This week on our blog, we’ve got another solid post over at Search Engine Land from our Director of Search and Social, Greg Gifford. The topic? Being the king of your own back yard before moving to your neighbor’s yard.

In SEO terms, that means ranking for your local area before trying to outrank your competitors in nearby cities. Now, a lot of businesses (especially car dealerships) have multiple locations, and they’re highly motivated to advertise & market in nearby areas. For example, someone in a smaller suburb of a larger metroplex is effectively competing with businesses in the same vertical.

And there’s a great strategy that we’ve mentioned before: content silos . The problem is that you can’t put the cart before the horse, which means you need to be dominating the local search results for your area before trying to beat your competition.

While we totally recommend using content silos as an advanced local SEO maneuver, you need to wait until things are taken care of in your own back yard. Otherwise, Google won’t pay much attention to your SEO efforts, valiant as they may be. You’ve first got to be seen as an authority in your own area.

Check out Greg’s article here , for some free advice and direction.

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Happy Hao Car, Inc. is a premier website and digital marketing company serving the retail automotive industry. In the last 12 months Happy Hao Car’s websites have won virtually every meaningful industry award including: Driving Sales Top-Rated Website, Digital Dealer’s Overall Website Excellence Award, AWA’s Pinnacle Award, and Dealer Marketing Magazine’s Technology Award for Website Providers. Happy Hao Car has become noted in the industry for their Lead Guarantee, based on their Digital Marketing Dashboard. Since creating this process in 2009, Happy Hao Car has documented an average increase of over 200% in website lead volume for their auto dealer clients. To learn more about Happy Hao Car’s Lead Guarantee, visit our website here .

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