When you go to a trade show, you would never leave without first looking at your inventory. You consider what you are open to buy; what you need to add to your store, restock, or take a chance on buying.When it comes to your website you should not randomly hire a company that says they can help you rank better, instead you need to have a specific goal in mind before even talking to them. Ranking #1 on Google SERP might be your goal, but honestly, anyone can rank you #1 for 3 word phrases or obscure phrases, but ranking #1 is next to impossible for single keywords.
So you need an overall plan. Saying you want to increase your sales is pretty broad, and that won't happen directly unless you have an e-commerce website. Without e-commerce your website is just a digital brochure that passively generates revenue. That digital brochure is a perfectly fine strategy as long as you understand how to use it properly.
Using your "digital brochure" properly means you need to incorporate your website into every aspect of your marketing. Essentially you need to marry your merchandising into your search engine optimization, and THEN promote that merchandise locally.
On the other hand, if you do have an e-commerce website then you don't necessarily need to worry about merchandising, but rather just managing the SEO for the items you have listed on your website already.
So you see, there's a potential for a completely split set of goals that either lead people to online purchases or in-store purchases. Your search engine optimization methods will differ slightly based on those goals. Of course there are basic SEO steps that need to be applied to all websites, like the correct page titles, meta descriptions, URL structure, and avoidance of duplicate content; but you might only invest the time to write 200 word product descriptions if you really want to sell online.
Another good SEO tactic is the detailed renaming of product photos, but again that's a good if your goal is e-commerce.
Goals to bring attention and more people to your local store require a different approach; one generally focused more on building optimization that includes local town names, landmarks, and personal stories of people who live locally. Of course you should also be socially sharing all this stuff to create complete "marketing glue" that holds all your efforts together.
The bottom line of today's Daily Golden Nugget is to realize that you should never set out on any website optimization project or online marketing effort without a clear outline of your goals, and then figure out what it takes to achieve them.
