If you own a small business in the Denver metropolitan area, follow these location-specific tips for local SEO.
Denver Local SEO
For most small businesses there are larger competitors in the same state or across the United States. When a business is just getting started, there typically isn’t a large digital marketing budget. If you are familiar with localized SEO, you know it is a lot easier to rank for keywords in a local market than for a broader term. To get the most out of a budget, businesses that serve the Denver area will want to focus their efforts on Denver specific keywords.
Keyword Research
If you have ever used Google’s Keyword Planner, then you might be familiar with this image. If you’re new to keyword research, you may want to read up on it here.
Keyword Planner allows you to specify which locations you would like to gather keyword data from. Depending on the locations your business serves, you will want to select the most appropriate search filters. If your business serves the Denver area, you have two options:
- Select the Denver Nielsen DMA region filter, which includes data on nearly the entire populated state of Colorado and the southern tip of Wyoming.
- DMA stands for Designated Market Area, or regions that are in the same local television broadcast network.
- This is a good option for a business that already has already developed prominence with Google in the Denver market and intends to rank on the first page for several keywords.
- Break it down into individual cities (Aurora, Lakewood, Arvada, Westminster) to gather more location-specific data.
- This is a good option for newer businesses who aren’t ready to rank at the broader Denver level. These businesses should build out pages for each specific location and keywords they want to rank for. Attempting to rank on the first page at a hyperlocal level is much easier due to competitors targeting the first option.
- You can still have a page dedicated to serving the city of Denver, but for smaller businesses, this will take more time to rank.
This image is also valuable because it gives us an approximate amount of data points in the specific regions. For businesses doing hyperlocal SEO, it is important to take into account how large of an audience you will reach by targeting each area. Even if we are trying to target areas where large competitors have less presence, we still want to maximize our reach. Take a look at your competition and what is populating on a Google search of the keywords you would like to rank for.
For example, if you would like to rank on the first page for “SEO Company”, perform searches of “SEO Company Aurora”, “SEO Company Lakewood”, “SEO Company Arvada”, and so on.
Start with the regions with the least competition and largest population. If other businesses similar in size are ranking on a page, it is a good bet yours can too.
Demographics
According to DATAUSA, Denver’s population is almost 30% Hispanic. When it comes to website traffic, you want your site to be accessible to as many people as possible. For many small businesses, investing in a human translation may not be a viable or necessary option. However, if your website traffic has become stagnant, creating an alternate Spanish version of your site could be one answer. Be sure to use hreflang tags to indicate to Google that it should direct users with Spanish set as the default browser language to the alternate page. This will also ensure you do not get hit with a penalty for duplicate content.
Google My Business
Whether your business is in the Denver area or not, you should always keep a well maintained Google My Business profile. Since Denver specifically has a thriving tourism market this is especially true. When travelers are searching for businesses in a new area, they turn to Google to find store hours and location. With the COVID-19 pandemic keeping many businesses on their toes, it is more important than ever to have accurate information for potential customers.
Denver’s Local Events
COVID-19 proved to be a great example of how searchers follow trends and how that can be used as an SEO advantage. Our clients who created COVID-19 related content have seen spikes in traffic to those pages over the past year. While luckily Denver does not have a local pandemic to target for keywords, it does see trends in search.
For example, from October to February there is an 80% spike in search traffic for skiing and winter sports-related keywords. Google’s algorithm recognizes this and will prioritize fresh content related to those keywords on a search engine result page.
Another example would be events like A Taste of Colorado, a large local festival that features local Colorado businesses. With an event of this nature, not only can you create relevant content that is seeing a temporary spike in search volume, but it is a great time to secure new quality backlinks. For most local festivals, the organizers will feature participating businesses on their website. This is a major opportunity to strengthen your link profile and develop local prominence by getting the community talking about your business.
Summary
Mile High City. 5280. Gateway to the Mountains. Denver is filled with nuances and trends that can be used to the advantage of businesses looking to improve their prominence locally. Focusing on local SEO is the best way for small businesses to rank on the first page of Google. Let Firestarter SEO help you form a local strategy right for your business.
