Why your Edmonton competitor ranks higher than you on Google and what you can do about it. 

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Like many people, you're wondering why that average business that is nowhere near as good as yours is outranking you in Edmonton on Google. Well I'm here to tell you there's reasons, and you can do something about it!

On the whole, search engines like Google want to make their websites more user-friendly, but they also want to provide the best results for users looking for products or services. How does this work? It's a bit complicated, but I'll break it down for you and help you understand how you can improve your Edmonton website rankings. First let me give you an overview of what SEO is and how it affects your Edmonton company website rankings on Google. The Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process that involves improving your site's chances of being found by search engines such as Google.

Surprisingly, this is actually not as difficult as you might think and can be very effective. There are three different types of search engines, and they each have their own unique way of ranking sites: Search engine spiders: These little bots crawl through the web looking for new content. When they find it, they "crawl" back to your Edmonton website and index it for other people to find. Search engine crawlers: These are the real power behind the search engine system. They visit websites, crawl through them and collect all kinds of data that helps the search engines build their databases. Crawlers aren't the only thing that helps search engines rank sites. The main part of the ranking system is done by algorithms that look at the quality of your web pages, keywords you're using in your site, the amount of backlinks you have, and how often you update your site.

If you have a lot of people linking to your Edmonton website, it will be more likely to be found by the search engines. How does backlinking work? This is where you create a link to your Edmonton company website from an external source. For example, let's say you're a dentist in Edmonton and you want to create a website for your practice. You can create a link to your site from an external site like Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter. If someone links to your site, it will show up as a backlink.

Positively influencing search results on Google or Yahoo is called backlinking. Search engine spiders look at the number of backlinks you have to determine where your Edmonton company website ranks. However, links aren't the only ranking factor. 

The way the algorithm works is complicated, but basically, the search engines try to figure out what your Edmonton company website is about. Then they figure out which other websites are relevant to your site based on how well their pages match your content. The search engines then determine how important your Edmonton company website is in comparison to the rest of the Internet. 

This is where things get a little more complex and why SEO can be very effective. If your Edmonton company website is related to a specific niche, such as dental practice, it makes sense that it's going to rank higher than a website for a general business like an insurance company. You can improve your rankings by targeting certain keywords for your Edmonton company website. For example, if you're a dentist in Edmonton, your keyword should be dentist. Your competitors should also be using similar keywords, so if you see them ranking high for these keywords, you know what they're doing is working.  So now let's talk about SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it includes all of the things you need to do to improve your Edmonton company website's rankings on the web.  The three main areas of focus are on-site optimization (or local SEO), off-site optimization (or backlink building) and optimizing content for search engines. On-site SEO can include things like fixing broken links, updating content, optimizing images and adding metadata. This will help with page speed, which Google says is an important ranking factor.

To demonstrate the value of on-site optimization, let's look at an example of a simple dental website for a general dentist in Edmonton.  Let's say we want to rank for the term dentist in Edmonton. We could set up a website that targets a niche, such as general dental practice, so we're not competing directly with any other sites. We could set up our site for the term dentist in Edmonton. However, if we don't do any on-site optimization, we could end up with pages that don't rank well, because they don't match the keyword. Let's say we have pages about topics like "dental hygiene", "dentist", "dental care", "best dentist", "dental insurance" and so on. Our website may be focused on a single topic, but it's not optimized for the terms dentistry and dentists. This is bad, because Google and other search engines will think our content is about something different than what we actually wrote about. They will rank our pages lower. This is how Google works.  It looks at the pages of your Edmonton company website and tries to figure out which pages are relevant to which keywords.  Then it ranks those pages higher based on how well their pages match those keywords.

Besides the pages we set up, there are many more topics that our dentist in Edmonton could write about. For example, we could have pages about cosmetic dentistry, root canal, crowns, dental implants, dental care for seniors, general anesthesia, etc. To get the highest possible rankings in search results, we need to create pages for each topic and optimize them for that topic. So if we have pages like "dentist", "dental hygiene", "best dentist", "dental insurance", "dental implants", "dental care for seniors", "general anesthesia" and so on, we will be able to rank much higher for these terms than a website that only has a single topic. This is how we can beat our competitors who aren't optimizing their websites properly.   

I've only touched on a few ideas in this article on how to outrank your competition. If you'd like to learn more about what makes a good SEO campaign take a look at our SEO packages. If you're a local business in Edmonton that doesn't have the time to manage all of this on your own and needs some help, take a look at our Edmonton SEO services. 

Now get out there and dominate your competitors on Google. Be the authority in your niche and bring in the most targeted leads. You've got this!

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