SEO for a Local Business “web design Valencia”

In the following tutorial, we’re going to run a real-time experiment on organic positioning of specific keywords. To do this, we’ve selected three keywords in the exact order we want them to appear in search engines: web design Valencia.

We should mention that we’re working with WordPress and will use the latest version of the Yoast SEO plugin to redefine our keywords.

Since organic positioning isn’t immediate, we’ll be updating this post as our position changes. That’s why this blog entry will start to make sense over time and with its respective updates.

Before we begin, let’s take a look at the factors that influence the organic ranking of specific keywords and the added challenges of positioning the ones we’ve selected: “web design Valencia“.

1- Exclusivity and competition

The more exclusive a term is, the easier it is to rank for. For example, if at Marabelia we decide to rank for the terms “super cool websites” or “awesome websites“, we’ll appear on the first page of Google at the first pass of the Googlebot because there’s no competition for those specific keywords. Therefore, ranking for terms with no competition is extremely easy: it’s often enough to include the term in your page title (or even just in the content), and in no time your site will show up in the top results for those words.

But of course, we didn’t want to make it that easy for ourselves. We’re targeting a local audience (from Valencia) to attract potential clients interested in web design in Valencia, so we chose highly competitive keywords.

In our browser, we opened an incognito window and typed “web design Valencia”, and here’s what we found:

 

This means heavy Adwords competition (at least ten web design companies in Valencia fighting over these keywords) and equally tough organic SEO competition.

Leaving Google Ads aside, the difficulty of ranking organically for these keywords can be assessed by asking a few simple questions about our competitors:

How well are our competitors optimizing SEO for these terms? (URLs, page titles, and content + SEO)

How much traffic do they get? How long have their websites been online? (Traffic and domain age)

What is their site structure like? How do they manage content? (Site updates and other Google-relevant factors)

2- URLs, page titles, and content

URL: If there’s a domain like webdesignvalencia.com or webdesignvalencia.es, it will carry more weight than any other URL.

Main page title: If a competitor’s main page title is “web design Valencia”, that will have more SEO value than any other variation. Here, word order matters, and the more keywords you try to include, the harder it becomes to rank for all of them.

For example, between the following page titles:

a) Web design Valencia

b) Graphic design and web design in Valencia

c) Web design, graphic design, marketing, and videos in Valencia

Ranking results would follow the same order: title a) would rank highest, followed by b), and so on.

That’s why it’s best to focus on just a few keywords and work on them thoroughly, with dedication and consistency. If you try to rank for a long list of terms, you’ll never reach the top pages of Google.

Content: If your competition consistently highlights their keywords throughout their site, they’ll have strong internal ranking.

It’s essential that your page content includes your keywords—ideally more than once. Google prioritizes headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.) and bold text over regular paragraph text. The first paragraph is the most important.

So when working on SEO, you need to bring up your main keyword early, format it properly, and rename your images using those keywords.

SEO plugin: Your competition might be using SEO plugins very effectively.

Once the page is built, we can use the Yoast SEO plugin to adjust keywords as we see fit. In our case, the default title would be “Web design Valencia… Or how to rank specific keywords on Google“, but since the second part doesn’t help, we’ll edit it in Yoast so the final title is simply “Web design Valencia“.

We’ll do the same with the meta description, tweaking it to include exactly what we want: “Web design, graphic design, online marketing, and corporate videos“.

3- Traffic, backlinks, and domain age

No matter how well we craft pages, titles, and content, if our competitors get lots of traffic and have been online for years, it will be tough to outrank them. The only real way to do so is to beat them—something we can’t always achieve. We’ll need visits, visits, and more visits (and a lot of patience). That’s why it’s so important to use all available channels: Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and more—with plenty of engaged followers.

Aside from traffic, backlinks are key. These determine your PageRank and positively affect your SEO. Getting quality websites to link to yours is a fast and effective way to climb the rankings.

It’s also a good idea to submit your site to business directories and (of course) to all search engines beyond Google (Yahoo, Bing, etc.).

4- Website updates and other things Google cares about

A regularly updated website not only gets more visitors (thanks to more content), but it also attracts more frequent visits from Googlebot, which helps improve rankings. So blogs with fresh, exclusive content will outperform static, outdated sites.

Remember: Googlebot is not a humanoid. It operates based on algorithms that are relatively easy to understand. It won’t “read” your content like a human but will spot duplicate content. So if you copy text from another site, Google will detect it and penalize you—just like it penalizes duplicate pages within your own site.

Also, don’t go overboard repeating your keywords—Google will treat it as spam. Create original, quality content and forget the shortcuts!

Other things Googlebot dislikes include:

• Websites with hard-to-read code (don’t overdo JavaScript or use Flash)

• Websites that are too heavy and take ages to load. We know we need to improve this on our site. Although we’ve already implemented GZIP compression and optimized images, we may need to drop a homepage script… We’re considering it.

With SEO optimized to rank for web design Valencia, we’re wrapping up this post as of September 15, 2014. Now we wait—without losing patience.

 

Using the exact phrase “web design Valencia” in quotes, we reached the second page of Google:

We achieved this without any social media promotion. If we now “boosted” this post and gained more visits, we could easily reach the third page. Still, we’re going to wait and reach that page organically before taking further action.

Let’s give it time!