Local Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Local Organic SEO
That Gets You Found

Google uses thousands of signals to decide which businesses show up first—and we know how to make yours stand out. From optimizing your website and Google Business Profile to building local citations and crafting geo-targeted content, we help you rise in search results and attract nearby customers ready to take action.

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Website Hosting Options Explained (Non-Technical Guide)Choosing the right hosting solution is essential for performance, scalability, and security. Below are the most common hosting types, explained in plain language so you can decide what's best for your business.

  • Shared Hosting
    • Best for: Startups, personal blogs, low-traffic websites How it works: Your website shares space with thousands of others—often 1,000 to 2,500+ sites per server. Pros:
      • Very affordable ($1.95–$19.95/month).
      • Easy to set up Cons:
        • Limited performance and slower load times.
        • Shared email and web traffic can cause bottlenecks.
        • No control over server resources.
    • Bottom line: Great for getting started, but not ideal for growing businesses or sites needing speed and reliability.
  • Cloud Hosting
    • Best for: Small to mid-sized businesses, growing websites How it works: Your site is hosted on a virtual server with fewer neighbors (50–100 sites), offering better performance and flexibility. Pros:
      • Scalable resources based on demand.
      • Easier migration and upgrades.
      • Moderate control over server settings Cons:
        • Shared email/web traffic can still impact performance.
        • Costs vary widely ($30–$250/month) depending on needs.
    • Bottom line: A smart middle-ground for businesses that need more power than shared hosting but aren't ready for full server ownership.
  • Dedicated Server Hosting
    • Best for: High-traffic websites, eCommerce, HIPAA-compliant platforms, enterprise-level apps How it works: You get an entire physical server to yourself—no sharing, full control. Pros:
      • Maximum performance and uptime.
      • Separate email and web servers for better reliability.
    • Custom security configurations Cons:
      • Higher cost ($300+/month).
      • Requires technical expertise or managed support.
    • Bottom line: Ideal for mission-critical websites and businesses that demand speed, security, and control.

Hosting Strategy Tip

Fawkes Digital Marketing uses dedicated servers with a strict cap of 100 websites per server—ensuring optimal performance and uptime for every client.

There are several types of hosting available to busness owners when they wish to host their website. Below are the most common methods and then we cover some of the technical items, in non-technical words, so that you can choose what is best for your business.

Types of Hosting Options

Note: The prices below are not Fawkes Digital Marketing prices. They are noted here to educate and inform what the industry best practice prices are.

  • Shared Hosting - Shared hosting is just like it sounds. You share your business with hundreds, even thousands, of other websites. Expect a minimum of 1,000 websites running on a single server with most webservers being at 2,500+ websties. Hosting companies determine how many sites based on the processing power, memory, and how many files they are storing. Shared servers will often have email and website traffic on the same server. You will end up with busy websites and non-busy websites. Their "hope" is that overall performance is acceptable to you. These packages cost anywhere from $1.95 to $19.95/month.
  • Cloud Server - Are similar to shared hosting but limit from 50-100 websites giving you better performance and more granular control over all aspects. You can easily be moved to different servers based on need. Email and web server traffic will be on the same server if your provider doesn't understand that sharing of information adds a performance penalty. These servers can have their resources increased to meet changing business needs. 65% of all Fawkes Digital Marketing servers are cloud servers. These servers cost anywhere from $30 to $250/month depending on resources and unique needs.
  • Dedicated Server - You get an entire server to yourself. These servers are dedicated to meet some very specific business needs. These range from HIPPA compliance to added security needs. Web server and email traffic are typically on different servers and not on the same server so that you have the highest level of system uptime. You will have the highest performance available to your business. These servers cost from $300+ per month depending on the physical hardware requirements your business needs.
    • Note: The servers Fawkes Digital Marketing uses are all dedicated servers with a maximum of 100 websites on any given server.

Core SEO Features Breakdown

Process

  • Hands-on execution of best practices ensures adaptability across local, regional, national, and international markets.
  • Emphasizes manual oversight, which is crucial for nuanced optimization and avoiding automation pitfalls.

Name, Address, & Phone Number (NAP)

  • Builds structured citations across industry-specific directories.
  • Enhances local SEO by reinforcing business legitimacy and consistency across platforms.

Organic Local

  • Targets geo-specific keywords (e.g., "Valparaiso painting company") to capture local search intent.
  • Helps businesses appear in Google's Local Pack and Maps results.

Reputation Management

  • Monitors and responds to reviews, which boosts trust signals and click-through rates.
  • Attempts to remove or suppress negative reviews, while promoting positive ones across platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook.

Content

  • Publishes and distributes high-quality, keyword-optimized content to improve rankings and engagement.
  • Supports topical authority and helps capture long-tail search traffic.

Technical Audits

  • Weekly audits ensure your site aligns with search engine algorithm updates.
  • Identifies issues like broken links, crawl errors, duplicate content, and slow page speeds — all of which impact rankings.

Website Updates

  • Keeps your site secure and functional, reducing downtime and vulnerability to attacks.
  • Ensures freshness signals for SEO, which Google favors for certain types of content.

Analytics

  • Uses Google Analytics to track traffic, user behavior, and conversion paths.
  • Enables data-driven decisions for content, keyword targeting, and UX improvements.

Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Process

Search Engine Optimization isn't magic—it's methodical, strategic, and rooted in hard work. At Fawkes Digital Marketing, we believe in complete transparency and actionable results. Our approach is hands-on, data-driven, and constantly evolving to keep pace with search engine algorithms and customer behavior. Whether your goals are local visibility or global reach, our SEO process is built to help your business rise in rankings, attract qualified traffic, and convert visitors into loyal customers.

  • Auditing: We begin with a comprehensive SEO audit that highlights technical issues, content gaps, backlink strength, and keyword opportunities. This includes competitive analysis and a full evaluation of your website structure to establish a clear benchmark and roadmap for success.
  • Analytics: Understanding your audience is key. We analyze visitor demographics, user behavior, and interaction paths using analytics and heatmapping tools. If you're not already using these insights, we'll set them up to ensure your site's performance is fully measurable and continuously optimized for conversion.
  • Strategic Development: We build a tailored strategy based on your goals, industry trends, and competitors—both local and national. By merging branding with performance data, we craft a winning plan designed to increase visibility, engagement, and revenue.
  • Implementation: Once the strategy is approved, we execute with precision—handling everything from content creation and technical improvements to building citations and optimizing for search engine compliance.
  • Tracking & Reporting: Progress is monitored regularly with in-depth reports that measure traffic, keyword movement, and engagement metrics. We ensure every adjustment made delivers measurable results.
  • Continuous Optimization: SEO isn't a one-and-done task—it's an ongoing process. We continuously refine your strategy, make informed changes, and stay ahead of search engine updates to keep your business at the forefront of digital visibility.

Building local organic SEO citations for each location

Citations are links from reputable websites back to your site. The easiest way to think of citations is that they are the modern version of the Yellow Pages. We don't dig into paper copies of the yellow pages to find businesses anymore.

We build citations from authoritative sites that consistently maintain your NAP or name, address, and phone number. These authoritative organic SEO resources can increase the visibility of your business. Citations are often found in the following formats and need to be consistent:

  • Company name
  • Company phone number
  • Company address
  • Company name and phone number
  • Company name, phone number, and address
  • Company name, phone number, address, and website
  • Company name and website

Organic SEO Citation Setup Information

As we build out your citations for your business, we always like to look at how long they take and the information we provide for you. Once a citation is initially set up, they are quick to update. Updates to setup citations take minutes to a few hours to be updated. This is great as you will have your hours on most citation sites, images showcasing your products and services, description of your business, and pictures of your team working.

  • Day 1 - Campaign started, we add you into our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, create spreadsheets for tracking, and set a schedule for the team member(s) that will be working on your project.
  • Days 2-4 - Pre-submission data accuracy check where we have two people verify everything that will be submitted so that we have the most accurate data. This does require the information to also be verified by you.
  • Days 4-9 - Submissions to the specific search engines, social media platforms, and directories to be listed on.
  • Days 9-14 - Campaign QA checks completed. Another team member verifies everything that was submitted and that it was submitted exactly as expected.
  • Days 15-23 - 1st live listing check completed and report updated.
  • Days 24-38 - 2nd live listing check (more links added to campaign report) and verified.
  • Days 39-60 - 3rd live listing check (remaining live links added to report) and verified.
  • Day 61 - The Excel spreadsheet we are working off of is provided with references to everything completed and anything currently outstanding.

Organic SEO and Local SEO Marketing

Organic SEO is getting your business to show below and above the paid ads. Local SEO is when you optimize your website for queries that a person might type in. Often, the goal is to rank your business for keyword phrases like "your service/product" with your "city or city/state" in the query. By focusing on the local organic SEO you can showcase that you have the best products and services within the area.

  • Examples of organic SEO searches
    • SEO in Cullman, Alabama
    • SEO in Michigan City, Indiana
    • SEO in Valparaiso, Indiana
    • web design near me
    • restaurants near me
    • emergency plumbing services cullman county

    • Organic local SEO is usually hyper-competitive, and you want to outperform your competition. We look at trends by looking at analytics and mining the available data. With this information, we modify your website to make it highly optimized for each of the local markets you want your business found in.

    As we work on your local SEO these are the tasks that we update:

    • Keyword Research – We look at the most relevant keywords that apply to your business, that your competitors are using, and the ones that will generate the most organic traffic.
    • Content Optimization - We will optimize the content on the site to be more optimized for the keyword phrases that you wish to be found for.
    • Optimization Optimizations - We will check on the SEO health of your website. The number of inbound links, outbound links, on-page links, robots.txt, duplicate content issues, and other factors that will affect your SEO campaign.
    • Schema Markup - We utilize all of the available schemas that are supported by schema.org to provide the best website markup for your SEO.
    • Bad Link Cleanup - We will fix any broken links on your website. We also will work on removing and disavowing any links outside of your website that may hurt your chances of reaching your SEO campaign results.
    • XML Sitemaps - We make certain your XML sitemap is properly structured, contains all the right pages, and is accurate.
    • Image optimization (sizes, alt text, title tags, filename, and more)

Review & Reputation Marketing

An area often missed when it comes to any SEO is focusing on getting reviews for your business. Reviews are the "word of mouth" the search engines have available to learn about your business. There are many aspects to reputation management, and when done well, it can give you a significant boost to add revenue to your business's bottom line.

  • Collect reviews via customized "review funnel" landing pages and widgets
  • Embed review collection widgets on business websites, social pages, etc.
  • Mobile-optimized customer experience through the review generation funnel
  • Generate reviews on targeted major, local and industry sites
  • Segment positive vs. negative feedback to pre-empt negative reviews
  • Guide customers with clear instructions and conversion triggers review sites
  • Engage customers with coupons and offers to make them more engaged
  • Customize email and text message campaigns, templates, timing and sequence
  • Automate sending, follow-up, removal and de-duplication of campaign recipients
  • Measure performance with open, click and conversion tracking
  • Collect reviews on-location with compliant "kiosk mode"
  • Monitoring of major, minor and industry-specific review sites for new reviews
  • Get review alerts or send to clients or staff based on custom criteria
  • Replying to all reviews using best practices to give each review more value and organic SEO benefits
  • Auto-share positive reviews (including images) to social media profiles
  • Stream your latest and greatest reviews to your website
  • SEO-friendly rich-snippet/schema markup for reviews and aggregate rating

For more information and details about our review and reputation offering click here.

Fight Bad Reviews

Content and Press Releases

With paid ads, you can become complacent having a mediocre website. When it comes to growing organically, you need to think differently. It is best to focus your business on building citations, localized content, and getting information out to the masses making triggers that the search engines will notice. Key areas that we focus on are:

  • Customizing existing content to include local community triggers.
  • Creating new content written to show you are the expert and best in your industry.
  • Push the information out through press releases.
  • Promote those press releases and generate local content to appear on the Google News Network.

Technical SEO Audits

When looking at your local SEO, you need to make sure your website stands proud with the best foot forward. This covers the pictures and content of the web page but also the backend that people don't see. A technical SEO audit dig deep looking for every possible improvement you can get. This includes items like:

  • Core Web Vitals - Core Web Vitals are a set of website quality metrics based on the user experience. These metrics are considered by Google when measuring website satisfaction. This includes:
    • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures the main content loading speed.
    • FID (First Input Delay) measures how long it takes for the website to respond when a user clicks on something.
    • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measures visual stability during page loading.
  • Site and page load speed
  • Duplicate content within the website
  • URLs with duplicate page titles
  • Missing descriptive text on images and links
  • Broken links and images
  • Image optimizatios
  • Spelling errors
  • Localization issues
  • Mobile optimization
  • META data
  • Browser compatibility
  • Security
  • Caching and Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

Updates and Website Improvements

Updating titles, descriptions, keywords, and content is only part of the picture of keeping information accurate on the search engines. Key areas we work on every week for you are:

  • Patches for plugin performance and security
  • Security updates
  • Content updates
  • SEO optimization based on the search engines current recommendations and best practices

Analytics, Datamining, and Improving Your Website

Each week we look at data to analyze how your website is currently being used, how we can improve the lead conversion of your visitors, and implement those changes. We look at:

  • How many people are coming to your website, and what devices are they using your website.
  • What pages they are looking at and how they interact with those pages.
  • We look at how far they are scrolling on pages to determine if we have the right balance between content/images and the overall length in helping them to become customers.
  • We use heat mapping software to analyze where the eyes of the visitor are at on the screen to increase the overall engagement of your website visitors.