Fort Myers SEO Company | Expert Business Services

Fort Myers SEO Services Targeted To Your Location

Where your business is located, what you sell, and your long-term goals are all important aspects that need to be taken into consideration when designing and implementing a search ranking strategy for you. SideBacon excels in this department. We don’t do cookie-cutter optimization with the same plan applied to every company. Your business is unique and needs to be treated that way.

When you contact SideBacon for a free consultation, our goal is to learn about your business to figure out the best strategy to help it grow. Some websites will benefit more from frequent updates, such as running a blog. Others have plenty of content already and need backlinks instead. It’s even possible to have perfect content and tons of links while rankings could still be held back by a poor site design or severe technical problems. Social media outreach or eCommerce may even be a key element for specific types of businesses. We can quickly determine the most efficient and effective approach based on your exact needs.

Prime commercial real estate can sometimes remove the need for additional marketing efforts, but it is also obscenely expensive. Not everyone can afford to have one of those prime spots. Even when you can afford it, the high costs may not make sense for your business and may even handicap your growth. When it comes to SEO, none of that matters. A small business owner with a tiny budget can compete with the biggest companies in the county that have deep pockets.

More details are provided below for specific locations in and around Ft Myers (all in Lee County). Learn more about how your exact location can affect your business and help determine the most optimized approach to get top search positions.

Downtown Fort Myers

When you think about the downtown area, you probably picture the Riverfront district around First St. It certainly has the most recognition and foot traffic, but the entire Fort Myers region is quite large. When you have a business located somewhere that doesn’t get a lot of walk-ins but you’re surrounded by people, there are some strategic steps you can take to bring more people in your door.

One of the biggest issues with Ft Myers, especially during the day time, is the traffic. Trying to travel up and down US 41 through the city is constant stop-and-go. Residents adapt to it by sticking to their immediate area as much as possible. This means that it can be difficult for them to learn about new businesses or companies outside of their daily living radius. Someone can live here for years and still only know a small fraction of the town and companies located there. This is even more true for snowbirds.

Google is your best friend when it comes to getting discovered. Countless searches are performed here every day looking for certain types of local businesses. If your company isn’t listed and ranking in a top position, you are losing out on new customers and more sales. SideBacon can help you get discovered by creating a strategic plan tailored just for you.

Cape Coral | Matlacha | Pine Island

The fastest growing city in the county is Cape Coral. This city alone makes up about 25% of the total population in the county. In many ways, this area could probably be a separate county (along with North Ft Myers perhaps), especially as more of the unoccupied land gets developed.
This place gets credit for being the reason why SideBacon even exists in Southwest Florida. Our owner’s mother has lived and taught in schools here for 20+ years, back when the city wasn’t even half the size it is now. The magic of having a saltwater canal in your backyard that connects to the ocean was a big draw for the earliest residents.

The days of Cape Coral being a sleepy town are long gone, but it has luckily still retained a lot of the magic. The Cape Coral Bridge and Midpoint bridge are now traffic bottlenecks that cause cascading problems throughout areas miles away on both sides of the Caloosahatchee. Traveling down Del Prado Blvd most days now feels more like living in a large city. The intense traffic combined with bridge tolls can stop people from Fort Myers and below from visiting. Matlacha and Pine Island have it even worse since you have to travel west through Cape Coral down Pine Island Rd to reach these areas.

We view these problems as opportunities for business owners located here. A large portion of your customers will likely live in this local area. However, you can still grow even more by tapping into people that live on the other side of the river. Those people are not likely to cross the bridges just to browse, but they will cross to go to a specific destination. Google search is often the perfect place to connect with them. Our owner will make the drive from Bonita Springs out to the edge of Matlacha to go to Miceli’s to have dinner with his mom or take the family to Sun Splash Waterpark. You have to get discovered first, and then people will travel to reach you.

North Ft Myers

This particular region lies on the North side of the Caloosahatchee River, both above and to the east of Cape Coral. In the city itself, there are a lot of residents nearby, especially in Cape Coral. Once you head out east on US 78, the population becomes much more sparse. Barely 5% of all county residents live here. Retail shops in some of those lower population areas appear to be on the decline. Many shopping centers are abandoned or have just a few struggling tenants remaining. It is also not very common for southern Lee County residents to venture that far in their day-to-day life.

Roofers, plumbers, electricians, lanai repair, and other service based operations in the area have an advantage since they get lower operating costs while still being able to travel to more populated areas for projects. For others, it is very important to market to other nearby cities.

Retail stores have one potential advantage. In additional to targeting local search keywords to bring traffic from other cities, there is also a potential opportunity to start an eCommerce shop. Online you are not limited with your customer base. The entire country becomes a potential customer. If a store doesn’t get enough in-person sales, it leads to chain of events that often involves downsizing and laying off employees before eventually closing.

That same store could start a website or perhaps even an Amazon or Shopify store to sell their goods to anyone in the USA. This raises monthly revenue, which could provide more employees with work to pack and ship orders. Profit margins are higher with eCommerce compared to traditional brick-and-mortar retail too. SEO and eCommerce easily fit together too, since organic rankings can provide free traffic to your website that can then convert that traffic into sales.

At SideBacon, we have a lot of experience with eCommerce, so we’re happy to discuss this potential strategy for use with your business. We can create your entire eCommerce website for you, market it, and even provide ongoing advice.

Lehigh Acres | Alva | Olga

On the far eastern side of the county you will find Lehigh Acres along with the country towns of Alva and Olga. A lot of companies here will mostly serve customers in the immediate local area. For example, in Lehigh, most of the commercial real estate is located along a handful of roads like Lee Blvd, Gunnery Rd, US 82, Joel Blvd and Homestead Rd. Both Alva and Olga are in similar situations but to a more extreme degree, since they’re mostly centered around US 80.

To start with, you need to make sure that the locals where you’re located. Once that goal is accomplished, you need to start branching out into other nearby cities to grow your clientele. Many of these businesses can be very appealing to people that live in other parts of the county, but they’ll never know about them without search marketing.

Lehigh Acres in particular also presents a potential opportunity. With about 15% of the county’s residents, this city seems to be generally under-served by commerce and retail. There are plenty of stores and restaurants, but you won’t find the same variety. As an example, there is not a Best Buy in the city. Residents have to travel into Fort Myers to go there. If your company offers products or services that can’t easily be found in Lehigh, there could be a huge potential to bring customers from there to your door.

Buckingham

The agricultural hub of Lee county offers a peaceful country setting just a few miles outside of downtown. Plant nurseries, U-Pick farms, horse stables, and other similar types of businesses can draw a lot of visitors, but they can be hard to stumble upon. Utilizing the internet to make potential customers aware of your existence can bring amazing results.

In general, there won’t be a ton of car or foot traffic passing in front of your location, so you need to draw them in some other way. Optimizing your website for local search keywords can be the perfect marketing strategy for you. One-time or recurring events can be very successful when you can reach enough people to let them know about it far in advance.

Service based companies in Buckingham have it a bit easier because they will typically travel to the customer. However, it is still very important to have strong search engine visibility to ensure your potential customers can find you. Overall, almost every company in Buckingham should be utilizing search engine optimization to help expand their customer reach and revenue potential.

Estero

The community of Estero is nestled between Ft Myers and Bonita Springs. It has a lot of prime location commercial real estate, with the vast majority located along US 41, Corkscrew Rd, or around the Miromar Outlets. Despite this central location and a large amount of road traffic, some in this area could struggle to bring customers into their door.

For a lot of people in Lee County, Estero may be commonly visited, but this is also likely to be during the daily commute. Someone may pass by your place every day on Hwy 41 going back and forth from work. However, that same person may not even realize your company is there since the focus is often on fellow cars on the road. This is an easy opportunity though. You don’t have to convince many of these residents to go out of their way to come to your location. Since they are likely to drive close to it already, they just need to be made aware of your existence when they seek your type of business. Having a top 10 Google listing can easily put you in this position.

Bonita Springs

SideBacon is located in Bonita Springs. Our owner lives here too. We love this quaint town and think that it has some of the best to offer of Florida. It is centrally located between the larger cities of Naples and Fort Myers. While it isn’t in Collier County, it sits on the northern border of the county, so it is close enough for a visit. The city also sits at the southern entrance to our barrier islands and beaches in the southern part of Lee County. You have to go through Bonita Springs to get to Lovers Key State Park or the Dog Beach in a reasonable amount of time.

Even though the city only has about 55,000 people that live there, businesses located there have easy access to well over 1 million potential customers. There are 1.2 million people in Lee County and Collier County, not to mention all of the seasonal snowbirds. Business owners in this city can greatly benefit from SEO efforts to draw in these nearby residents. You really don’t want to ignore a potential customer base that is 20 times larger than the residents in your city. We can help because we live and breathe this situation at SideBacon. We are located in a small city surrounded by a lot of people, so our business is able to thrive by reaching clients in larger, nearby regions. The internet and search engines are one of the best ways to accomplish this strategy.

Sanibel | Captiva | Fort Myers Beach | Estero Island | Iona | Barefoot Beach | Boca Grande | Bonita Beach

We know the past year has been tough because we’re located just 1.5 miles inland behind Bonita Bay off of US 41. Hurricane Ian has devastated these areas. This not only includes the people but the local businesses that operate there too. While we don’t have the skills to help rebuild, we can contribute by helping affected businesses grow a larger customer base. If your business was affected by Hurricane Ian, make sure you mention this to us during your consultation call to receive 25% off the cost of our services for an entire year!

Locals should flock to these areas to support local small business owners, but it can also be difficult to know which companies have closed and which have reopened. Residents outside of your immediate area may also stay away on purpose trying to be respectful.

Just as a random example, the owner of SideBacon loves to bridge fish in his spare time. Big Carlos Pass Bridge between Bonita Beach and Estero Island is his favorite fishing spot. He used to frequent this area a few times a week but has only returned once since the storm. The devastation along Hickory Blvd going up the coast north towards Ft Myers Beach is heartbreaking. We haven’t even gone through Fort Myers Beach since the storm, which we know is much worse. With all of the cleanup and work being done in the area, it felt like the best thing to do for now was to stay off the road and keep out of the way of workers.

As a business owner, this should be valuable information to you. If you’ve reopened and find that your sales have dropped, there could be other locals beyond your immediate area that are staying away for the similar reasons. Everyone wants to return because these are some of the most beautiful places in the entire state of Florida in our opinion. With targeted local SEO efforts, you can easily let others know that you’re back in business, host special events, and even attract new customers.