You may be thinking that you need to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars each month for good SEO. If you are trying to rank high for extremely competitive keywords, that may be true. However, we can deliver results for most small businesses for much less. Consider the case of VP Insurance Agency in Indianapolis, Indiana. They wanted to rank highly for the phrase “Indianapolis insurance agency,” but their website didn’t show up until the second page of the Google results. After making a number of changes, here were the search results on September 13, 2021.
As you can see, VP Insurance Agency showed up first in the rankings, right after the Google Local results. How did we do it? Did we use some evil black hat tactics to reach the number one spot? Not at all – Here’s what we did:
Step 1 – Clean up all the onsite issues
When we started, VP Insurance ranked in the middle of the second page of results. Unfortunately, being on the second page isn’t much better than not being in the results at all. By using Seobility, we were able to find and correct all the problems on the website, including:
- Making all the titles unique and the proper length.
- Making all the meta descriptions unique and the proper length.
- Adding alt text to all images.
- No indexing all pages with limited text.
- Correcting all improper headings
- Removing internal re-directs.
- Removing duplicate text.
- Eliminating internal re-directs.
- Removing unused webpages.
- Adding keywords into headings and text.
Most of these issues by themselves didn’t affect SEO a whole lot, but when you add them all up, it was enough to move the ranking from the middle of the second page to the middle of the first page. While we pleased with the improvement, we wanted to move up even higher in the results.
Step 2 – Add more text to the webpages
The VP Insurance Agency website was pretty simple. There were only three significant pages – Main, companies and locations. We added a little more text on the main page. This included their Google Rating, which fortunately happened to be 5.0, along with excerpts from the Google reviews. Because of thin content, we had to no index everything except the main page. We looked at the locations page and couldn’t figure out how to add any more relevant text to it. Moving on to the companies page, it contained the names, logos, website links and phone numbers of the insurance companies they represent. We decided to add information about the history of their insurance companies underneath the existing material. Most visitors to this page probably won’t bother to read this material. but the webpage now has enough text that we can allow Google to index it without being penalized. This was enough to move us up to the number one spot in the Google search results.
Step 3 – Improve rankings for other keywords
We’re not going to rest on our laurels. The next step is to improve the rankings of other keywords. First on the list is “Indianapolis auto insurance.” To do this we will add a new page with the keyword in the title of the webpage. The page will contain text that explains the different parts of auto insurance and some tips on saving money. We don’t want the page to be all text, so we’ll get some free images (Like this blue sports car) from Pixabay to break up the text. Once this is complete we will do the same thing with the keywords “Indianapolis homeowners insurance.”
Step 4 – Get into Google local results
The last step will be to make into the Google local results. This will require some help from the agents at the VP Insurance Agency. Their reviews are all 5.0, but unfortunately there are only ten of them. More reviews would be a big help to achieving our goal. It’s a good idea for a business to send an email to a customer after they have made a purchase. The email should thank the customer, ask them to do a Google review and include a link to the Google review page. We may also add a widget onto their main page so people can click on it and write a review. If you want to get reviews, you need to make it convenient to the customer.