereby competition for this phrase is high. Agents who have not done their homework erroneously choose the phrase, “homes for sale in Fullerton”, a phrase that has around 5% of the search volume of the previous version of the same words but a different order. The former phrase has a global monthly search volume of 22,200 while the latter has only 1,300.

Keyword research matters. As an agent, you have to stay connected to the buying side if you want to use the web to locate listings. Believe me, people are checking things out on the web long before they take the relatively tenuous step of actually contacting an agent.

If you don’t hire an SEO expert, make sure you do as much as you can to become one on your own behalf before undertaking a keyword campaign that isn’t doing you much good.

By contrast, sometimes you can discover a niche keyword, a long-tail keyword that nets close to 100% paying customers for your business. In real estate it could be something very specific such as a search term I recently saw that brought a person to one of my client’s websites. The term was simple and to the point with no competition but definitely found someone looking for a specific kind of agent to work with. What was that term? It was, “realtors in that spend time with you.” My client has made a point of letting customers know that they’ll get the face time they need and it shows in their web pages and blogs.

The Google Keyword screenshot below illustrates the importance of keyword research as described in this article. Be an SEO Expert on your own behalf and give plenty of thought to your keywords for both long term and short term SEO strategies in Orange County and anywhere you are marketing.

Looking for PGA National real estate? Check out PGA National Homes by Jeff Lichtenstein.

Keyword research, Orange County SEO, Orange County SEO Expert, Orange County Web Design, SEO analysis

Orange County SEO and the Advantage of Geo Marketing for Small Business

Web strategies on a local level, Orange County SEO for small business, is my focus and it’s your advantage wherever you may be geographically located. SEO for large companies and SEO for small business have much in common but also differ in very important ways:

• SEO for small business can capture local market share
  Large companies have to dominate the web globally. This may be possible for a niche product or service but it becomes increasingly difficult to impossible for small business to compete with large SEO campaigns. Conversely, a specific product or geographic target, such as La Cresta Custom homes, can land you on page one and in position one for a Google search: proof- La Cresta Custom Homes – check for my photography back-link at the bottom of the first website. Also, this client owns the first several results- not just the first one. If someone is looking for nearly any search term on La Cresta Custom homes, or even La Cresta homes for sale, they will find this target home on page one of Google. They will be exposed to the message about this home ahead of many thousands of competing web pages.
• SEO for small business can enjoy faster results
  Since competition is smaller, effective analysis and keyword research (see my article: Orange County SEO Expert | Finding the Right Keywords) can mean faster access to high rankings in Google. My example of La Cresta homes was achieved in about six weeks, with page one results appearing within three weeks. Dominance- multiple showings in high positions is possible depending on competing SEO efforts and site traffic.
• SEO for small business can be inexpensive. If you’re a do-it-yourself type, you can learn from studying and applying basic SEO techniques and for the cost of web hosting (Bluehost offers the best cheap web hosting plans from $6.95/month) and the time spent setting up and posting to a WordPress blog, a small business can make a quick impact on search engines and place high in search results with little other work.
• Small businesses know their target and it can be more easily reached.
  This is even true for individuals. Example: My wife and I collected several Thomas Kinkade prints- but after two moves, we have one that doesn’t fit our decor- the one that my wife always liked least. It’s the Clocktower Cottage print. I’m selling it, but the demand is low for Kinkade is low. I created a WordPress post for this painting and titled it, Private Sale: Thomas Kinkade Painting – Clocktower Cottage Streams of Time $779 Kinkade Paintings. This post always shows up on page one when the title is mentioned in a search, and in position one when “for sale” is mentioned in the search too. I get little traffic for this term, perhaps three or four hits a week. What I’m assured of is that, when someone wants to buy this painting-print and looks online, they will see my offering. It’s over-priced a bit so it hasn’t moved. That’s fine because it gives me the advantage of this illustration. There are countless methods of capturing the buyer that only a small business owner that knows their audience can leverage. Local people start typing locally oriented phrases into Google when they’re closer to buying.
• Geographic specificity is your biggest advantage.
  A large business, like Canon, for example has to take a completely different strategy toward brand building. Even a page one result means little more than the sense that they might be a bigger name than Pentax. A small business that serves a locale has tremendous advantage by being on page one. There is a greater sense of relevance and authority for that business. Often, the first link with a good call to action, direct or inferred, in the title or even the description will get the first click. The title, Orange County SEO small business advantage that I used here immediately communicated, “there’s something in it for you” to those who are reading this post.

Always remember that SEO should always be SEM, Search Engine Marketing. You’re not just trying to get on page one. You’re marketing a product, a serviced and a brand. That is why the keyword research and analysis I mentioned earlier is vitally important.

Orange County SEO, Orange County SEO Expert, Search Engine Marketing, SEM, SEO for Real Estate, Small Business SEO

Orange County SEO Pricing

Though it is not necessarily the most critical part of a successful SEO campaign, the optimization phase is the one most familiar to clients and business owners.

Dave Keys: basic optimization pricing for Orange County SEO

Keyword results with Google rankings is something everyone is after but the mistake most often made is that business owners often think in terms of how they perceive their business, not what the most likely buyer is thinking when they go to a search engine. That is both the science and art of effective SEO and search engine marketing. What is a person who is ready to buy your product going to type into Google? There are tools that enable an accurate analysis of what people are searching for- that’s the scientific part. Analysis with various tools will show you exactly what people are typing into Google. The art is predicting what your next customer will type into Google. Someone who actually needs your product may not even be aware of your product as they are trying to solve a problem.

Orange County SEO, SEO, SEO Expert, SEO Expert Dave Keys