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As sometimes happens when you work online, particularly when you start letting slip that you spend time optimizing and ranking sites well in organic search engine results, this week a friend of mine asked for my opinion on a website.

So here we have the opportunity to provide some good old free advice, promote a couple of our free services, while at the same time helping a friend out by getting his site to rank a little higher in Google and other websites.

The vertical? Locale-specific upholstery, carpet and oven cleaning services. This service operates in the Oxford area of the UK, and is not number one in Google for its own business name, Clean to Go. Yet.

There are a lot of people out there, whether franchisees or lone trading businessmen, who are offering cleaning services which are marketed online. Several of them are pretty canny when it comes to SEO and online marketing too – I know this to be true as, over at Your Story, our free press release distribution service, we get, daily, a lot of submissions from those looking to promote similar cleaning products and services.

Most of the press releases which are submitted are deleted because, generally speaking, they are not newsworthy, however, the fact that those behind such businesses view them as necessary indicates that this vertical is one which may be a little competitive in terms of SERPs.

In any case, my initial advice was, as always, not to optimize your site to bits and pieces, but instead to get into the head of the searcher. Simply put, think hard about what people will be Googling to find you, as well as what you’d like to be visible for.

One thing many people don’t consider is just how important their locale actually is.

Think about this point. If I live in Oxford, in the UK, and I want someone to clean my carpets, will I just jump on Google and search for “carpet cleaners”? I might, but isn’t it just as likely, if not more so, that, after being faced with page after page of capet cleaners in many places where I don’t need them to be, I might eventually narrow that search with a “carpet cleaners in Oxford” search. Bingo. That is your key phrase!

More than that, though, it is worth considering an “areas covered” page, which lists explicitly which towns, villages and cities you will work in. This is both useful for the potential client, as they can see straight away that you work in their area, but also will help you out with Google searches for the more obscure towns: how many others do you think have optimized for villages of 200-300 residents? Not many, but if, purely by listing the name of their town or village, you can be present in the top two or three organic search results, chances are you have just made yourself a sale.

However, the most important thing, as ever, is not just the words on your own website, it is also the words which link to your site.

A great way you could work on this is by finding local websites, based around those towns and villages you wish to cover, and asking if they will link to your website – use the different town / village name in the link each time – e.g. “Clean to Go – Upholstery, Carpet and Oven Cleaning in Abingdon, Oxford, UK” – adopt an insert name of town here approach! BUT, and this is a big but, don’t just email everyone with a cookie cutter email – make a personal approach to everyone. Consider using the good old telephone. The fact is, even just one link in from a good local resource is highly valuable to you, so work hard.

As a webmaster, I get link requests approximately every three seconds – I VERY rarely even respond to them – so be sure to adopt a personal approach.

Some people may want paying for this link. Others may want you to reciprocate with a link back to their website. These two options are slightly dangerous in terms of Google’s webmaster guidelines, so you should avoid them whenever possible. It always works best if you are already friends – in which case it is a favour! Also, you need to stress that it is genuinely useful for people in the local area to be able to find services relevant to them on their local websites.

This final point is precisely what Google is looking to help provide: the most relevant result.

Concentrate on that.

If your site appears to be the most relevant to a person in the Oxford area of the United Kingdom of Great Britain when they are looking for someone to clean their carpet, upholstery or oven, then Google will place you high in the search rankings for related searches.

There are many things that you can do to help make this point to Google et al – a few of which are described above.

I don’t offer professional SEO consultancy – because I prefer to concentrate on delivering genuinely engaging and entertaining content. However, if I did, it would contain most of the above.

One last point: SEO is something you should learn, not pay for, if you are to be successful in the long run. It essentially comprises all of the same skills which are required to be successful in any business: understand your target audience, and what they want, and you can deliver it to them. Without that understanding, your chances of success are severely restricted with or without Google rankings.