How Important Is A Portland SEO Strategy For You?

Oregon has a population of over 4.1 million people and has over 450,000 small, medium and large businesses registered in the area. The question Portland businesses need to ask is how they are going to compete with those 450,000 other businesses in order to reach their clients? It doesn’t matter whether you have just gone into business as an independent tradesperson, have an established retail store, or a corporation that manufactures business to business components, if you have goods or services to offer you need to make sure that you are reaching the right people.

How Is A Website Free Advertising?

98.8% of the population of Portland has internet access, this means that if you are a local Portland business you have access to over 640,000 people, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No matter what the weather and no matter what the transport situation is. If you have a website your potential customers can learn about you.

Your website may be a simple one page ‘business card’ site with just your contact details and opening hours. Or it may be a multipage, multimedia extravaganza that keeps potential clients coming back time and time again to access the information you provide. Unlike print advertising, once it has been built and is live on the internet, your website is always there providing constant advertising for your business.

Be Found Online

The caveat of course, is that they have to be able to find you amongst the incredible amount of information available on an internet search engine. Often small businesses build a website, or have one built, and are just happy that it goes live. Before you know it, ten years have passed and you are still running the same site with outdated information and it provides a poor view of the company – if it can be found at all.

When someone is looking for business by using a search engine like Google, they are rarely going to go beyond the first page to find what they are looking for. In fact, if your business isn’t showing up in at least the first five search results chances are that your potential clients aren’t seeing your website at all.

So, the question becomes, how can you ensure that your website start showing up in the top five results returned in a search engine? No tricks, nor expensive spending on AdWords, but you do need to turn your attention to Search Engine Optimization. Consulting with experts like Portland SEO can make the task easier by showing you exactly where you need to make changes in order to be found.

What Is All The Fuss About SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, in a nutshell, is simply ensuring that your website is presented in such a way that a search engine algorithm can quickly scan the relevant sections of your website and know what the appropriate keywords are. If you are an accountant in Seattle who has several blog posts about your client who is a plumber in Portland, you might be quite surprised to find that your website is quite prominent in search results for people looking for Portland plumbers.

Search engines constantly update and improve the algorithms that pull all the data they have collated about the world wide web in order to provide the best and most relevant search results. They also ensure that any tricks used by less than scrupulous websites backfire. Rather than moving you to the top of the rankings, trying to trick a search engine is more likely to get you quickly blacklisted. This means that absolutely no one will find you, and potentially cause other problems with your emails being directed to spam folders and mailing lists being blacklisted too. To know more about web guidelines, you can go to this https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a.

SEO is obviously an important part of your website build. However, it doesn’t need to be complicated or difficult to maintain a top-ranked website, but it will require you to know exactly what keywords you should, and want, to be known for. Get advice from a reputable SEO expert to ensure that you aren’t going to wind up in trouble with the search engines, and make sure they are able to scan your website to ensure that it is primed for the right audience.