Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

The fastest way to move up the list is to get people to click on your site from a search result, and not hit the back button immediately. And the fastest way to do that is with paid search advertising -- like Google Adwords. You can probably move to the top 3 or 4 within a month if you have an aggressive Adwords campaign.

And with Adwords you only pay when someone actually clicks through to your site, and you control when your ads are shown, with which search terms, in what geographic location, and which times/days you want to be advertising.

If you wait for natural search to yield results it could take a while -- like months or years.

How are your Yelp reviews? That's likely to be the place people go to validate which animal hospitals people like the most (social validation). Get those higher first. Adwords make sense as well. Organic web ranking is ideal for long-term, but does take time and knowledge.

There are two components to this. First Google needs to know that you indeed cater to "rockford animal doctor" and Secondly, they need to understand that you are more authoritative than competitors out there.

For the first one, invest in learning more about technical SEO. For a local business as yours, it is not enough to just have the right keywords on the title, H1 tag, etc. It is also important to make sufficient use of structured data to help Google understand your location.

The second part is building authority. In a generic sense, if I were to ask you whether product A is a bigger brand than product B, how would you answer that? You would probably look at 'top of the mind recall', how many people are talking about either of the products, how many people buy product A vs. product B, etc. right?

The same goes for evaluating your website's authority as well - try to obtain as many organic (and genuine) reviews about your business. Try to be active on your local city forums so that more people talk about your business. Essentially, work on PR. As more people talk about your company, and you gather more honest backlinks and reviews, you will start seeing a rise in rankings.

I can't help you if you won't answer my questions. But I will tell you this: no one's searching for "Rockford animal doctor". However, I've learned that there are 4,400 monthly searches for another term in your area.

I also know I can build a simple website for this term, rank it on page 1 of Google within 24 hours, and be driving traffic and collecting leads (names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers) I could then be passing on to any one of your competitors on a monthly basis … for a fee … with little effort.

"I've heard that if there is not activity on our website, that google drops it to the bottom of the list."

What utter balls. I know of a one page site ranking on the first page of Google in a TINY niche in Arizona that hasn't been update in THREE YEARS. And yet, it's STILL in the top 3 results for its search terms.

There are half a dozen reasons why your site is underperforming, not least of which because for the search term: "rockford animal doctor il", your site, (if it's the one I mentioned above) ranks on page 3.