Everyone wants to grow their business via online promotion
but today locally promoting a website is more challenging.
So, In this guide, we hope to share with you some of the
techniques that could help you, one of the good guys, thrive, get more
customers and become Local SEO consultant.
Becoming a Local SEO Expert Starts With Google My Business
Locations
Google My Business Locations is the very first step to
establishing a presence in a new market. All you need is a valid gmail account
in order to create up to 10 different locations that span across mobile, maps,
and, Google’s desktop search results. The best part of all…it’s free. Google
even provides an easy to use Excel template that lays out what information is
needed to confirm the locations and get them indexed. I’ve provided an example
of that below.
Top Level Domains Vs. Subdomains:
One of the biggest decisions you’ll need to make when expanding
your reach to new territories and countries is whether to create a top level
domain or a subdomain for each location. If you’re not quite sure what that
means, HalfElf.org, a WordPress Guru site does an excellent job of explaining
the differences between the two. As Matt Cutt’s describes in the video in the video below.
Optimize Your Website
For Each Location:
Once you’ve set up a web presence for each region you’ll
want to optimize schema for your various locations. Make sure to include a
local number, local address, and business hours to increase your chance of
being shown in Google’s SERPs. These should be unique for each location and
need to be linked to either your top level domain or subdomain for that area.
You can find more information on localized schema at schema.org.
Google Isn’t
Everything
Although Google takes up 68.5% of desktop and 92.7% of
mobile market share, they aren’t the only ones that can make an impact on your
bottom line. In fact, using other business listings, review sites, and citation
sources can actually improve your results within Google, doubling their
effectiveness. Here are few resources to consider when expanding your presence.
Yahoo Local
Marketing: Yahoo offers a paid service that lists your business on over 50
websites within their network. They offer “Local Enhanced Listing” priced at
$9.99 a month and “Yahoo Local works” priced at $29.99 month. This can be an
excellent way to create high quality backlinks, among other benefits.
Bing Place for
Businesses: Bing makes it easy to set up a local listing with their free
service. The only requirement is to have a valid Microsoft account which is
also available for free if you don’t already have one. Utilizing Bing’s local
listings seems to be ignored by many companies, and can give you an advantage
over your competitors who don’t know that value of this resource.
Yelp: Yelp has
become the premier review website not only for their ability to show up high
within Google’s results, but also as a trusted source for consumers.
Establishing your location in Yelp and actively managing the reviews there can
pay huge dividends to your business.
Data Providers:
There are several different data resources that are used by search engines in
the United States. These include Factual, Infogroup, Acxiom, Neustar, and a few
others like yellowpages and superpages. These have a large impact on search
results and feed directly into search engines, review sites, and more. Ensuring
your business is listed on these and that the information is correct is
extremely important for companies that want to be found locally. Moz has an
excellent list of who these sites integrate with.
Citation Resources: Each region will have different citation
resources that you can take advantage of. Luickly Moz has done all the work for
us, and provided a comprehensive list of the best citation websites to use for
each metropolitan area in the United States. Most of the websites are
redundant, but there are a few that are unique in specific areas. Take a look
at that here.
Developing Localized
Content
Having a content marketing plan for each location can
drastically improve search results across all major search engines. Ensuring
that your meta tags, URL, alt tags, and content all have the city and state
included is an excellent way to localize content.
Making this content unbiased can be difficult, but using
subtle tactics to promote your business works much better than shouting to the
world that you are the best. Here are a few examples of article topics that can
be used to help establish you as a resource locally:
- “Who is the best [niche/service] company in [location]?”
- “The top [niche/service] reviewed in [location]”
- “Where are the best [niche/service] in [location]”
Some Extra Tips:
If you can do all of these things above, your are well on
your way to becoming a local SEO expert. Here are a few more tips to help you
on your journey of local search engine dominance.
- Make sure your websites are mobile optimized.
- Use companies like Foxtail Marketing, Whitespark, or Brightlocal to help you if you’re not feeling confident in your strategy.
- Embed Google Maps for each location.
- Manage Google, Yelp, and Social Media reviews.
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