Transcript
Hi guys, Welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is when I should rank for my city or Orange County as a whole. So today's conversation is very Orange County specific SEO conversation. However, as an Orange County SEO agency, in addition to helping a lot businesses in Orange County with their SEO, I feel like I wanted to film a video in order to help the local businesses in this area understand local SEO and Orange County.
But before we begin, if you're new to our SEO Talk & Tea channel, this is called SEO Talk & Tea, so we always have a tea that we have with our conversation. It's just to liven it up a bit. And today's tea, we have an imperial green tea from the brand of Mei Leaf. Mei Leaf is a UK based tea brand I actually source a lot of my tea from. They are attributed to a lot of my understanding of tea and my hobby of tea, I would guess you could say. I'm really into tea and I think Mei Leaf and Don, who is the lead at Mei Leaf has done a lot of the work to help influence me in my understanding of tea and appreciation of it.
But let's go ahead and start talking about Orange County SEO. So if you are trying to rank locally in Orange County, there are different nuances to understand. Because of the way our kind of area operates, a lot of people use Orange County synonymously with their city in that we identify very heavily with the County, not just with your city. So if you're from here, I think you get it. Like I'm born in Anaheim, but I say I'm from Orange County. Right? When we travel, we all just say we're from Orange County.
And so therefore it influences a lot of searcher behavior. If you go look on Google searches and you look at keyword research, a lot of people when they're looking locally will actually just put locally, like "I'm looking for this in Orange County," right? So for a lot of businesses, they don't want to just operate and rank for their local city, they do you want to rank for their local county.
So there's some different things that we have to consider when we're trying to do this. I have advised a lot of businesses in trying to rank locally in Orange County, and what I will often tell them is the goal is to rank for the city you're located in and the county as a whole. However, that may be the goal, but it doesn't mean to do it overnight.
What I often recommend to clients is if you're new to SEO and you have a location in a city, I would rank for that city first. One, because as I've talk about in other videos, if you have an address in the city that you operate in, you will be given a handicap by Google to rank in that city. Google prefers businesses that have the city in their address. So you have an easier time ranking in your local city. And I'm all about getting small wins and having them incrementally add up. I would recommend ranking your local city and once you do then go for the County as a whole.
I have done strategies where I have done Orange County as a whole and the city together, but what I would say is that there needs to be an understanding that you're splitting resources up, therefore you're going to demand more content and link building needs to acquire both. But second, you need to have a good understanding of local SEO to acquire both. It can easily get sloppy and messed up when you go for both and you're not sure what you're doing. So I tell people if you're not experienced SEO, go slow, go with Irvine first and then go for Orange County. Or go for Anaheim first or Mission Viejo, and then go for the County as a whole.
That's usually your best bet because in your local city, you will have less competition. And if you have an address in that city, then you'll have a handicap to get you ranked there. Then you can move on to the county as you acquired more SEO assets and as you're ranking you can use that benefit to go into the county as well.
Now saying that, I want to say that there are some cases where the business is a little bit different. And so the number one consideration for ranking in Orange County is always down to your business's bottom line. I always want to put that out there, that it doesn't matter what the SEO best practices is, it matters what you're business's bottom line and situation is. I have worked with companies that do not care about raking in their local city and only in the county as a whole. And that might be because they deliver things and they're not concerned about the local city.
So therefore a good example is a catering business. Lots of catering do not care about the local city because their events are all over the place, so they care about raking as a county as a whole. In that case, you could rank for the county at first and then trickle down to the cities. You can do that. But what I will say is understand that each strategic decision has different resource concerns. If you go for the county as a whole first, it is the biggest fight to have, because you're going for the biggest county, the biggest umbrella, everyone's going for that. So your resources must be heavy. You must go in hard. And it might take a while and the competition is much more stronger, whereas if you go on for the city first, the competition is weaker, you could probably get the win in a much shorter time, and then you could move on to bigger pools to kind of win.
So therefore, when you're doing Orange County SEO and specifically local SEO, I would say ensure what your understanding of SEO is. If you're new to SEO, I really encourage you to go the city first and then the county as a whole. But if your business really needs to go for the county, understand the amount of resources, time, and competition that you're up against in order to rank from that.
Of course, there's no one strategy that fits all. I would say it depends on the situation you are in. I have helped a variety of different Orange County companies rank in their different cities or the county as a whole, and so I would say everything's a little bit different, but understand it usually always comes down to the competition and your own SEO understanding and resources.
So as you guys move forward... Oh, wow, I never poured out my tea, guys. So typically with this tea, you're supposed to pour it out in about 15 to 20 seconds. I probably did not pour it out for five minutes. So this tea will be extremely bitter, but I got so excited talking about this conversation that I totally forgot to pour it out.
But where I was going with the conversation is that when you're going about Orange County SEO, it boils down to your competition, the SEO resources that you have. Every situation will be a little different so I would encourage you, don't just watch this video and then create your strategy. Do your research. Audit your SEO resources, understand what's going on in the SEO competitive layout in Orange County or your city, and then mark the strategies from there.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. Our agency is in Orange County. I've helped a lot of Orange County businesses, so I'm happy to help you there. but hopefully this was valuable. If you guys liked what you saw, please like and subscribe. I'm going to pour out my overly steeped tea. This is going to be hella bitter, but let's go in and drink this.
You know, it's not as bad as I thought. It is a little better. All right, nope, it stings in the end. Oh, it's bitter, it's bitter. Yeah, let me have another sip of that. Yeah, bitter. So there you go. Another lesson today: don't overstep your green tea.
But hopefully all that was valuable. I hope to see you guys again soon in future videos. And any other Orange County SEO questions, please send them my way and we can create some more videos about those.
Thanks, everybody. Hope to see you guys again soon.