In Pittsburgh SEO: From Local to Global Part 1, we discussed how optimization strategies must target the right keywords to capture local and global markets simultaneously. These strategies include comprehensive keyword research, various methods of backlinking, on-page optimization and directory listings. The following are three additional techniques that a professional Pittsburgh SEO company must employ to propel your business to the top of its marketplaces.
*Press Releases
A popular press release can drive a significant amount of highly targeted traffic to a website. This can help to decrease bounce rates – the measure of how many users visit only one page on your website and then exit to another domain. A large influx of traffic can also increase conversions if the landing page referenced in the news story has powerful conversion points.
Significant traffic from consistent press releases can help to quickly rank a website for a particular term or group of terms. Different versions of a press release can be sent to different geographic regions as part of an effective market expansion strategy.
Finally, publishing your news-worthy press release on sites like PRWeb and WebWire can often result in a PR4 or higher backlink. These types of links can be worth more than hundreds of poor quality links from low-level linking efforts.
*PBNs
Private Blog Networks are groups of hundreds or even thousands of websites that are all controlled by one company. This company allows users to submit articles to them that will then be randomly distributed to one of the websites in the network. Users can place anchor text links in these articles that will then be pinged and bookmarked by the PBN service in order to ensure those links get indexed by the search engines.
By using such a service and building up a number of high quality backlinks, a website can rapidly become competitive for and even dominate the keywords it's targeting.
*Social Media
When it comes to SEO, the experts know that social media is a critical part of achieving success for their clients. Social media can build backlinks when people share your web pages or articles (although these links are exceptionally short-lived), but more importantly it serves as a powerful medium to build brand awareness and cultivate loyalty among customers.
The top three search engines are beginning to use social proof as an increasingly more important metric when determining the authority – and therefore the ranking – of a website or webpage for a particular keyword. Social proof refers to the phenomena of people making decisions based upon the actions and behaviors of other people. Social media is a perfect example of this.
With social media, users can tell (using a number of available metrics such as Facebook's "Like" feature, the number of "Tweets" an item has had and so on) whether an item is "popular" or not and will often make decisions based solely on the fact that other people have made similar decisions. This means that the search engines will do the same in the sense that more search weight will be given to items that have a large amount of social proof.
Finally, social media is an excellent way to generate interest in your products or services worldwide, but it's also an especially effective way to capture local markets. This is because consumers generally interact more with local businesses through social media than with huge national or international conglomerates where their "voices" will likely be lost in a sea of other customers.
Whether you're targeting a local market, an international market or both at once, it's critical to employ the services of a professional Pittsburgh SEO company in order to overcome the sometimes-substantial efforts of others in your niche or market. To learn how you can get started right now, click here for a free consultation from Pennsylvania's most potent internet marketing firm.
