How to Rank for Las Vegas SEO

Why would an average reader of ours care to learn about ranking for Las Vegas SEO? The principles we outline here are applicable to ALL locally based competitive keywords, not just ours. So pay close attention to the specifics and you may draw out a thing or two that can help your local rankings too.

For the past 9 years, we have been on a mission to rank for the term Las Vegas SEO. Over that time we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to rank for one of the hardest search terms in all of Las Vegas, the one that all the SEO guys strive to rank for. It’s not easy to get ranked and it’s even harder to maintain, but having been there numerous times over the years, we know what it takes.

How to Rank for a Competitive Local Keyword

Ranking for an incredibly difficult keyword can be a daunting task, for some it might even be impossible. But that level of difficulty won’t stop all of us SEO guys from trying.

Google really doesn’t like to rank a business for a locally targeted search term if that business doesn’t have an actual physical presence in the location being searched.

You cannot just get a virtual office or a PO Box at the local UPS and think that will cut it. It may get you by for a time, but ultimately Google will figure out where you’re located and unless it’s a physical brick and mortar, a decrease in ranking will follow.

Along with having an actual physical presence, the best way Google can understand where exactly you are located is by seeing your name, address and phone number (NAP) listed everywhere on the web.

In order to rank for Las Vegas SEO we have been working tirelessly for the past 9+ years to make our NAPU as accurate as possible using things like Moz Local or just processing manual updates as regularly as we can.

For a locally based search term, sometimes it may be difficult to get backlinks that are also locally based. This being said, building a solid network of local backlinks is critical to outranking your local SEO competitors.

We’ve found the best way to get local backlinks is by being an active participant in the community, sponsoring events or putting on events when needed. That participation gives local outside entities an incentive to link back to your site, which becomes backlink gold.

This is an interesting one because over the years it hasn’t proven as valuable as you would normally think. It would seem that sometimes the sites that rank for the keyword “Las Vegas SEO” are often very thin on content. But never have I seen those thin content sites last very long ranking in the top spots, the content giants always seem to win out in the end.

It’s always important to establish your expertise in everything you write. Teach your readers and Google that you really know what you’re talking about. Google has gotten smarter over the years and mentioning the city in your content isn’t as valuable as it used to be, and sometimes is penalized. It’s better to have your business address in the footer of your site and just talk about the material and not the local.

The times when our site has ranked the best have been the times where we’re the best at updating our site on a regular basis. This can be hard to do when you’ve got 1,000,000 other things on your plate, especially as an SEO trying to rank everyone else’s sites for their keywords, but it has to be a priority. Regular updates to the blog or webpages is a critical factor.

Those updates can come in many shapes and forms, but primarily we’re talking about regular updates to the blog. Other updates on the site are also helpful, updates to the main pages with new ideas and other content additions are always good. But the blog is the best place to add new large amounts of content to the site with relative ease.

Get out your recliner and/or meditation mat, because ranking for a competitive local term like Las Vegas SEO can take a very very long time. Keywords with a competitive nature can almost seemingly be unattainable at times, but following the above four ideas for an extended amount of time, sometimes years, does usually pay off.

Why Try and Rank for Las Vegas SEO?

Usually, a keyword only becomes “competitive” when there are a lot of searches happening for that keyword. The term Las Vegas SEO only gets about 1,200 searches per month. Compared to other local search terms for the SEO industry, 1,200 is one of the highest volume terms we have.

Confusion behind the term SEO

To the general public, we have found that most people don’t fully understand what SEO actually means, and instead, they associate the term SEO with general website marketing, or said differently someone who says they need SEO often means “I want leads from the internet”. This is often beneficial because since we’re not solely an SEO shop, it allows us to sell the best item for their specific needs. Whether it be SEO, Social Media or some sort of ad management,

Number of Leads

When ranking for Las Vegas SEO in the top 3 spots there is a noticeable difference in the volume of leads that come through the door. More leads obviously mean more opportunities to close a deal. This is never a bad thing. The quality of leads is interesting though, we’ve found that most leads that come from searching the term Las Vegas SEO are usually looking for a low budget solution, which isn’t always a good match for what it takes to rank a website.

Street Credit

It’s always nice when the firm you choose to do your SEO actually ranks for the term themselves. This proves that they’re able to do the things they’re telling you they can do for you… It definitely plays to our benefit time and time again.

How Competitive is Ranking for Las Vegas SEO?

Well, one interesting thing about this search term over alllllll the rest is that every professional search engine optimizer is aiming at the target on the backs of the top three results. They are watching closely at the things you do or don’t do and pounce at any opportunity they’re given.

It also means you have to do even more than normal to rank for the term because standard SEO practices often fall short. More posts, more often, for longer time. All of it, and a lot of it.

One other potential downfall is that the competitors in this space are very savvy in all things SEO, including the black hat things that can hurt other sites. In a very unfortunate set of events, our website was attacked a few years ago by one of our local competitors. We have no idea who did it but the repercussions were real.

As we had pretty much locked in the first ranking for Las Vegas SEO we were quickly targetted by a link buying black hat tactic. Suddenly overnight our backlinks skyrocketed from spammy sites all over the dark web. All of them spewing terrible content from penalized domains that took an immediate hit to our search results. This was terrible and hard to recover from, we probably still suffer from it to this day. We’ll probably never know who it was, short from someone admitting it, so we’ll just live with it being a fact of life: when you rank for a competitive keyword, your competitors will likely do whatever it takes to burn you to the ground.

Is all the hard work worth it?

For NeONBRAND, our efforts surrounding our ranking for the keyword “Las Vegas SEO” have to be a resounding yes. It has really set us apart from all of our competitors and really put us on the map as the top SEO agency to use in Las Vegas. We work really hard to rank our own site as well as the sites we manage for our customers. It’s a dog eat dog world out there when it comes to ranking for a local SEO firm keyword, but we are reaping the rewards.

And in case you didn’t notice, this post in and of itself is obviously an attempt to help continue to rank for the term we’ve already mentioned too many times in this post. OF COURSE we’re trying to rank for the term, so we figured teaching both you, our friend 🤗, and Google, our master 😆, that we know our shiz is one way of helping that ranking continue to shine.