By the way, i n case you don’t have time for a long read right now, check out my one-page cheat-sheet summary. In all of these recommendations I assume only that you have time to work smart, because you sure as thunder do not have time to work dumb. In that case you don’t need to take all these bits of my unsolicited advice, but if you do few or none, you can expect extremely tough sledding and some worn-out dogs.īelow are 30 principles you can apply and strategies you can follow to get your local rankings and business moving even from a cold start. But these strategies and principles are extra important to do if your business has been around for nary a hair past a freckle. You’ll benefit from these action items and SOPs even if you’ve been working on your SEO for a long time. Speaking of practicality, many of my suggestions in this post will help you even if you’re not starting out. It helps me keep a bead on what’s practical and what’s not. As someone who also started my business with little in the rucksack, I often think of the start-with-nothing situation when I hear others’ SEO advice. That kind of thing gets me out of bed in the afternoon. Either in spite of or because of the stakes, start-with-nothing SEO is oddly fun. In the cases where my client started with nothing, I also started with nothing to optimize (or at least nothing tangible). The stakes vary, and so does the poker strategy. It’s important for local SEO professionals (in particular) to be able to help businesses of all sizes and at all stages: well-established, in the middle, and just starting out. In my view, that’s always been the whole point and promise of SEO. In those cases it took a while, but we got visibility, customers, and some breathing room. In some cases they had just started a new business, and in a couple of cases they had never been in business at all. But a few of my clients started working with me right around Day 1 of their business – that is, from a cold start. Most of my clients had been in business for a while before contacting me, and sought my help some time after the end of the beginning.

IF you work smart and hard, stray off the beaten path a little, and don’t trust most of the advice you hear. Not only can you get visible and scrounge some business, but you also might be able to do it in less time than you think and not need to spend all your time working on it. This may sound like a stretch now, but the local search results still are a place where it doesn’t take money to make money. In other words, you’re starting with zilch.Ĭold-start SEO (as I call it) is a mighty different thing from doing SEO for a company that’s been around for a while, has a customer base, maybe has a war chest, and probably has other resources you don’t. You’re starting with your wits, work ethic, presumably a computer somewhere in the trunk, and not much else. Are you starting your local SEO work at Customer #0, with few or no connections, few or no resources, and not much certainty as to where to begin? Working on local SEO for this new business may feel like you just moved to a foreign land with only the clothes on your back.

Seo nibbble