SEO services for Hilton Head Island businesses that serve visitors and residents

Three crowds search for Hilton Head Island businesses

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey puts retail trade first among the island's working residents, at about 14%, with accommodation and food services close behind at about 13%. The businesses in those fields sell to three kinds of searcher, and each one looks in a different place.

The first group isn't on the island yet. They are at home, planning a week in Sea Pines or Palmetto Dunes, comparing places to stay, things to do and somewhere to eat near Coligny before they drive down US 278 through Bluffton. Where they sit tells Google little about what they want, so the place name in the search carries the weight. Your pages have to say where you are and what you offer in the words a planner would type.

The second group has arrived. They type "near me", check what is open now and ask for directions from the house they rented. Those results lean on your Business Profile, your reviews and how close you are, which is why hours and a correct pin matter more in July than any blog post.

The third group lives on the island all year and needs a dentist, a roofer or an accountant, searching the way residents of any town do. Between them sits a fourth case: the owner who lives somewhere else and books a contractor, a cleaner or a pool service from out of state. Nobody walks into your shop, so the website does the selling on its own.

Sea Pines to Coligny: naming the parts of the island you serve

People describe the island by its parts: Sea Pines, Palmetto Dunes, Shipyard, Harbour Town, Coligny. If you work in some of them and not others, name the ones you serve on your profile and your pages, because people search that way and pages that use the same names match those searches.

A separate page for each part is worth writing only when you have something different to say about it, such as the kind of property you work on there or the questions owners there ask. Google's spam policies currently describe pages that only swap the area name as doorway pages, so check the current wording before you build a set of them.

Lead with the place your customers name. If your charter boat leaves from Harbour Town, Harbour Town belongs in the page title and the profile description. A cleaning company that turns over rentals all across the island gains more from naming the island and the service than from listing every neighborhood it has ever visited.

US 278 is the road onto the island through Bluffton. An island business that also serves Old Town Bluffton or the homes along the May River should say so on its profile and its pages, and our Bluffton page covers the mainland side, from Old Town to the US 278 corridor.

SEO services for Hilton Head shops, rentals and home-service firms

For an island business, we would set up:

• Seasonal profile upkeep: hours that change between the busy months and the quiet ones, holiday hours, and a temporary closure or special hours when a storm shuts you.
• Listing cleanup: directories that still show an old phone number or a former business name get corrected or removed, along with duplicates.
• Pages for the trip planner: what you offer, where on the island you are and how booking works, written as keyword pages around what visitors type before they arrive.
• Review requests: visitors read reviews from home long before they reach the island, so every guest gets a short request after the visit.
• A website that sells without you: for contractors and home-service firms hired by owners who aren't on the island, photos of finished work, a clear service list and how you keep an absent owner informed. Websites start at $400, quoted per project.
• Links: guest posts and Web 2.0 pages aimed at those pages, with amplification links behind them, all shown in the monthly report.

A first season on Hilton Head: the 90-day plan

Say you rent bikes from a shop near Coligny and deliver them to rental homes in Sea Pines and Palmetto Dunes. Corner Shop ($65 a month, 5 keywords) is enough for a narrow business like that: a handful of terms around bike rental, beach bikes and delivery, plus your own name. Each month's package is delivered in 8-10 days.

Weeks one to four: the profile gets the right category, hours for the season, photos of the fleet and the shop front, and a pin in the right spot. Listings carrying an old number are fixed. A review request goes out with every return.

Weeks five to eight: one page for rentals and one for delivery, naming Sea Pines and Palmetto Dunes because you really deliver there, with prices, how drop-off works and what happens on a rainy day. The month's guest posts and Web 2.0 pages are pointed at those two pages.

Weeks nine to thirteen: the first monthly report lists the month's links by address, with the page each one supports and its anchor text, and the next month's links go to whichever page needs them most.

What we need from you along the way: photos of the bikes and the shop, the list of neighborhoods you deliver to, and a habit of handing guests the review link when they bring the bikes back.

Timing matters on the island. Pages for the busy months need to be live and indexed well before the first bookings, which often means doing the work in winter, and storms are possible from June 1 through November 30. The season planner counts back from your own peak months. Rankings on island terms take months to build and depend on who else wants them.