Organic SEO services for San Diego businesses.

Organic SEO gets your website’s pages to rank in the regular, unpaid Google listings that appear under the ads and the map pack. The map pack ranks business locations. Organic listings rank pages, so the result turns on what each page says and how the site is organized, and on which other sites link to it.

How organic listings differ from the map pack

Distance from your office counts for far less in the organic listings. Google still localizes the results (a search made in San Diego returns San Diego plumbers), but a company in Solana Beach can hold an organic position for a search made in Coronado, where its map listing would be unlikely to appear. That makes organic the way to reach the parts of the county your address can’t.

Most home-service companies need both kinds of listing, and I measure them differently: a rank grid for the map, page positions and clicks for organic.

Which searches organic SEO catches

The typical case is someone researching before they call. Google often shows no map for these searches, or shows it below articles and service pages. A few examples:

• tankless water heater cost
• heat pump vs furnace in San Diego
• do I need a permit to replace an electrical panel

The person behind a search like that is earlier in the decision and may be planning a larger job than an emergency repair. Keyword research is how I find out which of these searches people make in useful numbers for your trade, and which only look good on a list.

What I change on a page

The aim is to make it obvious, to Google and to a reader, which one search a page answers. With on-page SEO I edit the title, the headings, the opening sentence and the content itself, along with the internal links pointing at the page.

A common problem on home-service sites is several pages chasing the same search and splitting the credit, while other services the company sells have no page at all. Fixing that is site architecture: grouping and linking pages so each one has a single job.

Why I don’t sell content by volume

A new page helps only when it answers a search that people make and that your site doesn’t already answer. Agencies sell a fixed number of blog posts a month because a count is easy to invoice. I’d rather write one page that answers a real question from a Carlsbad homeowner about replacing a furnace than a dozen that restate what every other site says.

Sometimes the right amount of new content is none, and the work is fixing what is already there. So content for SEO starts with deciding what gets written and what gets merged or removed.

Links, and the kind I won’t build

Links from other websites still tell Google that a site is worth ranking, and for competitive searches a site with few of them will struggle. The honest version of link building is slow: real relationships with suppliers, manufacturers, trade associations and local press. The fast version is buying links in bulk, which Google’s spam policies prohibit and which can lead to a penalty or to the links being ignored.

Links from other San Diego County organizations also count toward the map pack, and I treat that local link building as a separate job.

How organic changes get tested

I test one page at a time. I record where a page ranks and how many clicks it gets, then change one thing and look again. Organic positions often move more slowly than map positions and shift from day to day, so I’m careful about calling a result early, and some tests need longer than the usual two weeks or so to read. I’ll tell you when a result isn’t clear yet. If the site has problems that stop Google from reading the pages at all, I fix those first, and that work is technical SEO.