Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most Tulsa businesses are screwing this up. Not because they’re lazy, but because they don’t realize their profile is actively driving customers straight to their competitors.

With 84% of “near me” searches happening on mobile devices, your Google Business Profile isn’t just nice to have anymore. It’s the difference between someone calling you or the business three doors down. After working with Tulsa businesses for 12 years, we’ve seen these same seven mistakes cost companies thousands in lost revenue.

Let’s fix them.

Mistake #1: Your Business Information is Incomplete (Or Just Wrong)

This one seems obvious, but you’d be shocked how many Tulsa businesses have incorrect hours, missing phone numbers, or outdated addresses on their Google Business Profile.

Google uses your business name, address, phone number, website, hours, and services to determine if you’re relevant for local searches. Leave any of these blank, and you’re essentially telling Google you’re not serious about being found. Even worse? Having the wrong information makes potential customers give up before they even try to contact you.

The fix: Block out 15 minutes right now. Search for your business on Google and click “Suggest an edit” if you’re not the owner, or log into your Google Business Profile dashboard. Verify every single piece of information is current, complete, and matches what’s on your website exactly.

Mistake #2: You’re Ignoring Mobile Users

Remember that 84% of “near me” searches happening on mobile? Those are high-intent customers looking for SEO Tulsa services, restaurants, plumbers, or whatever you offer right now. They’re not browsing: they’re ready to buy.

If your profile isn’t optimized for mobile viewing, you’re invisible to the majority of people actively searching for businesses like yours in the Tulsa area. Your photos need to load quickly, your contact button needs to be prominent, and your information needs to be scannable at a glance.

The fix: Pull out your phone and Google your business. Does everything load quickly? Can you easily tap to call, get directions, or view your website? If anything feels clunky or slow, that’s what your potential customers are experiencing: and they’re bouncing to a competitor.

Mistake #3: You’re Treating Reviews Like They Don’t Matter

Customer reviews aren’t just social proof: they’re a ranking factor. Google wants to show businesses that actual humans recommend, and they use the quantity, quality, and recency of your reviews to make that determination.

But here’s where most Tulsa businesses drop the ball: they’re not actively generating reviews, and they’re definitely not responding to them. Every unanswered review: positive or negative: signals to Google and potential customers that you don’t care about feedback.

The fix: Create a system for requesting reviews from happy customers. Send a follow-up email after a successful project or transaction with a direct link to leave a Google review. Then: and this is crucial: respond to every single review within 48 hours. Thank people for positive reviews and address concerns in negative ones professionally and promptly. This shows you’re engaged and builds trust with people reading them.

Mistake #4: Your Profile is a Digital Ghost Town

Google rewards businesses that actively maintain their profiles. If you set up your Google Business Profile three years ago and haven’t touched it since, you’re losing ground to competitors who post updates, share photos, and engage with their listings regularly.

Think about it from Google’s perspective: would you rather show searchers a business that clearly cares about their online presence or one that appears abandoned?

The fix: Treat your Google Business Profile like a mini social media account. Post updates about new services, special promotions, or company news at least twice a month. Share new photos quarterly. Update your services and business description when things change. Google notices this activity and rewards it with better visibility in Tulsa SEO rankings.

Mistake #5: Your Photos Look Like They’re From 2009

Visual content matters: a lot. Your Google Business Profile photos are often the deciding factor in whether someone clicks through to your website or calls your competitor instead.

Poor quality photos, outdated images, or: even worse: no photos at all make your business look unprofessional or inactive. Meanwhile, businesses with high-quality, diverse photos showcasing their location, products, services, and team get significantly more engagement.

The fix: Hire a professional photographer or use a high-quality smartphone camera to capture your business in the best light. Include photos of your storefront, interior, products or services, team members, and happy customers (with permission). Aim for at least 10-15 photos that tell the complete story of what working with you looks like. Update these every few months to keep things fresh.

Mistake #6: Your Information is Inconsistent Across the Internet

Your business name, address, and phone number need to be identical everywhere they appear online: your website, Facebook, Google Business Profile, Yelp, industry directories, everywhere.

Why? Google cross-references information across the web to verify your business is legitimate. Inconsistencies confuse their algorithms and hurt your local search rankings. If your website says “McWilliams Media LLC” but your Google profile says “McWilliams Media” and your Facebook says “McWilliams Digital Marketing,” Google doesn’t know which is correct: so it ranks you lower.

The fix: Do a quick audit of your major online listings. Your exact business name, address format, and phone number should match perfectly across all platforms. If you find inconsistencies, update them immediately. This is basic digital marketing Tulsa businesses often overlook, but it has a real impact on your visibility.

Mistake #7: You’re Not Using Local Keywords Strategically

Here’s where Tulsa SEO company expertise really matters. Your Google Business Profile gives you several places to include keywords that help Google understand what you do and who you serve: your business description, services section, and posts.

If you’re a digital marketing agency in Tulsa but your profile talks about “helping businesses grow online” without ever mentioning Tulsa, digital marketing, SEO, or your specific services, you’re missing massive opportunities to rank for the terms people actually search.

The fix: Update your business description to naturally include location-specific keywords. Instead of “We help businesses succeed online,” try “We’re a Tulsa-based digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, web design, and social media management for local businesses.” Add specific services to your services section using terms people actually search for: like “Tulsa website design” or “local SEO services.” Just don’t keyword stuff: write for humans first, search engines second.

Don’t Let Your Competition Win by Default

Your Google Business Profile is free, powerful, and completely within your control. Yet most Tulsa businesses treat it like an afterthought: setting it up once and never touching it again.

That’s a choice that costs you customers every single day.

At McWilliams Media, we’ve spent 12 years helping Tulsa businesses dominate local search results. We’ve seen firsthand how these seven mistakes drain marketing budgets and hand customers to competitors who simply pay attention to the basics.

The good news? You can fix every single one of these issues yourself in a few hours. Or if you’d rather focus on running your business while someone else handles your digital presence, that’s exactly what we do.

Your Google Business Profile should be working for you 24/7, bringing in leads while you sleep. Make sure it’s actually doing its job.

The post Is Your Google Business Profile Costing You Customers? 7 Tulsa SEO Mistakes to Fix Today first appeared on Website Design | McWilliams Media |Broken Arrow, OK.

You have an idea for a business. Maybe it’s an innovative new product or a needed service that you know people will love. You do all the things a good entrepreneur should do, register your name with the state, write up a business plan, order some business cards, tell friends and family what you are doing, hyperventilate, tell yourself 1000 times a day that your plan will work, argue with yourself in the mirror about whether you are crazy or not. Last but not least you build a website. You are sure this is going to be the difference maker for your business. You hope that soon thousands will flock to your website daily to hand over money in exchange for your product or service. Right before you launch the site you wonder to yourself if Red is a bit too ostentatious of color for the yacht you will soon purchase. You decided you can probably figure that out later and send your new website and business out into the world.

Cue the crickets.

You start to realize that your shiny new website isn’t getting much traffic and therefore your stream of customers to your new business is not the stampede you imagined. Looks like you’ll have plenty of time to figure out that yacht color.

Welcome to a hard entrepreneurial reality, people won’t visit your site or buy from you because your website is new or shiny. People don’t buy when you are ready to sell, they buy when they are ready to buy. So the key to driving traffic to your site and sales to your company is connecting with the people that are searching for your product or service. To do that you are going to have to learn about something called Search Engine Optimization commonly abbreviated to SEO. SEO is more of an art than science, a vast and constantly changing field where the focus is understanding what search engines want and how they serve search results to people. The goal of good SEO is to help your website be found by the people who would benefit from it by optimizing keywords and content so that search engines serve those results first. In the world of SEO, there are two very important streams to understand, Organic SEO and Local SEO. We are going to look today at the difference between Organic SEO and Local SEO and how you can combine the two streams together to form a mighty river of people visiting your site. Bye. Bye Crickets. Hello Customers.

What is organic SEO? What is local SEO? Which one do I need?

Organic SEO revolves around a website and keywords. It is not necessarily attached to a geographical location or focused on driving traffic to a brick and mortar location. It is focused on keywords and driving traffic to that website based on people searching for those keywords regardless of where the individual searching may be located. Organic SEO is essential for national brands, internet marketers, and online businesses. Local SEO is similar to Organic SEO but has a strong geographical component to it. It is focused on building signals of relevance for search engines to pick up on regarding a specific location. It’s focus is to drive traffic in a certain area to a brick and mortar location. The big difference is in what the two streams are trying to show to search engines. In Organic SEO the goal is to get search engines to find relevant and trusted content. In Local SEO the goal is to get search engines to find relevant and trusted locations.

So which strategy for SEO should you use for your website?

Life has tough choices, for example when choosing which ice cream. Chocolate or vanilla. Thankfully a genius invented the twist cone and I am forever grateful. Why choose chocolate or vanilla when you can have both?

Local SEO vs Organic SEO can indeed be a twist cone scenario. A powerful and comprehensive SEO strategy will combine both strategies to their maximum impact to drive new customers to the website and business location. We are going to look at some key components for both SEO strategies and how to combine them together in an effective way. The results of a well-executed SEO strategy can be delicious. You just might go get a twist cone to celebrate.

Ways To Improve Local SEO

Local SEO is focused on making sure search engines find relevant and trusted locations. A primary goal of local SEO is for the website to place high in Google Maps for relevant keywords. Not all keywords trigger a local map, typically only the searches that Google determines to have local intent. One important concept of local SEO is a focus on citatations, (no, not the kind the traffic officer leaves on your window). Citations are references to your name, address, and phone number online. Common places for business citations to appear online are on directory sites like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Manta, and many others. The goal of local SEO is to create a strong citation profile that lets search engines know that your locations are trusted places to go for people searching for certain keywords.

Optimized Google My Business Page

Wondering how to find a new gym? Wondering when your favorite restaurant closes? My guess is that last time you had those questions you grabbed your smartphone and entered in a search and that locations google location page popped up on your phone. Having an optimized Google My Business Page is absolutely critical for good local SEO. Unfortunately, many business owners neglect this important step and don’t even set up a verified page with Google! Over the years many changes and improvements have been made to Google Location listings. Now google offers a variety of features to business owners including the ability to post offers, posts, pictures, videos, and other media to present themselves better to customers. Do not leave a good Google local page out of your Local SEO strategy.

Verified Listings

One great strategy for local SEO is to make sure your business information is distributed across a wide range of web directories and listings. This would be sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Manta and many others. It is critically important to make sure your business information is consistent and accurate across all platforms and directories. Make sure your address, phone number, email, and website are correct and the same across the web. When there are inconsistencies across your listings search engines are less likely to trust that your location is a trusted and relevant location.

Ways To Improve Organic SEO

Strategies for organic SEO include researching and choosing relevant keywords for a website that has high amounts of traffic and achievable levels of competition. These keywords are then used strategically in website content to send signals to search engines that the website is a trusted and relevant source for people searching those keywords. Keywords are often used in page and blog copy and also added to the metadata of the page and images. Citations are the focus of local SEO but links are the focus of Organic SEO. A website that is connected with a strong link structure is more likely to be shown by search engines. Both internal links and external links are important components of a solid organic SEO strategy.

Keyword Optimization

The first step to keyword optimization is choosing the right keywords to try and rank for in search engine results. You want to research a wide list of keywords relevant to your business and then sort them based on the amount of traffic that keyword receives and the ranking difficulty level. Certain keywords have a large number of people contending for search engine traffic so they are more difficult to rank high on and be found on the first 1-2 pages of search results. You want to choose keywords that have the best balance of traffic and achievable competition for ranking.

After choosing your keywords focus on consistently creating content for your website that includes your strategic keywords in an intentional way. Create blog posts or pages that have your keyword inserted into the content several times so that search engines will identify it as relevant content for people searching for those keywords.

Links! Links! Links!

Citations are the name of the game for local SEO but links are the creme de la creme of Organic SEO. A well-designed website should focus on both a well designed internal link structure and also high-quality external links.

Can Local SEO and Organic SEO be combined?

Yes!! Although it’s important to understand the difference between both SEO strategies a comprehensive SEO strategy for most businesses should include a hybrid approach that combines the best of Local and organic SEO techniques. You should focus on both optimizing your site for the best keywords and also making sure that your business location is well verified and found by search engines as a trusted and relevant place. Combining the best of local and organic SEO techniques can be a powerful way to drive traffic to your site and new customers to your business.

The post Understanding SEO vs Local SEO first appeared on Website Design | McWilliams Media |Broken Arrow, OK.

They may have claimed that they can scan your site and provide you with information that only experts can provide. They also may have claimed your website not being up-to-date, missing information, or lacking speed. These emails or calls may be full of promises about your business being able to leverage this success overnight and gain a large quota of sales quickly!

Tempting.

We know.

These scare tactics can convince anyone to jump in on the investment, but before you hand over any private or financial information we wanted to provide you with some valuable tips to help you recognize spam, as well as reasons as to why you should stick to the experts.

How to recognize spam:

• Unsolicited emails and/or comments left on your website from random companies or contacts that you have never had contact with before. These are often full of exaggerated promises that seem too good to be true – because they are.
• Consider the email address. For example, are they sending you an email from an unprofessional email address or a free service such as @gmail.com or @hotmail.com?
• Research their company and consider the professionalism or the lack there of, their website, social media accounts, and email addresses provided.
• Requesting private information too soon. For example, are they requesting your private or banking information simply after your first interaction? If they seem pushy at all – RUN.

Why you want to use SEO experts instead:

• You will be better off because the experts are not out to trick you, but actually want to see your company succeed. Our success is directly correlated with your company’s success!
• You will save money by not trying to find a quick fix that doesn’t work and results in you needing to start ALL over again. Invest your money the right way the first time and avoid detours along the way to your SEO success.
• Your company will grow when you avoid the shortcuts.

Bottom line, trust your SEO success with the experts. SEO isn’t an overnight fix. It’s about promoting your site and overtime beating your competitors in the Google race.

Remember: slow and steady wins the race.

The post SEO Spam: How to Recognize and Avoid It first appeared on Website Design | McWilliams Media |Broken Arrow, OK.

1. What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. No, that doesn’t mean making the search engines on your computer work better (that’s not really a thing). But it does mean making search engines work to your advantage.

Search engines, like Google or Bing, are web functionalities that help people find things on the internet. If you’re in business, this is really important. You want people to find you.

What search engines do

When a customer searches for businesses like yours, they see a list of choices. Search engines direct people to websites. But they also rank these results. They use hundreds of factors to perform these functions. However, they can be distilled into two ideas; relevance and popularity.

How relevant your site is to a search will affect your site’s query ranking. But popularity is also important. Search engines work on the idea that popularity corresponds to accuracy. So if a site is more popular, it is more likely to be of a higher quality.

What SEO does

So SEO helps you make sure your site appears in the correct search queries (relevance). Then it helps you push your site to the top of those queries (relevance & popularity). In short, SEO is how you get seen online. If Google is a field of billboards, SEO makes your billboard taller than anyone else’s.

2. How does SEO work?

But how is this accomplished? Well, for starters, keywords. These are the words that are most relevant to your business.You need the right keywords on your site. And you need them to occur often. This is the simplest function of SEO.

Search engine bots accomplish this by scanning your sites content. They make sure your keywords match your business. They make sure your keywords match your market. And they make sure your site follows the rules of the search engines.

Beyond keywords

But keywords are just the beginning. In the old days, search engines only looked for words. Therefore, search results were often of little value. But now search engines are much better and much smarter. But this also makes them much, much more complex.

Search engines now look at hundreds of factors to determine the rank and relevance of your site. Knowing which of these factors is most important to your business is a major function of good SEO. This helps keep your site from blending into the noise of the internet.

SEO experts

The algorithms used to do this are complex and constantly changing. For that reason, SEO has become an industry in itself. SEO experts work hard to keep up with the changing metrics of the major engines. They analyze search engine rules and site content. Then they make them work well together.

3. Why do you need SEO?

I think we sometimes have the idea that putting a website online suddenly gives us an online presence. But it doesn’t always work that way. The internet is huge. After all, it’s called the “world-wide-web” for a reason. So when someone searches for “Mufflers Tulsa, Oklahoma,” they might not find your Tulsa muffler shop at all.

Avoid Search failure

Who’s had an experience like this? You’re looking for–say–ok, mufflers. You type in “Mufflers Tulsa Oklahoma” and you see several that look familiar. Scrolling down a bit, you see one that catches your eye, Tony’s Muffler Shop.

You click on the website. You chat online with an expert. Nice site! Great experience! You might even book an appointment. Then you find out they’re in Munsey, Indiana! (or some other random location) How did this happen!?

The top few on the list were most likely local. But you, like many others, rarely choose the top result unless it’s the specific name you were searching for. So you scrolled past the obvious choices. And not far down the list, you found your Munsey muffler shop with the great site.

Why was he there? Well, there are a lot of possible reasons. But more importantly, why did so many Tulsa, Oklahoma muffler shops not get seen in that search? SEO. Or rather, the lack of good quality SEO.

Get seen.

Without good SEO, you have no idea who will see your site, or if anyone ever will!  You work hard to make your business the best. And you probably paid good money for your site. So you need to make sure that site doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

SEO helps you make sure your site meets the complex criteria for search engine rankings. You need to know that when someone searches for a business like yours, you at least have a chance! SEO gives you the peace of mind to know you’re not invisible.

Get seen by the right people.

Expert SEO not only makes you visible online but also makes you visible to the right people. You need to know that you’re showing up in search queries. But you also need to know you’re showing up in the right search queries.

By fine-tuning keywords, link structure, and other key elements, professional SEO targets your customers. You wouldn’t spend your money on a magazine advertisement in a place you can’t do business, would you? Well, without good SEO, you might be doing just that. The internet is huge, and good SEO helps shrink it down to size.

Tulsa & Broken Arrow SEO

At McWilliams Media in Broken Arrow and Tulsa, Oklahoma, we specialize in professional, customized SEO for your business. Call us today to see how we can maximize your website’s impact! We will work with you to make sure your business gets seen–and that it gets seen by the right people!

Our team are experts in all phases of digital marketing. From web design and branding to videography and social media, we are here to help you succeed! We are passionate about helping our entrepreneurs build their dreams! Call us for a free consultation today!

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

The post SEO-What it is and Why you need it first appeared on Website Design | McWilliams Media |Broken Arrow, OK.