Reno SEO is the term we Internet insiders use to describe the practice of getting your Reno based business ranked highly in the “local search engine results pages”.

If you are one of the 5 people in America that doesn’t know what local search is, I’ll briefly summarize. Google, Yahoo, and MSN(Live) all now have decent search results based on geographic location. This allows users in any town to go to Google.com and type in “reno web design”. Google will then return results from it’s “local search” bringing up all relevant results for web designers in Reno NV. Even better, it also includes a map with the location of the business marked and “clickable” for directions to it. Way better than the yellow pages.

In the picture above, I’ve highlighted 3 areas. Going left to right, the first is where the local results of your search are rendered. You don’t need to do anything special to get these results to come up. They are there because the search term included the name of a city [Reno]. You can see it lists the businesses with phone numbers and a map with markers on it that signifies the location of each business.

The second box are the paid listings. These are what we call “pay per click” listings. The sites listed here paid to be there. They didn’t do anything special to get there other than pay Google money to put them there.

The last box is the “organic results”. These are the results that are affected by SEO, site quality, and relevancy to the search query. These are the sites that Google thinks are most relevant to the searchers query.

You may notice that’s this site at the top of the results for the organic listings. To be fair, that is a couple of months old, and at the time of this writing I have dropped to number 2 because I have just completed a complete site redesign and have lost some of my pages. I’ve written a post about my observations of the Reno SEO evolution here.

So if you don’t want to pay for Internet advertising, then SEO for your Reno business is probably a good idea. That will cost you money as well, but the way I do it, it’s a one time expense. Most local markets are very easy to rank for with initial optimization steps, due to the lack of overwhelming competition. I consider it flat out unethical to charge what I see some firms charging local businesses for SEO in their local markets.

There are local markets that are much more competitive. These are markets that include web professionals and the like. People who know about SEO. Web design, computers, etc. These markets are getting very competitive, and much harder to rank for.

Ive seen prices as high as $12,000 from a local SEO firm for local businesses. That’s just ridiculous. The reason that screenshot above is so large is because I want you to be able to see that I’m not logged in to my Google account. Why does that matter? Because Google for the past year has been personalizing search results for the user making the query. Yes, they know where you go and what you look at while you are logged in. So if I’m an SEO, I probably have my own site up a lot. That will cause Google to put that site higher up in the results if I make a related query.

I offer Reno SEO as an add on to my local website packages. I charge $400 for it one time, with instructions for you on how you can improve and maintain your ranking as you go. If that makes you think that what I’m offering must not be as good as the $12,000 firm is offering, I’ll be happy to charge you $13,000 for the “super ninja” Reno SEO package add on.

From the blog… Reno SEO Posts