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Calgary has well over a million people. In the last four censuses, the population of the city grew by well over 10%. For business owners like you, that spells opportunity – hundreds of thousands of potential customers just waiting to find you.
There’s stiff competition. When you have an economy as big as Calgary’s, everyone wants a piece of the pie. There’s a lot of noise. How do you stand out in the crowd? How do you find customers who are ready to buy right now? How do you make sure those customers choose you? The answer is SEO.
The ROI on SEO is incredible; we’ve helped our clients generate a substantial increase in leads and paying clients at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. The full value of SEO is in long-term planning. As Google and the other search engines adjust their algorithms, we make sure your site is well-positioned to hit the top spot of the first page of results. That’s why we’re called First Rank.
Ranking Up
To understand what our Calgary SEO strategies can do for you, you need to understand what SEO is – search engine optimization. Imagine you’re a plumber in Calgary; what are your clients going to search for? Sometimes, they might simply look up “calgary plumber”. Other times, they might look up “beltline plumber”, or “best plumber near me”.
Understanding what keywords and phrases people are searching for is one of the many elements of great SEO. You know what else is important? Understanding what kind of queries people might make at other points in the buying cycle. Someone might look up “how to fix a leaky kitchen sink faucet”; we want your website to pop up when they do (if you’re a plumber).
SEO is a particularly important strategy in Calgary where there are tonnes of businesses competing for customers. When you’re not on the first page of search results, over 90% of potential clients won’t find you. Think about the last time you went to the second page of Google – in this industry, if you’re not first, you’re last.
SEO for Calgary
Every city is different. SEO is all about targeting keywords that the population of a given area will use. In other words, great SEO requires an intimate knowledge of a particular region. We’ve tailor-made SEO strategies for Calgary so your business will stand out to the people who matter most – other Calgarians.
Look at how Calgary’s population is dispersed. Compared to other regions in Canada, the city itself is the biggest population centre by a wide margin. Look at a city like Victoria; it’s not even the biggest city in its own metropolitan area. That means that SEO efforts are best focused on targeting neighborhoods in Calgary and the city itself. You don’t just want to find customers who are looking for things in Calgary; you want customers who are looking for things in Inglewood, Bridgeland, and other neighborhoods.
That doesn’t mean we want to neglect Calgary’s commuter communities. Look at Airdrie’s population growth; their size has more than doubled in the last 15 years. Targeting growing commuter cities is an excellent strategy because SEO pays off over time. Establish yourself early, and you’re more likely to maintain consistently high rankings.
Understanding Calgary’s demographics and infrastructure is also essential. A company that’s looking to attract new immigrants as clients might get content about how to navigate the CTrain. A lawyer might get content about the new photo radar spots and what they mean for drivers.
To be able to create content that Calgarians want, you need to have your finger on the pulse of the city. That’s the service we provide – an intimate knowledge of the issues facing Calgarians, and the experience to turn that knowledge into readable, sharable content.
Content is King
You’ve probably heard that phrase a million times: content is king. What does it mean? You can have everything in the book – a great product, a technically optimized website, pay-per-click ads, social media outreach, whatever.
None of it matters without great content.
When people show up on your website, they want to be wowed. They want you to answer their questions. They want to enjoy themselves. Brick-and-mortar retailers have learned that customers are looking for an experience, and it’s high time everyone starts applying the same lessons online.
Great content is sharable, which means you’ll get traction on social media. What are you more likely to pay attention to on social media – a sponsored post or something your friend sent to you? Pay-per-click ads have their place, but nothing beats organic sharing, and for that, you need top-notch content.
Search engines recognize great content, too. When your content answers people’s questions, they’ll stay on your page longer. The longer users stay on your site, the higher search engines will rank you – it’s a sign that what you’re creating is valuable.
Great content should be both localized and industry-specific. Let’s go back to our hypothetical plumber. They want to attract clients in the wintertime. To do this, we might create an article about the risks of frozen pipes. We might elaborate on how many frozen pipe claims insurance companies in Calgary get each year. This content is industry-specific (it’s about plumbing) and localized (it’s about Calgary). That way, when someone looks up “frozen pipes calgary”, they find our plumber’s website.
Establishing Authority
First, we create the content. Then, we have to get it out there. Search engines have a lot of metrics to determine what makes content high-quality; if they didn’t, you could just blog lorem ipsum and rank. While natural language processing has come a long way, algorithms can’t understand great content like we can.
When we see great content, we feel it. Robots have to take our word for it.
One of the ways search engines figure out what makes content good or bad is by looking at who links it. The idea came from academic papers – when you’re frequently cited, it’s a sign your paper is important. When a number of esteemed scientists cite your paper, you might just become esteemed yourself.
This is the principle behind establishing authority. We find well respected websites in your industry, show them the content on your website, and encourage them to link to it. Those links bring more clients to your site and improve your ranking in Google. We can target locally, too; blogs in Calgary are constantly looking for content.
What’s Under the Hood
Your website is well laid out. You have call-to-actions in the right place, you’ve got a neat grid in place, and branding is consistent along each page. Great! Humans will be able to navigate it no problem.
But what about robots?
Search engines use robots to feel their way around the web – these bots are called crawlers. Their job is to find and index new web pages as well as changes to web pages. They are extremely temperamental, and when they feel down, they tell their handlers.
Here are some things that make bots sad: Dead links. Bad redirects. Slow loading websites. You can think of robots a little bit like rats in a maze; too many obstacles, and they’ll just give up on trying to get the cheese. Search engines assume that when robots have a hard time crawling your page, humans will too, so they lower your rank.
Great SEO is all about aligning your interests with the interests of search engines. Google and its competitors want to keep users searching on their site; they want the top result to be the best result. When sites load slowly or are hard to navigate, people will leave quickly. That’s a bad result, and you’ll be penalized.
The same principles that guide our technical SEO strategy are the ones that guide our content strategy. People want a great experience. Search engines want people to have a great experience. You want your clients to have a great experience.
SEO is Holistic
You get the point. SEO is about quality. It’s not about gimmicks, like it might have been back in the ‘90s. The better your site is for users, the better it seems to search engines.
When your website is getting a lot of traffic, it’s another sign that you’re an authority in your industry. That’s why we can employ a number of strategies that indirectly influence search engines.
Your presence on social media is relevant, too. To ignore Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms is to ignore huge segments of your potential client base. Shouting out influencers in Calgary, creating local Twitter groups, and creating your own pages can all move the needle for your search engine ranking.
Using all the tools search engines give you is essential. Have you already set up a Google My Business? Have you optimized it? Do you even know what GMB is? If the answer to any of these questions is no, our SEO strategy can definitely get you customers.
Our strategies are always tailor-made to the businesses we serve. We’ll look at how your competition is ranking, find ways to outrank them, and bring you to the top. Our multifaceted, long-term approach means that as algorithms change and the business landscape shifts, your rank will stay strong.
SEO for All Stages of Development
Whether you’re building a new website from scratch or you’re looking to redevelop a website you already have, we can help. The principles of SEO mean that it’s important to consider at all phases of website design. Almost everything on your site will affect SEO.
When people want questions answered, they look online. Be the first answer to that question. Get in touch with us and optimize your site so you get the first rank. A quick reminder:
Over 90% of web traffic doesn’t go past the first page of the results.
Don’t risk losing over 90% of your potential clients. Take advantage of some of the most targeted marketing that’s ever existed – marketing that only hits Calgarians who are actively looking for your services.
Choose First Rank.
