Search engine optimization (SEO), which is the way you get your website ranked as high as possible in the search engines, changes constantly. Two of the biggest and most recent changes is that it is now recommended that people focus on mobile optimization, and on local optimization. Because of the many changes over the past decade or so, SEO has become a true art in its own right, and keeping up with it takes the skills and knowledge of a true professional. This is why you need a local SEO company to make sure your website is found. But what is it they can do for you?

Understanding Local SEO

Once upon a time, SEO was almost fully down to link building. But now that it is local, the focus is more strongly on social media. This is why local SEO always goes hand in hand with search engine marketing (SEM). Through SEM, you can access elements such as local Twitter tweets, Google Maps, Google Places, and Facebook places. Whereas once, the focus was almost solely on keywords, it is now more on how many local links and local mentions for websites. This is particularly true for sits that refer to businesses that actually have a local presence, such as law firms, plastic surgeons, dentists, plumbers, and so on.

Naturally, you still also need to focus on the traditional forms of SEO, which includes link building and keywords. But you now have to add those local features in order to really make a difference. Clearly, SEO is now so complex that you need someone who has specialized in this in order to have a truly optimized website.

In fact, there are other very important factors that are now all symbiotic elements of SEO. This includes:

• Having an IP address in your own country.
• Multimedia enhancement.
• Video marketing.
• Online reputation management.

Finding a Local SEO Company

So what does this mean practically for you? Unless you have a background in internet marketing, you will have to find a company to help you manage your campaign properly. Once upon a time, finding an SEO company to do the work for you was reasonably easy: there weren’t many of them around, and they didn’t have to have highly specialized knowledge. But from the above, it is easy to see that this has now changed.

To find a good SEO company, you need to consider that they need to be able to do for themselves what you want them to do for you. Hence, you need to think about how easy it is to find them in the first place. They should, themselves, have all the features that you need, such as local SEO, a strong social media presence, YouTube videos, and an excellent reputation. If they have been able to achieve this for themselves, then it is reasonable to assume that they can do the same for you. Take your time in finding a good company, because your local SEO campaign can mean the difference between having a business and not having one.