What Our Clients Say About Us

Amy Parker Vice President of Marketing at Geode Health
Amy
Abhirup Bhattacharya Head of Digital, Athenahealth
abhirup
Joey Truscelli Virtual Me
Joey truscelli
Patrick Brown CEO
patrick brown
Mark Rickmeier CEO
Mark Rickmeier
Amy Parker Vice President of Marketing at Fresh Thyme
Amy
Julie Novack CEO
Julie Novack
Calin Moigradan President of LadyBug & Friends
Calin Moigradan
Nathan Juncan CEO
Nathan Juncan
Julian Gnatenco CEO at a Medical Billing Company
Julian Gnatenco
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Work with Chicago’s Top
Local SEO Agency

When customers look for a local business or service, 88% of them start their search online using search engines.

That’s over 2 million Chicago residents who might never hear about your business or organization if it doesn’t have good organic search ranking.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the art and the science of increasing your web site’s search engine authority, so it ranks at the top of local search pages. For local businesses, local SEO is easily the highest-return digital marketing activity. Studies show that 90% of search engine users trust organic top results over paid ads. Paid ads can produce straight-line growth—to grow more, you have to pay more. On the contrary, the effects of local SEO tend to compound, leading to exponential traffic growth.

We Help You Rank Organically for Local Keywords that
Increase Your Local Sales, Leads, and Online Store Visitors

Strategy
Technical SEO
Web Design and Development
Google My Business
Authority Backlinks
Analytics
Discover why DAP is the only local SEO Agency you ever need to partner with to transform your website into a revenue hub.
Award-Winning SEO

Our team has decades of specialized experience in every SEO vector. We leave no stone unturned to get you the best ranking possible.

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Chicago-Specific Expertise

Don’t settle for out-of-towners. DAP understands the unique Chicago market—what your customers are searching for, and how to engage them.

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Commitment to Service

We take a “client-first” approach. We listen, and we’re always available to explain our strategy, hear feedback, and maintain the integrity of your brand.

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Results or Bust

The point of SEO is to increase traffic, conversions, leads, and sales. Our job isn’t done until we have made that vision a reality.

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Most websites have a lot of dead weight. Search engines not only look at your content; they look at site performance, metadata, and mobile optimization, among other things. We audit the technical SEO of your website looking for areas of improvement. Common fixes we implement include:
Website Load Time and Performance

Poor performance and slow load time negatively impact your SEO both directly and indirectly. Search engine crawlers notice your load time, and they also notice bounce-back rates, which increase if your site is slow or performs badly. We optimize your site to load quickly and perform perfectly, reclaiming crucial page authority to boost your ranking.

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Add Local Schema

Local schema is a type of data markup code that can be added to your website to help search engine web crawlers read and understand the location and purpose of your website. Users won’t see it, but the right local schema helps search engines rank your site for the most relevant keywords.

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Optimize Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

The most important text on your website is the page title, which is different from the header text. The page title is what appears to describe your website when it appears on SERPs. The short sentence that appears below the title in SERPs is called the meta descriptions. The title and meta description is a golden opportunity to include keywords you most want to rank for, since the crawlers read the title and meta description first. It must also be structured for human eyes, so searchers immediately see the value of your page, enticing them to click.

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You may already have a website, and it may have great technical SEO. But more design and development could be necessary to rank for the keywords your customers are actually searching. SEO usually involves some sort of web design and web development to help build out your site index—which in itself adds to your domain authority. Web design and development contributes to SEO in other ways, including:
Create a local SEO Page For Each Service

Here’s where your site index starts to balloon—local SEO works the best when every service has its own page … for every locality you serve. This includes different cities, even different neighborhoods. You don’t want to miss the person searching for your service with the geotag “Lincoln Park” just because your site is focused on “Chicago.”

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Update Your Current Location Page

If you have location pages, they may need work, including more content, better content, more use of keywords, more longtail keywords, and proper technical SEO. Regardless, we make sure you are getting the most mileage possible out of your current location page.

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Optimize Your Website

You could be underutilizing your current web assets from an SEO standpoint. Websites can gain SEO tailwind can be gained by optimizing images for speed, adding browser caching, reducing Javascript, modifying photo alt text, adding missing AMP pages, and improving mobile performance. DAP leaves no stone unturned to boost the SEO of your current site.

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Local searchers often want to know how far away your company is from their current location. SEO geo targeting involves getting your business listed and optimized on the search engine’s mapping platform. In the case of the largest search engine, this means optimizing your “Google My Business” page, which determines where you rank on Google Map listings—one of the most productive SERP positions for local businesses. Step we can take to optimize your Google My Business include:
Claim Your Google My Business

Sometimes your business may already be on the Google Map, but you can’t use it to help your Chicago local SEO unless you “claim” it. DAP makes sure you own and control your own Google My Business profile.

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Optimize Your Local Services Offerings

Google My Business offers a menu of standardized service listings you can apply to your business to help them sort you to the right searchers. DAP makes sure you have the most accurate and productive local services listed, so that search engines deliver your listing to warm customers.

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Images and Keywords Optimizations

Google My Business allows you to upload images and add a business description—in other words, another opportunity to add content, alt text, and keywords to your GMB listing. The more content on any page, the better it will rank. DAP local SEO services help you take advantage of that.

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Managing Your Listing

GMB listings don’t perform well when left static. To remain fresh and achieve their best possible ranking, they must be updated with new pictures, fresh content, and kept current in terms of services, hours of operation, and location. DAP’s ongoing Chicago local SEO services keep your GMB listing current.

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The easiest way to rank locally is to get other websites talking about you and name-checking you in the form of links to your website, which search engines interpret as a vote in favor of your authority. DAP deploys ethical, “white hat” backlink campaigns to boost your authority without risking blacklisting. Sources of legitimate backlinks DAP uses our network to access include:
Local Websites

Backlinks from local websites are gold for local SEO, even if they don’t have as much domain authority as national sites, even if they aren’t directly related to your industry. Web crawlers associate Chicago backlinks with Chicago relevance, adding to your Chicago local SEO. Our relationships with local web developers provide a wealth of opportunities for natural local backlinking.

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Niche Sites

Web crawlers will also assign you relevance in your niche if your backlinks lead to high-authority sites relevant to your niche—i.e. legal niche sites for lawyers, biotech niche sites for biotech companies, etc. DAP has a deep bench of relationships in a variety of specialized niches that we can use to deploy relevant backlinks.

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Industry Magazines

Web magazines in your industry are some of the highest-authority backlinks you can get. Most business owners don’t have the connections or experience to access those kinds of backlinks … or the spare time to produce content like guest blogs or articles that will earn those links. DAP does … and can do it for you.

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You can’t improve what you can’t measure. One of the biggest advantages of SEO is that with the right metrics, you can tell what aspects of your SEO campaign are working, and which ones need improvement. SEO can be a long process, but analytics can tell you at any point in the journey if you are on the right track. DAP installs and tracks SEO analytics so you are never in the dark about whether or not the campaign is working. Our Chicago local SEO analytics services include:
Google Analytics

Google offers a suite of free analytics that lead the industry in tracking website traffic and performance. We install Google Analytics and track the most relevant KPIs for Chicago local SEO.

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SEO Reports

DAP’s Chicago local SEO services include monthly reports on site traffic, keyword performance, and site ranking. It can take 6-8 months to rank on Page #1 for a particular keyword, but movement on KPIs will prove that we are moving in the right direction, even before your Chicago local SEO effort bears its fruit.

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Visual User Tracking

We install software that allows you to see how users actually use your website, identifying dropoff points, popular pages, mapping the user journey, and suggesting areas for improvement.

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Helping local Chicago Businesses Rank
for Mission-Critical Local Keywords Since 2016

Chicago residents have more choices than ever when it comes to their choice of medical provider. Gone are the days when the regional medical centers had a monopoly over the ambulance and ER traffic. Small private ERs, urgent care facilities, pharmacies, apothecaries, specialists, dentist offices, and telehealth providers have an opportunity to claim niche healthcare markets … if they devote the proper attention to their local Chicago SEO.

Consumers are more health-conscious than ever. Google receives more than 1 billion health-related search queries every day. One of the best tactics a medical business can deploy for their local Chicago SEO is content marketing

This is the process of finding out what questions are on your potential customers’ minds, then writing content to answer those questions. If you are answering their exact question, they are much more likely to find that page, and build trust in your brand as a result. Remember, 47% of all searchers will read 3-5 pieces of a brand’s content before ever reaching out. Furthermore, large quantities of recently-added content is good for your domain’s SEO overall—search engines interpret recent content additions as a sign of relevance and authority.

Local Chicago medical providers are not the only service providers that can benefit from local Chicago SEO. National providers of telehealth or remote health services, including wearables, SaMD companies, and mail-in testing and screening providers, need to take a local as well as national approach to SEO, with market-specific landing pages and market-specific content. As the third-largest city in the U.S., America’s “Second City” is a crown jewel in any national SEO campaign, brimming with customers ready to take advantage of the digital revolution of the healthcare industry. 

DAP helps Chicago-based healthcare providers stand out from competitors, and helps national brands establish their presence in the Windy City.

Fintech companies often have big ambitions. After all, the right money app, the right finance SaaS, the right banking back office … can change the world. But the world is also conquered one market at a time. Whatever global aspirations you have, you have to start somewhere. Local SEO should be a key component of every fintech company’s growth strategy.

Local Chicago SEO puts fintech companies at the financial nexus of the Midwest, as well as one of the financial pulse points of the world. Between the Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, half of all market-traded derivatives in the U.S. and nearly a fifth in the world passes through Chicago—twice as much as New York. Forget Wall Street—in many ways, the Windy City is the financial center of the universe. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

In other words, fintech companies need skin in Chicago in order to be players … and local Chicago SEO is a key way to get traction in the market. It helps that many fintech companies are breaking new ground with their services, meaning that they have few competitors. With few competitors, it’s easy to dominate search terms, market content to consumer queries, and rise to the top of SERPs.

DAP provides world-class local Chicago SEO for fintech companies. We sit at the crossroads of many industries, including both finance and tech—the very bread and butter of “fintech.” We have credibility and strong relationships throughout the Chicago financial world, as well as the robust Chicagoland tech industry, making it easy for us to score the kind high-authority backlinks that propel a fintech company to the top. Basically, a fintech company that can make it in Chicago can disrupt the world.

The days of the ivory tower of academia are numbered. The entirety of human knowledge is never more than a Google Search away. Lectures that students used to pay thousands of dollars for can now be watched for free on YouTube. Top professors are leaving universities, while non-accredited educational institutions and online education are gaining credibility. We live in a world where the proof is in the pudding. It’s the results, not the degree, that matters.

Traditionally successful institutions can no longer rest on their laurels. Students have a robust, largely digital marketplace of affordable educational options to choose from. Some schools have gotten out in front of this, but every school must reckon with it—schools need to think like businesses. That means paying attention to their standing in the marketplace, and often the local marketplace. For Chicago schools, universities, colleges, and academies, that means local Chicago SEO. 

Local colleges and universities stand to benefit the most from local Chicago SEO thanks to a booming market in adult education, with post-graduate learners eager to upgrade their skills, advance in their careers, or break into new careers.

With local Chicago SEO, academic pedigrees actually hold huge weight. The most prestigious schools in the country now offer online courses, opening up major academic laurels to a wider audience than ever. Far from being the death knell, online education can be a major source of revenue for beloved universities, right when they need it the most.

DAP helps local schools, academies, colleges, universities, and technical colleges dominate high-performing keywords in local Chicago SEO. We also help national online academies increase their footprint in the lucrative Chicago market through local Chicago SEO. The digital educational revolution is already well underway. We help academia keep pace with the changes—even turn them to their advantage.

When their life, freedom, or property is on the line, people want the best. More than that, they want the local best. They want the local guy who knows the judge, the DA, who knows the bailiff and the clerk of the court, who has a reputation throughout the Chicago legal fraternity for being relentless on behalf of clients. 

When people need legal services, they usually start with local services. They may not have a lawyer of the proper specialization in their social circle, so they need to rely on other markers of authority—like local Chicago SEO.

Local Chicago SEO is a perfect fit for legal services in a number of respects. First of all, it’s easy to niche down. It might be hard to have the top-ranking page for “lawyer in Chicago,” but it might be easier to rank for “family lawyer specializing in representing divorcing fathers,” or “lawyer specializing in jail release for drug offenses.” If your practice has multiple specializations, providing a separate page with separate SEO for each specialization not only boosts your domain’s authority, but ensures that people searching that specialty as a long-tail keyword will find your page first. 

Law offices can also exploit the localization of searches by providing pages optimized for different neighborhoods. Ranking for “attorney in Chicago” is great, but some people will be searching “attorney in Lincoln Park,” “attorney in Wicker Park,” “attorney in Logan Square,” etc. Even if your practice isn’t localized in those neighborhoods, performing separate geo targeting for those neighborhoods can help bring law offices to the attention of clients who could be best suited for their services, even if they aren’t in the exact neighborhood.

DAP takes a comprehensive approach to local Chicago SEO for lawyers, optimizing for every specialty, every relevant jurisdiction, and content marketing for legal questions common in the Chicagoland market.

In a way, real estate is the ultimate local business. What could be more local than land and property? You can’t ship it anywhere. When we talk about real estate, one of the first questions that comes up is “where?”  Real estate agents and service providers in Chicago stand to benefit greatly from local Chicago SEO. But local real estate service providers also face unique challenges. Local providers have to cope with elephants in the room like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com. Furthermore, real estate is a crowded market, with many service providers vying for a limited pool of business. It’s hard to win that SEO fight without a very big bat.

And yet, so many real estate service providers never suit up. For their “website,” they settle for a generic, poor-performing, outdated “agent page” provided for them by Re/MAX or Keller Williams. It’s nearly impossible to optimize those pages … but the powerhouse brokerages don’t care. Their business model is based on door-knocking, cold-calling, and other 19th-century methods in a digital age.

But opportunity exists. A real estate service provider or proptech company that niches down effectively enough can generate significant traffic with local Chicago SEO.

Opportunity also exists in the fact that almost everyone will become a customer of the real estate industry at some point—as a renter, as a buyer, as both. And yet, real estate is kind of complicated. Not many people understand it. A lack of understanding in the face of a coming challenge means research … which means Google searches.

A local or national real estate service provider can win the local Chicago SEO game by paying meticulous attention to content marketing with a local focus. National companies won’t necessarily provide up-to-date content relevant to Chicago neighborhoods, Chicago markets, Chicago renters and Chicago buyers.

DAP helps both local boutique providers and national companies expand their footprint in the lucrative Chicago property and proptech markets thanks to effective local Chicago SEO, even in a crowded market.

“Professional services” encompasses many classes of business—B2B agencies, accounting and business services, marketing specialists, freelancers and “solopreneurs.” Rarely able to bank on being a household name, professional services must often depend on digital marketing vectors like local Chicago SEO.

Fortunately, they’re the ones who can benefit the most from local SEO, especially if they are able to break their services into niches that customers search for with long-tail keywords. With some of the specialized searches that lead consumers and businesses to professional services, ranking #1 on high-converting SERPs is actually easier for local professional services than many other classes of business.

Professional services often make the mistake of only geotargeting their office location—or, in the case of home-based providers, their home location, or no geolocation. The Google Map is some of the most valuable real estate on a SERP, and if you can get in there not just for Chicago, but for Lincoln Park, Logan Square, Lake View, Bucktown, and more … that’s far more SERPs you’re going to show up in, as both a local result and a map result.

What we’re talking about, essentially, is not just a “website” but a whole web ecosystem of services and locations, each with its own unique content (no duplicate content! Bad for SEO) and each with its own local Chicago SEO. No wonder so many local professional service businesses don’t even bother—who has time for that much web work when you have a business to run?

Nevertheless, a concentrated effort on local Chicago SEO is the key to scalability for many professional service organizations. DAP makes this massive task easier by deploying an experienced team to do the heavy lifting. With our experience, resources, and relationships, it’s easy to deploy a  local Chicago SEO strategy that actually works for professional service businesses.

Looking for Your Next Local SEO Agency in Chicago?
You’ll Be in Great Company

Schedule
your free consultation

Have questions about your next Chicago Local SEO project? Schedule a consultation with a DAP expert today and find out what we can do for your local Chicago business. Local SEO retainers start at $5,000 / month.

Michael Reddy
Chicago, Illinois
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Find out why so many businesses have placed their trust in DAP for their Chicago Local SEO initiatives.

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We’re Experienced.

Our Chicago-based team of SEO specialists know SEO backward and forwards. Our team of experienced Chicago SEO experts, marketing managers, & analysts have a history of delivering exceptional results.

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We’re On-Time and On-Budget.

DAP has built its reputation on a habit of meeting—even beating—our established success benchmarks, including the budget, and realization of results.

seo agency services
seo agency services
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We’re Award-Winning.

DAP is humbled to have received attention in the Chicago marketing space for the fruits of our dedication. It’s not why we do it … but it’s nice. This year alone, Digital Authority Partners was named the: Gold Winner – Best Search Engine Optimization Agency, one of the Top SEO Agencies by Clutch, an Expertise Best SEO Agency, and one of UpCity’s Top SEO Companies in the USA.

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We’re Focused on the Future.

Our SEO team stays current on SEO best practices, discarding played-out techniques, adopting high-performing ones, and is laser-focused on tech trends that inform the strategies of tomorrow.

Our Local SEO Work

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E-commerce

Fresh Thyme

  • 70+ locations overhauled with new template
  • 47% increase in “near me” clicks
  • 10% increase in overall searches compared with previous year
  • 93% increase in map views
View case study
Local SEO Strategy
Software as a Solution
Healthcare

Geode Health

  • 11 Number of locations ranking #1 on Google
  • 26X Increase in organic keywords ranking
    year over year
  • 1,500+ # of local keywords ranking
View case study
ladybug case study
Education

LadyBug & Friends Daycare and Preschool

  • 200% Increase in revenue year over year
  • 253% Increase in organic traffic year over year
  • 2,000+ # of local keywords ranking
View case study

Want to meet with our team?

Book a meeting directly here

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Why Work with Us on
Your Next Chicago Local SEO Project

Data-Driven Strategy for Your Chicago Local SEO Website

No more guessing; no more putting money into a black box with no idea what you’re getting back. We perform a full local SEO audit of your current website, identifying what is working and what isn’t. We install industry-standard analytics so we know exactly what is going on with your site now, and to track what it does in the future.

We then put together a plan to maximize your strengths and shore up weaknesses, including technical SEO, a backlink strategy, content marketing … the works. And it won’t add to your workload. We take care of everything.

Analytics
UX Design

Laser-focused on Your Chicago Local SEO Web Experience

Chicago is like no other city in the world. Even amongst Americans, we’re a different breed. What works in LA or New York doesn’t necessarily work here—something national or out-of-town SEO agencies don’t always understand. We never let it out of our sight. Our local Chicago SEO efforts are micro-targeted to a Chicago audience.

Our core strategy is to create an in-depth “local” page for every client, with Chicago-focused content, to anchor your brand in Chicago in the eyes of both visitors and the search engines. The goal is to entice Chicagoans to call, visit your store, or otherwise interact with your brand as a local presence in their lives.

Obsessive Optimization of Your “Google My Business” Profile

It bears repeating—the Google Map is some of the best real estate on a SERP. It usually appears right at the top, above the organic search results and sometimes above the paid search results. It’s a significant asset to any local Chicago SEO project.

As such, we pay obsessive attention to your Google My Business profile, optimizing the images and content to rank high in map results. We also blanket the web with citations of your exact GMB listing, a step that most businesses neglect or do incorrectly. When done right, GMB citations can put you on SERP Page 1 faster than almost anything.

Google Business
UX Design Team

Brand Mentions on Relevant Websites

Search engine web crawlers aren’t just looking at your website to determine its authority. One of the key indicators of authority that the web crawlers look for is evidence of your brand elsewhere on the web, social markers like brand mentions and backlinks from other domains.

The best mentions and backlinks come from high-authority sites that are relevant to your brand. A relevant mention helps. A high-authority mention helps. But the combination of both is incredibly powerful. DAP’s experience and relationships across the web make it easy for us to get high-authority, high-relevance social markers.

Thorough Monitoring of Your Site’s Analytics

Remember those analytics we used to do the audit and build the strategy? DAP keeps meticulous track of those metrics throughout the local SEO process. We want to know if what we do is working. We never just “play and pray.” Whenever we adjust your site’s local SEO, we check the metrics to see if they produced a measurable result. If it didn’t move the needle, we try something else or look for the problem.

There’s nothing magic about this. Digital marketing is the wave of the future because it is easy to track in real time. This is critical for SEO, a process that can take awhile to bear its maximum fruit.

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