Running a business seldom goes smoothly. But when it does, it fills you with a sense of accomplishment like nothing else. Customers are coming, money is rolling in, business is booming – what could be better?

Of course, there are many challenges on the way to success. And if you fight for it on the digital front (as you should), one of those challenges will involve stealing as many customers from your local competitors as you can. Which is achieved through good old local SEO.

Yes, even after all these years, it still helps businesses not just survive, but grow and thrive. Do you want to know the secrets of local SEO? You’ve found them.

Short on time right now? Get the full PDF guide to read it later. Download the Guide

1. Check for penalties from Google

SEO can be good or bad. When your SEO gets really bad, Google slaps your site with a penalty. Then your rankings drop, and you may even disappear from search results completely.

Are you in any trouble from Google? Check for that before anything else.

Log into Google Search Console as the site owner and select the website you are auditing in Search property. (If the site isn’t connected to Search Console yet, the owner has to connect and verify it first.)

Then in the sidebar on the left, click on Security & Manual Actions and choose Manual actions.

If it says No issues detected, great! If it says anything else, there’s your first batch of problems to fix later.

2. Run a thorough keyword audit

For this step, you will need a list of keywords the site owner is trying to rank for.

You can probably deduce some of those keywords on your own. For example, if it’s a barber shop in Florida, there’s one relevant keyword candidate.

Check the keywords for two things: rankings and user search intent. Let’s start with the former.

First, you need to find out if the website appears in search at all – on page #1 or the 3-Pack. You can try Googling the keywords from the list one by one, but it will be faster to use an SEO tool and check them all at once.

Simply scan your site rankings in WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool. Click on +Add keywords and type in all the keywords you want to check, then press Save and Scan to generate a report.

This tool’s settings allow for scanning in specified locations, which is just what we need for local SEO. It can even detect more interesting search results like the local pack, hotels or Knowledge Panel.

Once you receive the report, look at the columns Position and SERP: they show where your site is ranking. It also doesn’t hurt to check the Local monthly searches column, as it shows how often users type those keywords in Google. If any of these columns aren’t in the report, press the Manage columns button to add them.

Now for user search intent.

• Is the site owner using any keywords which are clearly irrelevant to the site or provided services?
• Are they short-tail or long-tail keywords? Long-tailed ones tend to be more specific, and therefore more effective. It’s very hard to rank for a short-tailed keyword if you aren’t a big shot.
• Do the keywords include words like where, closest, near me? Location-based searches often use words like that, so it’s a common local SEO practice to use them in your keywords too.

3. Check your Google Business Profile

To begin with, does your customer have a listing in Google Business Profile at all?

If not, that’s really bad news for their local SEO and they should rectify it ASAP. But if they do, then you have something to work with here.

Log into their Google Business Profile and see what it’s like.

• Is any information missing?

All fields should be filled out with accurate, up-to-date information about the business. Name, description, categories, address, opening hours and so on. A blank field in GBP is a hole in your local SEO.

Mind the character limits too.

• Are keywords present and used properly?

Keywords (especially local ones) in your GBP are a major ranking factor. They can ensure your business will appear in Google’s very competitive local pack. The catch is, you can’t just put them in the title and call it a day: that goes against Google’s guidelines, which demand using the business’ real-world name.

However, the craftier owners simply include keywords when naming their business. It’s a perfectly valid loophole which satisfies both the guidelines and the ranking algorithm. The only thing to worry about is making the name sound natural.

Relevant keywords should also be included in the GBP categories. Putting them in the description is optional, although encouraged.

• Are photos and other images uploaded?

There’s a variety of images you can upload in your Google Business Profile. The more you have, the better.

• Logo: mandatory. Every business needs one.
• Cover photo: also obligatory. Google displays it in search results.
• Exterior photos: customers will easily find you if they know what the place looks like.
• Interior photos: first-time visitors will be more at ease if they know beforehand what’s inside.
• Team photos: another comfort factor. Bonus points if you have reviews praising individual employees – photos can turn them into local celebrities.
• Product/service photos: customers need to know what to expect.

It goes without saying that all images should be of high quality.

Videos, too, deserve a mention as another type of visuals. If there are any, watch them and see if you can find any problems.

• What is the posting activity like?

GBP allows you to create posts in order to communicate with your target audience. Take a look at the posting activity on the page. How often does the owner post? What kind of content do they post? Do they engage with customers, do they promote events and sales?

Frequent and diverse posts can ensure this feature is used efficiently. Posting once a month is considered the bare minimum. It’s also good for posts to contain links, photos and geo mentions.

• Is there an FAQ page?

Self-explanatory. An FAQ is a powerful asset for any website, and customers are guaranteed to have questions.

4. Find on-page SEO issues

On-page optimization is a lot of work, meaning there’s also plenty of room for mistakes. And for a local business’ website, those mistakes can be pretty costly.

Waste no time dealing with problems. Find them all in WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview report.

This tool will scan all site pages at once, so not a single on-page SEO error will escape your attention.

For a local SEO audit, here are the most damaging issues to keep an eye on:

• Broken images
• A missing sitemap
• A missing robots.txt file
• Missing ALT attributes for images
• Overly long, missing or duplicate title and description tags

Naturally, any other issues displayed in the report should not be ignored. They all negatively affect site rankings.

5. Perform a backlink audit

The most powerful ranking factor of all. Backlinks can make or break your SEO even when you’ve done everything else right. No SEO audit is complete without a backlink analysis, and local SEO is no exception.

So make haste. Scan your link profile with WebCEO’s backlink checker.

Once your report is ready, it’s time to appraise your backlink profile.

• Are you gaining or losing backlinks? Of course, quality trumps quantity, but a stable trend of losing backlinks is a bad sign.
• Are you collecting backlinks from domains that are relevant to your niche? It’s the best kind of backlinks which increases your site rankings and authority.
• Are you collecting spammy backlinks from undesirable pages or domains? If yes, it will be necessary to get rid of them – either by having them removed or by disavowing them.
• What are the most common anchor texts in your backlinks? Anchor texts act as your ranking keywords, so your ideal scenario is lots of anchors which match your preferred keywords. Textless anchors also count as anchors and are less than ideal.

Based on this analysis, you will be able to fix the flaws in your customer’s link building strategy.

6. Evaluate your online reputation

A local business lives or dies by its reputation among customers. Good thing we have the Internet, right? There’s no place like it to find out what people think about you… and lose all sleep over it.

Hopefully your customer will keep sleeping well after you are done with this step. What should you check for?

• Reviews

Any self-respecting local business should be collecting customer reviews on its website. Positive and negative reviews, detailed feedback – be sure to pay attention to everything. A review is especially valuable when it has keywords your site ranks for.

Google Business Profile’s review section is another place you can’t overlook. And if your client has created listings for their business on any review platforms, be sure to check there as well.

• Ratings

Where there are reviews, there are usually star ratings on the same page, too. But it’s also common for business directories to display rating scores separately from user reviews.

If your client’s website appears in Google’s local pack, that’s the fastest way to see your client’s ratings. Of course, a thorough local SEO audit will require more information from other places.

• Citations and mentions

Everybody wants their brand to be the talk of the town. Problem is, there’s only so much you can hear with your own ears and so much self-Googling you can do on your own.

Thankfully, there are tools for picking up the word on the e-streets. Who, where, what and when – find all your online mentions with WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring tool. Just add the keywords related to the local business whose SEO you are auditing (its name will do best). The tool will show you the sites and the tweets where it has been brought up.

• Social media engagement

If your client has created social media pages for their business (as anyone should), you need to have a look at them too.

How do you know if they are well run? Pass your judgment by answering these questions:

• How often do they post new updates?
• What is the format of the updates? Text, images, videos, polls or other?
• How much user engagement (likes, shares, upvotes, comments etc.) do they get?
• How do the users respond to the updates in the comment section?
• How quickly does your client respond to the users?

As a rule of thumb, lots of activity (from the owner and users) on a social media page is good. If you find any problems there, jot them down.

7. Check data from Google Analytics

First things first, is your website connected to Google Analytics?

If yes, then you have access to tons of valuable information on how customers interact with your site. Better yet, you can narrow it down to a specified location, which is just what local SEO requires.

What kind of data do you need to keep an eye on?

• Bounce rates;
• Average session duration;
• Your visitors’ search interests;
• Sort your visitors by age and gender;
• Your visitors’ location and preferred language;
• How deeply visitors explore your site and where they drop off;
• Where you get all site traffic from (organic, paid, social media).

Thanks to Google’s switch to Google Analytics 4, you can find almost any metric just by typing what you want in the search bar.

If you have any custom reports which further narrow down your data, make sure to check them as well.

8. Audit your structured data

Structured data can enhance your search results in many ways. It’s one way to turn ordinary snippets into rich results, making them stand out among the rest and attracting more clicks.

However, as is the case with anything even slightly complex, there is room for error. What can happen if you make a mistake with structured data on your site? At best, your search snippets will not get any new fluff. At worst, they might break and display incorrect information. For a local business, that’s more damaging than for any other kind of website – not to mention wasting the effort you’ve put into learning and applying Schema.

Protect your efforts and your clicks. Test your structured data code with the free Schema Markup Validator.

But finding and fixing errors is only one part of the job. You’ve also got to make sure you are using the right Schema for your website. For local businesses, it’s the LocalBusiness Schema. There are countless LocalBusiness types to choose from, and your actual business’ type must match the Schema as closely as possible. For example, a law firm needs the LegalService Schema type.

Last but not the least: where are you using Schema and where are you not? Do you have any pages which don’t have structured data, but could benefit from it?

9. Evaluate the quality of your user experience

A good UX is expected from all websites. If you can’t provide it, clients will go somewhere else, leaving you with nothing except a higher bounce rate. What makes up a good UX?

• Fast page loading speed. Scan your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization and see if anything is holding you back. This tool measures your loading speed and Core Web Vitals, both of which are major Google ranking signals.
• Eye-catching, high-quality visuals. If any of your images are too file size heavy, you might want to compress them or pick a more optimal file format for them. Make sure all of them have ALT texts. The On-Site Issues Overview report will help you find images without them.
• Mobile friendliness and responsiveness. Run a check on your site in Mobile Optimization. Just like its neighbor Speed Optimization, this tool offers tons of useful tips for making your site more mobile-friendly.
• No technical issues. Bring up a list of everything you need to fix on your site in WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool.
• User-friendly navigation and footer. If your site has a lot of content to display, pagination and a View more button are also useful. However, all of these things’ effectiveness will be severely reduced if the website is not mobile responsive.

It’s also recommended to use software like CrazyEgg and create heat maps for your site. They mark the exact spots where visitors interact with your site pages (and where they don’t), which offers an easy way to find flaws in your website’s design.

10. Analyze your competitors

Competitor analysis implies evaluating somebody else’s websites. Why even bother with that when you have your own, you may ask? We can name two good reasons:

1. To see how close you are to outranking them;
2. To look for ways to outrank them.

Finding your direct competitors is easy enough. Most likely you already know who’s stealing customers from you. If you don’t, you can always find them on Google’s first page with the help of your main keywords.

But there’s only so much information you can gather from a single SERP. If you want details, it’s time to use SEO tools – starting with Dangerous Competitors.

Open Settings and enter this information:

• In the Keywords tab: your keywords.
• In the Search engines tab: press the Add a search engine button and select the target country, language and location.
• In the Competitors tab: your competitors’ URLs. If you don’t have them, the tool can find them for you with just the keywords and location.

Press Save.

The table will display the websites which are outranking you for your selected keywords. Visit them to make sure they really are your competitors, and once you are convinced, click on the flag icon to start tracking their data.

All right, that was the first step. What comes next?

• Shared Keywords report: it shows your and your competitors’ rankings for all of your selected keywords.
• Competitor Keyword Spy: it displays all keywords which your competitors use and rank for. This report is a good place to find more keywords you could use yourself.
• Competitor Link Profile: this report displays a quick overview of your own link profile compared to your competitors’. It shows the total number of everyone’s backlinks, and while quantity does not trump quality, whoever has the most backlinks might prove to be the richest source of potential backlink donors. Especially if they have backlinks from governmental and educational domains.
• Competitor Backlink Spy: the name says it all. If you want to find authoritative domains which give your competitors backlinks, this is the place. You can also find here more directories to make your own listing.
• Web Buzz Monitoring: although this tool isn’t in WebCEO’s competitor metrics group, you can still use it to find unlinked mentions of your competitors. Sites which have these mentions might find your site relevant, too.

Lastly, don’t forget to simply visit your competitors’ sites and social media pages. Their content could give you fresh ideas.

11. Perform a local content audit

Local business websites cannot live off “buy this” and “call us” pages alone. Google values sites with useful and informative local content, and if yours doesn’t have it, then it’s going to be overtaken by the competitor sites that do.

But first of all, what makes local content local? Simple: it’s the ability to satisfy local search intent. Content that attracts users who are interested in a specific place and what it has to offer – that’s local content. Here are a few examples:

• Travel guide
• FAQ about a location
• City-specific landing page

It’s not enough to have local keywords and phrases (although it’s certainly required). This sort of content is made for users who have a place in mind and want to find something there.

So how do you run a local content audit?

• Does your site have local content to begin with?
• Is it optimized for local search-oriented keywords?
• Does it include relevant phrases commonly used by people from the targeted location?
• Does it have any obvious flaws (thin, outdated, uninformative, has grammar errors, lacks good visuals etc.)?
• What purpose do the pages with local content serve and does their content match this purpose? For example, if there’s a commercial page, but its content leans on the informational side rather than trying to sell the product, that’s a clear mismatch.
• How can your local content be improved? Can anything be safely removed?

12. Analyze your social media activity

If you can make your site appear on Google’s 1st SERP, it will become your richest source of traffic. But when it comes to following a brand and its updates, the social media are more powerful than Google. And that means your local business’ social pages need to be checked, too – especially because managing those pages is a lot of work.

First of all, which social platforms are you using and which ones are you not?

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – you can’t go wrong with these. Your business definitely needs to be there.

LinkedIn or Pinterest? Depends on what kind of business you have. Not every social media platform will be a good fit for you.

Now let’s focus on the pages you do have. Here are some of the most effective ways to use them:

• Regular posting. Once a week is the golden standard, several times a week is great.
• Diverse content. Don’t limit your activity to just text posts. Sprinkle in images, videos and everything else the platform supports.
• User engagement. More is always better – big numbers attract even more likes and shares.
• Encourage user activity. Both online (e.g. with polls and user-generated content) and offline (for example, with contests).
• Engage with other local pages, such as groups and other people’s businesses.
• Launch seasonal campaigns. Holidays are always a great occasion for special offers and events.
• Use hashtags.

13. Find and get rid of duplicate content

There are two kinds of duplicate content: plagiarized from other sites and repeating on your own site. In both cases, you can expect that your site’s pages will be lowered in rankings – if not outright hidden in Google’s search results.

Worse yet, observant visitors may notice plagiarized content on your site and give you bad reviews for being a fraud.

The best solution to this problem is making your content unique on every page that you control. But what if, for whatever reason, you absolutely must have a large chunk of somebody else’s text on your site? There are two ways to deal with it:

• Use the rel=”canonical” attribute in the HTML head of the offending page and link to the original source.
• Mark it as a quote and list the source. Google is smart enough to see and understand such things.

It should be noted that for local business’ websites, the following things don’t count as harmful duplicate content:

• NAPU citations
• Reviews and testimonials
• Directory listings

Note that duplicate listings made on the same directory are duplicate content. They must be taken down.

Also, watch out for different URL variations of the same page in your index – for example, https://website.com and https://website.com?page=1. Google is smart, but unfortunately, not smart enough to recognize them as the same page.

14. Check your internal linking structure for flaws

Website pages need to be organized and interlinked in an efficient manner – namely, to satisfy both humans and robots. Visitors must always be able to find what they need, and search engines must always be able to crawl the whole site (with the exception of a few notable pages like robots.txt). Thankfully, website builders exist, and most of them already come with this sort of efficiency in mind. Still, no system is perfect, and you can never be too careful.

What kind of problems can you find?

• Orphan pages.

Lonely, abandoned pages that nobody links to. If they have valuable content, users won’t find it. Use a tool like Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to find these pages.

And then decide what to do with them. Either find other pages on your site which could link to those orphans in a natural way, or delete your orphans if they aren’t really needed.

• Too many pages between the home page and user’s destination.

An unofficial rule says the users shouldn’t have to make more than three clicks to find what they need on any website. Too many steps between the home page and the destination, and you risk your visitors losing patience and leaving.

Here’s an easy way to look at your site’s structure. If you have a project for your site in WebCEO, just open the Site Structure report and look for overly long paths.

• Low-quality or missing anchor texts.

Link texts play a major role in the user’s decision to click on them. Put yourself in your user’s shoes whenever you see a link. If its anchor looks weird or is missing altogether, you won’t feel like clicking on it – and the same will be true for the user.

Scan your site in Link Text Analysis tool. It will generate a report with all anchor texts on your site. If any of them stand out, and not in a good way, you should change them to something better.

15. Make sure you have NAPU citations

NAPU stands for name, address, phone number and URL. Sometimes it’s just NAP, without the URL.

As you can guess from the acronym’s meaning, these citations include your business’ contact information – and that’s an absolute must-have.

Which is why your website must contain this information, preferably in a place that’s easy to reach. Additionally, your NAPU information needs to be present in your Google Business Profile, as well as any other site (such as review platforms or business directories) with your business’ listing on it.

As a bonus, NAPU citations can be amplified with your contact email and an embedded Google Map with your business’ location.

Afterword

Congratulations on making it this far! With dedication like that, your local business is in good hands.

Now that you’ve finished reading this guide, feel free to use WebCEO and any other tools you like for local SEO.

Get the PDF guide and start using the tools for Local SEO! Download the Guide

The post Local SEO Guide: What Makes a Business Grow appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In the previous chapter, we discussed important off-page SEO factors that need to be constantly monitored and implemented for the growth of your website’s popularity. Today we will discuss local SEO. 

Local SEO is a huge topic for discussion. Google says it wants to give everybody an opportunity to be seen in local search results. If you are in the local league, then this chapter is a must read. 

CHAPTER 5: LOCAL SEO

Spotlight: GOOGLE MY BUSINESS – A MUST HAVE

Google My Business was launched in 2014 and has been helping local businesses get seen on the SERPs, primarily as Maps results. It’s the most important directory listing of all these days. You must have this directory filled out with important information for prospective customers.

This is the way the information about your business is presented in local search results on a desktop:

and on a mobile device:

N/B: These screenshots are for business categories that supply customers with food and beverage. If your business is from another category, there is a subtle difference between sections presented in the side bar except for permanent ones.  Permanent sections are: Home, Posts, Info, Insights, Reviews, Messaging, Photos, Website, Users, Products.

Basically, you will only need to fill out some forms. Once your listing is accepted, you will be able to see analytics data and this data can also be imported into the WebCEO tools.

The “Insights” section will provide data on:

• queries your business was found for;
• the way customers reached your business: direct, discovery or branded search;
• where your business was found (the “Views” section): on Google Maps or Google Search;
• customer actions: website visits, direction requests and phone calls;
• popular time: time periods your business is demanded most often;
• photo views.

After that you will want to update the information as often as possible to give customers only the freshest data. 

• Apart from that, you will be able to “work with your customers”: process incoming reviews (reply to them, edit them and delete) via Google My Business, start messaging with your customers, and upload some posts and photos. 
• If you don’t have a website for your business – it’s not a problem anymore, because with Google My Business you can easily create one.  
• You can keep track of your business even if you have a chain of stores and you can add as many users as you wish to the account. They will help you manage and watch everything that happens at your office/restaurant/cafe, etc. 

Google My Business has become a major free business listing platform. Don’t wait to create an account there! As soon as you’ve done this, WebCEO will open a new door for you. 

WebCEO’s Google My Business Module was created to help users keep an eye on their local performance and reveal their weak and strong sides of their business activity. WebCEO integrates well with Google My Business. 

WebCEO adds some extra conveniences such as an easier location switcher if you manage a chain, an opportunity to find and analyze your competitors and add their domains to other WebCEO tools. Also, WebCEO allows a user to compare and analyze data from different time periods. 

Spotlight: LOCAL FOCUSED WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION

To perform well in the SERPs you will not only need an optimized Google My Business account, but also some work done on your website. People will find your business because of keywords you are going to optimize your website for.

Your goal is to appear in the Google Local 3 Pack:

Here are some tips on local optimization that you should check with double accuracy:

• Localize your keywords adding the exact business location to your content: coffee houses in New York, best pizza in Washington, DC., etc.
• Use long tail keywords that include other words people use to describe your location and specific well known places that are near business.  
• Create a page with a detailed NAPU, working hours, service/product description, and pricing;
• Make your website mobile-friendly because people mostly use local search on their mobile devices;
• Insert important information about your special services and products in a snippet, such as “Pastry for special occasions. Wedding and Birthday Cakes. Christmas Pies. Every day, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Online orders. Free delivery”;
• Create content that will be relevant to your local business: this is an opportunity to increase your authority. Create more than three pages of content with keywords that are relevant to your business, for instance add a brief history of your industry, fresh news, announcements, updates, seasonal menus or special offers, prominent figures, and so on;
• Google My Business is not the only local directory on the Internet. Submit your website to other major and popular directories, such as Facebook, Apple Maps, Yelp, Bing, Yellow Pages, etc. 

 IMPORTANT!  Google no longer shows self-serving reviews that were inserted in a website’s markup or taken from third-party websites. This change was implemented in September 2019 as a part of the Google September 2019 Core Update.

Spotlight: COVID-19 MEASURES TO FOLLOW

I doubt this section will be breaking news, but Covid updates show Google you’re an active business, so it’s important to keep this in mind:

1. Implement changes Google offered and present new services.

Google has helped local businesses via Google My Business. They implemented new types of attributes that help potential customers to see what businesses are safest to attend. 

Change your workflow according to some of these attributes (better to work on each of them):

Mention the opportunity for contactless payment. 

Google introduced a new feature – Food Ordering. You will get a button “Online Order” right on the SERP. You will have to cooperate with “approved third party providers” to activate this type of feature. 

We can’t predict how long the situation will last, but we are sure that these types of services – that ease people’s interaction with local businesses – will be popular forever. 

Consider the opportunity to always work with delivery, takeaway, online ordering and so on. 

Even such businesses that require a physical presence can be adjusted to current times: there are a lot of services for communication or video presentations and other types of activities. 

Of course, if your business is open to welcome visitors, remember to mention online that you follow basic safety measures, such as handwashing and antiseptic stations and servers wearing various forms of protection. 

2. Modify content on your website.

If there are any changes you want to introduce regarding COVID-19, emphasize them on your website:

• Banners on the index page of your website

This is a perfect place for advertising banners and announcements. Such announcements can cover new services you would implement for people to know about them and use them.

• Content and snippets

Ad banners will eventually be removed from your index page, but you can immortalize information by adding it to the main website content. Hence, it will also be seen by people in the SERPs. 

Also, edit your snippets to outline new available services. This can be a temporary decision for the time when you want to draw the attention of a greater audience. 

Spotlight: PPC/GOOGLE ADS FOR LOCAL BUSINESSES

Google Ads is not a compulsory way to promote your business. However, it will be extremely useful if you want to get quick results. The difference is in the working process: you have to work on your ad in a local-focused way, i.e.:

• define products you want to advertise and Google will show this ad to people who use similar queries to find that very product within the area you’ve chosen;
• create themed landing pages, two or three pages for each campaign, to analyze which one works better and brings more traffic. Remember that these should be relevant to the products you are going to promote. 
• you have to choose localized keywords and point to the exact territory you want your advertisement to be shown within. Don’t forget to indicate specific languages your marketing campaigns are built for, etc.;
• prepare text that will complete local criteria: these may be seasonal or holiday discount events that are typical for a particular area. Use local services, i.e. delivery companies that are available in your region, to make a user’s online and offline experience better and easier.

Spotlight: GOOGLE LOCAL SERVICES ADS

[ currently available only in the USA and Canada ]

Aside from Google Ads there is a platform from Google that will help you find more clients on the Internet. That is Google Local Services Ads. This is more than just advertising; this is a guarantee from Google that your business deserves its place under the sun. 

Access to Google Local Services Ads gives you a line of real benefits: 

• more real clients;
• client flow management;
• clear picture of your advertising campaign success;
• an opportunity to ask your clients for reviews;
• the procedures are similar to Google Ads;
• you will pay only after a real call or message.

Local Services Ads operates two types of badges one of which a business gets after signing in to Local Services:

GOOGLE GUARANTEED

To receive this badge your business has to go through a background check and license and insurance verification. This badge is for in-home services, such as plumbing, locksmithing, electricity, etc. 

The peculiarity of “Google Guaranteed” is that you not only have Google’s praise and opportunity to appear in local services ads, but also coverage from the company for unsatisfied clients (max. $2000/CAD $2000 per business for a lifetime). 

HOW DOES GOOGLE COVERAGE WORK?

An unsatisfied client has a right to submit a claim and receive his or her money back from Google (the amount of money spent on a service, not $2000 at once). But only if the service was booked via Google Local Services Ads. Google will give the business a chance to resolve the conflict and, after its own investigation, the outcome will be announced

N/B: you can’t use the badge on your website. It appears only in local services ads listings.

GOOGLE SCREENED

This badge is available for such spheres as Law, Financial Planning, and Real Estate.

A business can apply for the badge only if it has a 3.0 rating or higher. A business will also go through a massive background and license check. 

The Google Screened designation doesn’t have Google coverage. 

Tools to use:

Google My Business will help you manage all the sides of your local performance and make it visible on the SERPs.

Google Local Services Ads will help you a lot in advertising and looking for real clients. 

The WebCEO Google My Business Module will extend your possibilities in interpreting your local SEO results. It will show you how well you’ve been doing during specific periods of time and will help you organize communication with customers and conduct analysis of your competitors without extra clicks and page shifting. 

As an all-in-one SEO platform, WebCEO guarantees you an easy workflow. Integrations with valuable sources of data help users engage themselves and get profitable results while saving time not gathering data on their own from many different places on the Internet.

IN CONCLUSION, we hope that we have comprehensively answered your question “how to do SEO yourself?” These chapters were rich and full of cost-effective DIY SEO tips. We hope that all our tips and explanations were clear to you.

It’s time to work! Create a to-do list for yourself and start the work as soon as you are ready. It is important to not only keep track of new features, updates and services, but also to implement them and always keep them in your mind. 

WebCEO is ready to help you with new ideas that appear on the radar. Start your journey with WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool and optimize your website to attract new customers and increase your rankings!

The post DIY SEO Guide for Beginners: Attract Local Customers Online. Part V appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Local SEO is definitely trending now, especially now when many companies have realized that turning to other local markets worldwide could help them scale up their businesses and stay afloat in a post-covid world.

We recently posted an ultimate Local SEO Guide that covers all must-do tasks in a comprehensive step-by-step way.

Today we are talking with Michał Kasprowicz,a Business Development Manager for Wolften, an international company that caters alloy materials to several European countries. Michał has been a customer of WebCEO for more than a decade, and now he shares his story with fellow marketers and those who are considering covering new markets but who need an inspiring example to get the ball rolling.

Joanne Pimanova: Michal, when did you come to the idea that you need a multilingual website? What made you take this decision? What were the technical challenges? 

Michal Kasprowicz: We thought of a multilingual website for a long time. For the past few years, our English and German versions served more as a courtesy rather than a serious source of business, however we gained some business leads from them.

With ever-changing and sometimes unpredictable situations on the market (the Covid pandemic being one of them), business owners started to think more about minimizing the risks related with sudden fluctuations in business. Hence, for us, international expansion became a key strategy not only to prevent a potential crisis, but also to gain valued and long-term business partners and keep the business stable.

We laid the first cornerstone of the international presence of our company online.:)

The first thing was to evaluate what our customers may be looking for, how they look for specific products and information, and what other companies and competitors do to serve their clients. We compared that data with what we already know about our Polish customers, at home. With that info, we were able to sketch our first draft of the strategy.

Joanne: How long did it take to launch your site in 3 more languages? How many pages did you translate?

Michal: We continually work on our web presentation. The website is something that will never be finished – sure, we conclude certain projects, but we keep working on new ones.

Our web presentation (or any web presentation, I should say) can be divided into two main parts: the part that we need and is necessary for our customers and operations (this makes approximately 70% of overall content) and the part that is a nice addition, “nice-to-have” feature with more information.

Obviously, the first part needed to be translated before launching any activities in a new country, but eventually we are going to have ALL information in ALL languages.

We are now concluding our Russian language version and it will also be a challenging project to promote and optimize Russian content to our potential customers in Russia.

Joanne: You sell specific stuff, high-quality alloy materials. Did you translate your content to English, Czech and German languages with the help of the Google Translate service? Or, did you translate it all by yourself?

Michał: I wrote and translated everything myself. For the past 12+ years, I’ve been a freelance translator working with the EN, PL and CZ languages. I lived and studied in the Czech Republic. I learned the language and I understand both the proper grammar and a “spoken”, colloquial language. I wouldn’t recommend using any automated translation to translate websites. Even though the quality of machine translations has improved significantly over the years, I believe human translation is a crucial issue and should be treated as seriously as possible. You can’t sell your products with poor language. Unique, good quality texts are also very important for SEO purposes. Uncle Bill once said “content is king”!

Even though the quality of machine translations has improved significantly over the years, I believe human translation is a crucial issue and should be treated as seriously as possible. You can’t sell your products with poor language.

I still remember when one of the biggest online auction companies with the most popular and innovative website in the world (I intentionally don’t state their name) tried to launch their operations in Poland several years ago. They failed! Why? Because they neglected the local aspect of their business. Their Polish version of the website was translated very poorly, with the majority of the crucial information either in English or just translated in such a way that puts a smile on a Polish native speaker’s face. Would you trust such a website? Would you pay for the product if you can’t really understand the terms and conditions?

Well, we definitely do not want to make such a mistake.

Joanne: Wow cool, you are really a versatile person! I also agree that you can’t sell products with poor language and that it’s critical to understand the mentality of a new market that you are approaching. Let’s talk about technology.

Were you choosing between:

(a) buying several country-specific domains, 
(b) creating several subdomains on one domain, or 
(c) creating several country-specific directories under the same domain?

Or, was the “directories” technology your first and most obvious choice?

Michał: We have local, country specific domains for the Czech (wolften.cz), Slovak (wolften.sk) and German (wolften.de) markets, but we mainly focus and base everything on one, main domain: wolften.pl, so I would choose option “c” from your list.

Joanne: Do you do any kind of local SEO? Or, was it enough to translate your site to 3 more languages?

Michał: Yes, we do local SEO. Understanding the product and conducting proper market research supported by solid data gave us an understanding of how to approach the new markets and how to optimize our landing pages to get the best results. It is never enough just to translate the website as Google changes its algorithms and one should keep an eye on what is going on with specific landing pages, how they show in SERPs and what the competition does.

Also, we never underestimate what our customers say, what they look for and how easy or difficult it is for them to find information on our website. But even with the best texts in any local language, with the best product description and well optimized landing pages, we cannot forget to properly treat those clients who do find us – providing customer service in their native language is an important aspect that marks our success. A disappointed client is the worst thing that can happen, so we also make sure that we serve our clients in the language they see on our website.

Joanne: If you do local SEO – what tasks do you regularly do? Do you track local rankings from several locations?

Michał: We approach local and global SEO with equal passion and try not to differentiate whether it’s the Czech or Polish market or the International Arena. Tracking our local rankings happens every two to three days.

An analysis of web traffic to each language version happens every day, all the time. We also try to make our website alive, by writing new content and improving and expanding the information on it.

Also, it is good to step back and look at the things with perspective: compare the results from each location and find patterns, similarities and trends that just wait to be explored. I always try to learn from the results.

A vast majority of automated tasks are done by WebCEO, which helps us to prioritize the tasks and focus on important aspects of SEO and online promotion.

Joanne: Have you registered your business in GoogleMyBusiness? Does your GMB profile help you to get more traffic and sales?

Michał: Yes, we do use Google My Business which helps us to get local traffic and reach local customers, my plan is to focus on that tool more in the future and see how it can help us gain international customers.

It is important to emphasize that our business is very specific as we work with a very homogeneous market. We also have a slightly different clientele compared to a typical online retailer, as the purchases for our products are not emotional or impulse-based. We do not use typical marketing strategies as our products are not “the best” … well.. of course they are!! but our titanium sheets are not “the strongest” nor do they shine more than those sold by other companies.

It’s important to us to have better rankings rather than huge traffic to the website. People don’t look for tungsten spherical powders for 3D printing on a daily basis, but when they eventually do, we want to be at the top of the list.

Joanne: Did you see the difference after you implemented a multi-language website? 

Michał: Of course Launching a website in a new language is one thing and optimizing and promoting it is another. The fact is, that within the first week after implementing our website and receiving the first visitors to the new language version, we got the first tangible (what can be more tangible than titanium alloys, huh? orders and the amount of requests jumped through the ceiling. For more details and figures – we still need to wait for and evaluate the results from a wider perspective.

Within the first week after implementing our website and receiving the first visitors to the new language version, we got the first tangible (what can be more tangible than titanium alloys, huh? orders and the amount of requests jumped through the ceiling.

Joanne: How does WebCEO help you with your work?

Michał: WebCEO helps to organize the tasks, the workflow and provides hints and tips related with technical issues. If I was to do it manually, using only a spreadsheet, it would take me months to analyze my website and what is going on with it.

Joanne: Have you tried other SEO platforms? What was the decisive factor that made you choose WebCEO?

Michał: Of course, I tried a lot of them. I also had a short romance with IPB (I think they are Germans or Austrians), but for some reasons the software got more complicated and since they were only a desktop version, I started to look for web based solutions.

Joanne: Michał, what is your global mission?

Michał: We want to become a global (European) leader in special alloys. That’s quite a heavy (literally) and hard (literally) thing to do, but with the proper SEO approach, online presence is the key to success. Sophisticated web presentation and easy-to-find information helped us to expand and grow and we want to keep it that way.

Since special alloys are not the most popular and frequently-purchased products, we are currently working on an e-commerce solution to reach out and gain new customers. Also, new language versions to the website (we currently have PL, CZ and EN) will also be a new task. Interestingly enough, WebCEO helps me to work with all language versions at the same time!

Joanne: Can you give 3 pieces of advice to those who are planning to run a multi-language website?

Michał:

– understand your clients in other (targeted) countries;

– do not try to think for your clients. Accept and understand that people in country A may have different preferences and a different approach than people in county B;

– be patient and draw conclusions from the results.

Joanne: Thanks a lot for your input, Michał! I am sure many of your insights will serve as a decisive factor to those who are still hesitating on whether it’s worth scaling up their business and facing new markets by going multilingual. I wish you great success in your business and openings to more countries in the nearest future!

The post How Local SEO Helped Wolften Scale Up Their Business [Case Study] appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Guy Siverson was a self-employed marketer in the past. He used to do everything by himself: SEO, Social Media, Videos and more. He couldn’t maintain the stress in a healthy way. One day he found himself with a BP of 200/100. It was obvious Guy needed to take a retreat.

A few years later, Guy opened Graceful Touch: Rapid City massage therapy.

Graceful Touch provides clients with muscle therapy, pain relief, increased mobility, and body relaxation using the art of massage. Graceful Touch is owned and operated by Guy and Irene Siverson.

We decided to ask Guy about the challenges he faced while working on this new business, in light of his previous burnout as a marketer.

Sophie Campbell: We are happy to know that your business is flourishing with the WebCEO marketing platform. How long have you been doing SEO?

Guy Siverson: In 2013, my previous business ViralTNTeam launched. It had amazing success. To gain clients we used Elance until this system was merged with ODesk and became UpWorks. Suddenly I had a severe client attainment issue that would be the end of ViralTNTeam.

Sophie: What was the problem?

Guy: Part of the problem was my inability to find clients while also navigating all the online marketing activities including SEO, Social Media, Videos and more. I just couldn’t maintain everything in a healthy way. All the stress of my failing business found me with a BP of 200/100. Not good.

Sophie: That is really not good. How did you return to the business?

Guy: After writing a lot about massage therapy on Quora, in November 2018 my wife and I opened Graceful Touch: Rapid City massage therapy. I had a website, but I wasn’t going to do SEO for it. Fortunately, a friend convinced me otherwise.

Sophie: But why didn’t you want to optimize your website and gain new customers?

Guy: I had no interest in doing SEO or web marketing because of the nightmare that had become my life back in the days of the previous business. As I turned up the marketing efforts for Graceful Touch, it wasn’t long before I was once again inundated with multiple tasks from every direction. The stress of my digital marketing days was beginning to rise again.

Sophie: Did you try some other SEO tools?

Guy: I’ve worked with tons of different tools and resources in my day. Tools like Majestic, Ahrefs, MOZ; there are others. They all had the same two results:

1. Drained money from my bank account.
2. They had confusing platforms with poor support.

So, one day, while surfing the Web, I ran across a reference to a tool I hadn’t tried before. It was WebCEO. I was intriguingly unimpressed.

Sophie: Sometimes it’s good not to have any expectations about a new thing. There is way more joy in finding yourself wrong later.

Guy: Yes, I didn’t expect WebCEO to be any different. Actually, I was about to discover exactly how wrong I was.

Sophie: What was surprising for you about WebCEO?

Guy: One of my first discoveries was the ease of navigation within WebCEO. Of course, there is a definite learning curve. However, compared to the other tools it was nothing! Especially when WebCEO provides live walk-throughs via screenshare apps like Skype. During that walk through we talked about  everything.

Sophie: Was this walk-through comprehensive or you needed some more assistance?

Guy: It was thorough but it was overwhelming. I was soon to discover a major difference in the support from WebCEO compared to the support departments of other companies. Simply put, the WebCEO Support Angels like to have fun while getting the job done.

Sophie: You know that our support team is always there for you

Guy: Definitely! I came up with my first question and within moments I had an answer. I ask a lot of questions. The answers I receive from support are always informatively thorough. It’s like they always have more than enough time to give me red carpet treatment. I love that!

Sophie: It’s great to know that using WebCEO brings so much pleasure for you. Let’s talk about the results you gained!

Guy: Well, the results for my Google Maps and Google organic rankings are amazing. Take a look:

• nearby massage – #1
• near me massage – #2
• massage therapy – #2
• massage therapist – #2
• massage therapist near me – #3
• massage therapist nearest – #2
• massage therapy nearest – #2
• massage therapy nearby – #3

These are all local geo Google Maps results for my local area.

Sophie: These results are great! But what’s more important is the number of clients you actually get from the web. I am sure you get a lot of conversions; describe them please.

Guy: Oh, just last Friday I received a call from someone wanting to buy a gift certificate from us. Turns out they found us on Google. Thanks, WebCEO. $450 later the deed was done – not bad for my day off!

That was followed by another $150 purchase from someone else that found me at the top of the results. We get these calls all the time now.

Sophie: Seems like there’s been a growth of traffic to your website. Did you notice something unusual in any of the reports?

Guy: Perhaps you mean this WebCEO report:

The red line is mine. Even though we are the newest kid on the block, we are killing the competitors.

Sophie: Wow! Seems like you are really on top! These results wouldn’t have happened if there was no hard work done. What SEO tools were a must for you in the beginning?

Guy: In the world of digital marketing, every day there is a new keyword to target. However, with WebCEO, I was easily able to target a specific landing page.

For example, I very much want to take all the traffic from my area when it comes to “nearby couples massage near me” type keywords.

Thanks to being able to keyword traffic to specific landing pages, I am getting into positions on Google everywhere. This is leading to increased phone calls like the one we received yesterday from a couple that wanted a massage. That’s an additional $175 for Graceful Touch.

Sophie: What are your Top 3 WebCEO resources?

Guy: I could speak about all the amazing tools which have brought me to a site optimization of 83%. This is not perfect but yet I am getting wonderful rankings on Google thanks to its ability to guide me in fixing things internal to my website.

However, if I were to pick the thing I love most, it would be the integration of the task list for me to understand what needs to get done and what doesn’t.

Another tool I really like from WebCEO is the Web Buzz Monitoring system. I have yet to utilize it to its fullest capability. But the way that WebCEO allows you to interface with Facebook and other social media platforms is excellent. I plan to get more involved in this area as time marches by.

Sophie: A professional tip: how often do you recommend SEO & technical audits? How often do you usually schedule reports?

Guy: I schedule automatic scanning and reporting twice a month, so I have enough time to check issues and fix them. I use the same scanning and reporting schedule for Rank Tracker, Backlink Checker, Web Buzz Monitoring tool and many other tools.

Sophie: What SEO task is the most challenging for you?

Guy: One of the hardest things for me to do is build backlinks. However, that has now become a non-issue with the competitor spy tools that produce these types of results:

At first, I wasn’t sure what all those different columns meant. But the WebCEO Support Angels walked with me step by step until I understood everything they are bringing to this table for my success. 

Sophie: Other SEO tools were helpful too, weren’t they?

Guy: Other tools give stats. Other tools give numbers. Other tools give results. WebCEO does all the above and they continue forward by actually caring about you and your success on the Web.

Sophie: And what do you find so unique about WebCEO?

Guy: While I do think that each tool is amazing, if this was the complete package that made up WebCEO, I probably wouldn’t be as excited. However, when you put all their power together in one package, make it easy to navigate, and provide first class fun support, there is absolutely no other option that beats WebCEO. At least, as a local business owner in my own right. That is my opinion.

Sophie: Guy, thank you very much for your inspiring story and so many good words about WebCEO! I am glad it became less stressful to maintain all your marketing routines.

Guy: Exactly. I am a slightly unique client in that I am presently a small business owner in my own right. Having just completed our first year in business while holding an A- rating with the BBB, which I believe, in part, WebCEO can take credit for.

How?

Thanks to the power you brought to my services I now have a very important commodity, called clients.

What’s so unique about a small business owner using the web to build a healthy client base? Nothing. Nothing, ezcept my previous business was focused on web marketing with SEO at the helm. I’ve worked in the SEO industry for well over 10 years, so I have much more than a surface knowledge when it comes to what is required for success on the web.

And I am here to say that all that knowledge can easily be found in WebCEO. But that’s not all. Each month they release a technological update, thus accruing more and more power.

I am clearly convinced that while other tools may attempt to compete, there is nothing quite like WebCEO.

The post How an Ex-Marketer Recovered from Burnout and Succeeded in Local Business appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

SEO copywriting has become one of the most sought-after services a copywriter can offer. It’s a huge technical market where copywriters can find an enormous amount of work as long as they have the right credentials. And a copywriter who knows the specific ins and outs to writing for local SEO can create even more opportunities for themselves within that niche market.

Why local SEO? It has been given much focus due to the ever-broadening range of products and services which consumers find with the help of search engines. The demand for certain items often depends on their locality (e.g. skiing and surfing equipment), and that’s where local SEO copywriters get their work opportunities. Their location-oriented texts direct potential customers to specific businesses, and everyone is happy.

Since it’s a relatively new field, some copywriters, though well-versed in the demands of normal SEO copywriting, do not yet have a full grasp on local SEO copywriting. These 10 actionable pieces of advice are for them.

1. Research Your Area

You can’t begin to do SEO copywriting if you don’t know what you are supposed to be promoting. And within local SEO copywriting you have to go a step further.

After proper research, you are likely to discover jargon, or localized keywords if you like, specific to the geographic region you are working in. For example, customers in New York might have a particular desire for ‘custom bicycle design’, rather than simply ‘bicycle shops’ which ought to be reflected in the copywriting that you produce.

The best way to go about this process is to use a keyword planning tool where you can quickly see the rates at which certain words are used by online searchers in your target geographic region. You can then factor that information into your SEO copywriting and get a more localized result for your client.

2. Use Your Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the few lines of text which sit directly below each search engine result. There’s a big difference between a site which takes full advantage of those lines and one that does not. Though the meta description doesn’t impact where a search engine will rank your site on their list of search results, it does have a massive influence on a potential customer’s decision about which site to click on.

“Multiple sites will have titles with keywords that appeal to a customer, but many of them squander their meta description area. Especially in local SEO copywriting, it is important that you load that area with keywords which are specific to the geographic region you are targeting. If you haven’t achieved that number one result spot this can be a good way to recoup the potential customers you might otherwise have lost,” says Xander Drummond, SEO Manager at Elite Assignment Help and OxEssays.

Check your site’s pages and see if some of them are lacking the meta description. Some might have a description that’s too long and gets truncated in Google’s search results.

3. Gather Testimonials with Locations

When a customer is looking for a particular service in their area, they will be looking for a sense of reassurance not only of the company’s quality, but also of how other customers perceive this quality. This can be a fantastic opportunity to build in some more geographically motivated content by localizing your testimonial page.

Try and make it so all submitted testimonials require giving a location as well. A customer will then, for instance, see a positive review from ‘John Smith, New Haven’ which will encourage a belief that the positivity is related to the region as well as the product or service itself.

4. Focus On Your Mobile Site

Mobile sites are an important part of most web design and SEO copywriting jobs. Smart phones have advanced to a level where many people are now conducting the vast majority of their online affairs through the interface of a small touch screen.

Test your site for being mobile-friendly – and see what you can do if it isn’t.

Mobile sites are of particular interest and concern for local SEO copywriting. Very often a client will be searching for results for a store, product or service when they are on the go. More often than not, they are seeking somewhere that is within range for them. Good local SEO copywriting will ensure that the locality aspect to their mobile website and text is emphasized heavily so that potential customers can conveniently find where they need to go.

5. Enhance Your Pages with Localized Keywords

Search engines that survived the passage of time have become much smarter since the day they were born. A search engine’s primary focus is always their own customers, meaning that they want to provide the best user experience for their users. A page which is simply packed with keywords in an attempt to earn a high ranking and bait out customers will be discredited by the search engine. The same goes for location-oriented copywriting on a website. The page needs to efficiently but naturally thread the keywords into the site to satisfy the search engines but similarly draw in the site visitors they want.

This is not solely the job of the copywriter, of course; a web designer is needed to manage overall site architecture. But a good copywriter for local SEO will have an eye to site structure when they format their keyword locations. They are also aware that a well optimized site has satisfactory keyword counts infused in naturalistic prose. They usually make sure not to repeat a keyword more than 5 times on a page.

6. Look for Advice

It can be a bit of a struggle to transition from SEO copywriting into the more niche local SEO field whilst maintaining the integrity of your writing. There’s no shame in turning to outside help. After all, that’s exactly what the Internet is for. Why learn from your own mistakes when others have made them all before you even discovered the Web?

Here is a list of sites which can make you a better copywriter and help with your transition:

• Studydemic and Academ Advisor: These are useful for grammar tips and research. No one will take your content seriously if it’s full of grammar mistakes, so don’t embarrass yourself.
• Academized: This is a very valuable online content editing tool, perfect for running your copy through.
• Via Writing and StateOfWriting: Two sites designed to help you generate keywords, subtitles and headings.
• Paper Fellows and Bigassignments: Both offer content formatting tools for your copywriting needs.
• MyWritingWay and Australian Help: A specific SEO content writing guide, with tips on how to produce the most optimized content.

7. Write Content for Buyer Personas

Understanding your customers’ needs is the key to winning them over; everyone knows that. But it’s not enough to just understand. What is the next step? Once you can see the customer’s journey from the users’ perspective, you put this knowledge to practical use. Design a buyer persona – your ideal customer – and then write content that will satisfy their needs.

The good thing about buyer personas is, you will inevitably create at least one if you are serious about figuring out your customers’ mindsets. However, your job will be much easier if you put your findings in writing. All you need to do is visualize your ideal customers and write down their characteristics: age group, gender group, interests, needs, goals and personality traits. The more detailed, the better.

Naturally, a single buyer persona will never be enough. The more you are familiar with your audience, the more personas you will be able to design to capture every type of customer.

8. Tell Your Customer a Story

Customers are drawn to content that tells a story, and there are several reasons for that.

1. A story will always be more interesting than a blunt “buy our product” message.

2. Stories are rare because not everybody can tell one. Good stories are even rarer.

3. When written well, characters in stories feel like real people with actual feelings. Compare them to the generic people from ads who wear fake smiles while washing their hair or pouring themselves a cup of coffee. Heaven and earth, don’t you agree?

4. Customers relate to story characters and the situations they go through. Alternatively, they can recognize other people in those characters and still feel a personal connection.

5. Stories can be just plain fun. Who doesn’t like fun?

Stories are something that we are inclined to listen to. A good story can draw us in and make us read for far longer than we usually would. So if you want to grab the attention of people who Google your local business, try to attract them with a strong, powerful story.

There’s no need to make it long and epic, but it needs to have two elements to make it work in your favor: a) a hero with problems similar to the readers’ and b) your company’s product or service acting as a solution.

9. Watch out for Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can be a problem with small businesses way too often, especially if you aren’t careful. How does it happen? For example, several pages having the same or similar descriptions for different versions of the same product. Or the same page can be indexed multiple times under different (though technically the same) URLs if you use parameters like id and utm. Lastly, content might simply be copied from elsewhere. Whatever the cause, Google will step in and derank offending pages.

There’s no better way to avoid it than to write unique content for every page on your site. If you find yourself with duplicate content for technical reasons (such as faulty indexation), be quick to find the source of the issue and deal with it.

10. Include NAP Citations

NAP stands for “name, address and phone number”. Sometimes you may find a NAPU form which also includes a URL address. NAP (or NAPU) citations are universally used to uniquely identify a business both in real life and online, which is why every business should use them – unless you want your customers to go somewhere else.

When you write about your business, always be sure to find at least one place to include its unique identifier – preferably where users expect to find it. Such places include a Contact Us page or a few lines in the footer.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. SEO copywriting is already a large field, and by becoming more experienced in this region-specific variant of it, you give yourself a much better chance to remain ahead of the pack and much more employable. User-oriented websites necessarily involve catering to specific individuals, and local SEO copywriting is simply an extension of that: namely, giving customers a convenient way to connect to businesses which cater to their specific needs and their specific location.

Now that you are armed with these ten tips, your pen is ready to create local SEO-friendly texts. Are you ready to make a name for yourself in this niche? Don’t forget the SEO tools to keep your content optimized.

The post 10 Tips for Local SEO Copywriting That Will Keep You Employed appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

If you run a real estate website, blog or platform – you have surely faced cut-throat competition when trying to occupy the first page of Google for most of the property searches in your area. SEO for real estate has some peculiarities though, and I hope you will love this guide as you proceed with making your real estate SEO more effective.

Step 1. Do Keyword Research with Your Customers in Mind

To make your potential buyers find YOUR website online rather than the listings of your competitors, you should offer what they are really looking for. What words and phrases are they using when doing a search on Google or using a voice assistant? What’s their search intent? Are they ready to buy or rent? Or, rather looking for general information or legal advice?

In the era of mobile search and voice assistants, long-tail phrases, local queries and question-like queries become more and more popular, so why not take advantage of this trend?

When doing in-depth keyword research, you can gather keywords using the following keyword research tactics:

1. Get keyword suggestions from Google. Use Google Search Autocomplete by typing real estate related terms and Google will automatically show a clue to all the related keywords phrases. Once you’ve entered a real estate related phrase, go down to the bottom of the search results page and you will get additional search query suggestions.
2. Spy on your competitors, especially on those who have better ranking positions than you.
3. Build a list of long-tail keywords using local real estate keywords. This will help you rank higher in local search in comparison with national search.

Instead of using multiple tools for keyword research, you can use an all-in-one Keyword Tool by WebCEO that combines general keyword suggestions along with local long-tail keywords and competitor keyword clues. It also helps you with grouping those keyword clusters using tags in your keyword basket.

Step 2. Tailor Your Website Content to These Keywords

Once you have all those words organized in your keyword basket, it’s time to optimize the pages of your site for these keywords. Use both long-tail keywords and short tail keywords in the most sensitive parts of your website: TITLE tag, URL, anchor texts, image ALTs, titles and the subheadings of blog posts.

You can also work on your META description, however it is no longer a ranking factor anymore. It’s now rather the text that can be used by Google in your search result snippet; it can help you increase your CTR if you have made it descriptive and attractive enough.

To make sure you’ve done everything right, you can now run a quick SEO audit of your site with WebCEO’s SEO Website Analysis tool. In fact, any new piece of your website content should always start with preliminary keyword research, then comes SEO copywriting, then comes an SEO audit.

Don’t forget about internal links optimization because it allows your site users to find more relevant information in the easiest way. It helps to involve visitors deeper in your website and reduce your site’s bounce rate.

Step 3. Make Your Website a Lead Generation Hub

Based on the stats provided by the National Association of Realtors, 72% of real estate agents were disappointed in the prospects generated with the help of their websites. Well, something went wrong for those 72% of realtors. Most of them treated their website as a direct channel for sales and didn’t care for the content provided on their websites.

In most cases, people use the Internet with several intentions in mind: initial search of real estate listings and analysis of all the options prior to taking a final decision. If you consider that they will buy a house once they find a listing on your site, it’s a huge mistake. Buying real property is not the same as buying a bar of soap. It’s a time-consuming process. Think about your website as one of the stages of your lead generation funnel. This lead generation funnel should be built in the following sequence:

Create educational and relevant content. Diversify your blog with how-to articles and tips, real estate news and trends (such as “Housing Market Predictions in New York 2018”), local real estate events (such as “5 Must Visit December Open House Events in New Jersey”), recommended neighborhood places of interests and activities, an FAQ and so on. You can draw inspiration for your blog from this list of 72 real estate blog ideas.

Create attractive calls-to-action at the end of each of your blog posts and an eye-catching blog subscription form in order to capture your potential clients’ contact details. Store your readers’ emails and phone numbers in your client database. Think about a robust CRM for real estate companies that will help you manage your client database in the most effective way.

Build smart marketing chains of informative emails that will help you retain your real estate client database. Your emails should be interactive, informative and helpful in order to efficiently convert leads from your email marketing campaigns. Start your email marketing strategy by using the following 10 email templates for real estate business.

Step 4. Submit Your Site to Local Real Estate Directories

Don’t forget about an old tried-and-true local SEO tactic – website submission to the local real estate directories. The main reason why you should submit your is that business listings always show up on the first page of Google local search results. A real estate local submission strategy should include the following techniques.

Build local real estate citations. Submit your real estate company NAP (name, address and phone number) to the most popular real estate directories like Zillow, Trulia, Homes.com, Redfin. Make sure your NAP details are consistent throughout all the resources you have submitted your website to. Use WebCEO’s Content Submission tool for automatic and local citation submission.

Get listed on Google My Business. By having a page on Google My Business, you will provide immediate access for your customers to contact information, directions to your office, business hours, reviews and ratings, quick links to your website, images, videos and apartment virtual tours etc. Besides, your agency profile on Google My Business can result in an additional local search visibility boost if you are listed in the Google 3-pack results. Read the following tips on how to get listed in the 3-pack. Some of the information provided in this 3-pack is taken from your Google My Business profile.

Step 5. Make the Most Out Of Social Media Channels

Think about a solid social media strategy to complement your real estate SEO.

Invest your time in the following social media activities:

• create a Facebook business page and don’t forget to use targeted keywords in its title and company info; create compelling posts and graphics at least several times a week with a link to your website in each post;
• run a Quora account and show your real estate expertise when answering questions related to your business;
• run an Instagram account and showcase your property there; use Instagram ads to reach a wider audience;
• participate in discussions on local real estate forums to create a greater awareness of your business, build trustworthy relations with your potential clients and generate high quality leads for your business.

Step 6. Let Your Great Reputation Precede Your Real Estate Company

A word of mouth reputation is great, but if you want to generate more real estate leads online, start working on online reviews. Online reviews improve your reputation and lead to social proof of your real estate services. Here are several online review techniques you can use to enhance your business online reputation strategy:

• Ask for long-written (300 words) Google Reviews.
• Ask people to rate your product on your corporate Facebook page.
• Use LinkedIn for personal references and recommendations.
• Build your Yelp and Trulia review profiles.

Step 7. Analyze Your Competitors’ Backlinks and Build Yours

In the world of SEO, links are still a prominent ranking factor, so you should work on your backlink profile on a regular basis. Guess what? The easiest way to accelerate your link building efforts is spying on your competitors’ backlink strategies.

You can automate this SEO process and use the WebCEO Spy on Competitors tool to find websites which link back to your competitors. Pay special attention to the sites which link to several competitors – the chances are that they will willingly link to your real estate website as well.

Real estate SEO is definitely not a one-night endeavor. It requires time and effort, especially when it comes to highly competitive areas. The good news is that there are great tools online to help you make this process smarter and faster, so arm yourself with good tools and move your real estate business to a new level!

The post Real Estate SEO Guide: 7 Steps to Your Success appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

If you are a business owner, a top ranking position in Google isn’t the ultimate goal, but a means to seize your goal: people who will become your customers after a few minutes of typing and clicking. Well, here’s the kicker: putting your website on the coveted page one doesn’t guarantee a successful completion of your business goals. It’s entirely possible to fail them all if you overlook a crucial part of SEO for businesses.

You will probably have to optimize for local search, too. Delegate at least some of the optimization activities to local SEO tools.

Content and backlinks are two powerful pillars of SEO that separate a run-of-the-mill website from the winners on page one. Businesses with a physical location get a third pillar called local SEO. As a pillar, it provides your website with a stronger support – if you don’t topple it carelessly. With that said, let’s see what makes a good local SEO strategy and how to carry it out.

1. List Your Company at Google My Business

This is the number one most important step in any local SEO strategy. It’s tantamount to poking Google in the side and loudly proclaiming, “I’m right here!” Google is always so grateful for this poke that it sends you a postcard acknowledging that your business exists and you are its owner.

All Google wants from you is to fill out a listing with as much information as you can. Your company’s name, address, telephone number, open days, hours of operation, website and everything else it will ask for. Photos will be necessary, too. Needless to say, inaccurate information is greatly discouraged.

Submitting a listing at GMB affects how your site appears in Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph and organic search results, so make the most out of it.

2. Choose Location-Specific Keywords

Local optimization calls for local keywords. How else are you going to be picked up by local searches?

You probably know this by now: optimizing for long-tail keywords with clear user intent is much more likely to bring you traffic (as well as customers) than keywords that only vaguely refer to your product, service or brand. Hold off relying on the latter until your business grows bigger. Adding your location’s name to keywords completes a winning formula. Example: car repairs in London.

As usual, the places to put your keywords are:

• Website’s URL address
• Page title
• Page description
• H1-H4 tags
• Anchor texts (but not in the links that lead to other sites)
• Images’ filenames and <alt> attribute
• And of course, directly in the text itself.

3. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices

Well over a half of all Google searches are performed on a mobile device these days. What does this tell us? Simply that webmasters and SEOs have more work to do now. Display a high-ranking, UX-optimized website on a small screen, and suddenly user experience isn’t so great anymore. Conversions drop as visitors refuse to become your clients, Google detects the rising bounce rate and lowers your rankings even for desktop searches. Scary, isn’t it?

Optimizing your website for a PC alone is no longer going to cut it. Blame the difference in display size or not, but providing mobile users with a satisfying experience has become an essential part of modern SEO.

Until such a future arrives, make sure to keep your website mobile-friendly by analyzing it in WebCEO.

4. Give Your Site a Geographic Domain

Putting a keyword in your URL is a known SEO trick. It boosts your chances to rank for a keyword. Local SEO offers a way to approach this method from a different angle: instead of the URL slug or even the domain name, you can buy a geographic domain and have the name of your location in your site’s URL at all times. City, region, state, country – all of these options are available.

This is purely a matter of taste, though. When you have the option to choose between URLs for your site like animalcare.london and animalcarelondon.org, pick whichever strikes your fancy. The only real downside of .city TLDs is their cost.

5. Embed a Map on Your Contacts Page

It’s good when your office can be found on Google Maps. It’s even better when looking you up in Google Maps isn’t the only way to find you.

Consider embedding a map on your site. Right next to your contact data is the best place to do it, whether this information is on the main page or on a dedicated Contacts page. It will help your visitors pinpoint your location without multitasking with the tabs in the browser; in other words, it’s a timesaver. A significant plus, especially when dealing with notoriously impatient mobile Internet users.

6. Submit Listings to Local SEO Directories

Link building is more than just gaining authority in Google’s eyes. It also helps you raise your reputation in the eyes of your target audience. Gaining people’s trust through references is what inspired Google to use the same method of discerning trustworthy resources. And having your clients’ trust is immensely important in business; challenge this truth at your own risk. But I digress.

There are many directories where you can submit a listing for your business. Indeed, these directories work like search engines for businesses; for example, Yelp is particularly popular. People who want to eat out will often turn to Yelp first, not Google. What will happen if you run a restaurant and it isn’t on Yelp? I’ll leave that to your imagination.

A few of the other platforms for making your company known are:

• Merchant Circle
• YP.com
• Foursquare
• Citysearch

Submit a listing for your business everywhere where it could belong. Local directory submission is how you earn exposure, backlinks and NAP citations (“name, address, phone number”) that strengthen your presence online.

7. Add a Schema Markup to Your Website

Internet users want information immediately. Even sooner than that, and they don’t care if it’s possible or not. But what if I told you there is a way to give them information about your business almost immediately? Yes, it can be done through the use of schema markup.

Creating a schema markup code and putting it on your site gives search engines additional information to display in search results, as well as a proper way to display them. There is room for all sorts of embarrassing mistakes. For example, you can make your city appear as your company’s name instead of your location, so be careful with your schema. But the result is people can contact you directly from a Google search results page.

8. Gather Positive Customer Reviews

Customer reviews carry a lot of weight. People who have tried a company’s service can give the most unbiased opinion about its strengths and weaknesses, which is what prospective clients would like to know before parting with their money. Gather as many positive reviews as you can and show them off: that’s one way to convince your visitors of your competence. Most customers will leave a review if you simply ask them.

And don’t forget to make use of the review schema. It’s best if users could see some of your reviews and the stars in search results before they even visit your site.

9. Create Specialized Content for Your Target Audience

Is there a gimmick to your niche that could help you promote your business from an unorthodox angle?

Some businesses aren’t as broad as others and target specific audiences. A good and simple example is a vegan restaurant: meals are pretty restricted there. In cases like this, there is merit in creating content on your website that takes your audience’s characteristic interests into account and appeals to them. Vegan customers would enjoy positive stories about their lifestyle. What about your own clientele? How well do you know them?

If you have doubts – even if you don’t, consider seeking advice from someone well-versed in your niche. More experts on your case mean more valuable ideas that you can use to rise above your competitors.

10. Monitor Your Local Rankings with WebCEO

I’m sure eventually you’ll get curious and want to know just how well your site is performing. Do your keywords bring you plenty of traffic? This sounds like a job to entrust to local SEO tools.

With WebCEO, you can see how well your website is ranking for them both overall and in any city specified by you. This is pretty useful when you need to analyze your incoming traffic and narrow down its sources. Simply open the Rank Tracking tool and click on Settings -> Search engines -> Add a search engine, then proceed to select the options relevant to your site as shown in the example below.

Automate Your Local SEO
Sign Up for a Free 14-Day Trial!

The post 10 Steps to Perform the Best Local SEO for Businesses appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In today’s world, technology is a blessing. When somebody needs help with the law, the Internet will be the first place they’ll look for solutions. Law offices are aware of this, so each of them attempts to make the solution-finding process easier by creating its own lawyer website… and then they have to compete for their would-be clients’ attention. That’s where the fun begins.

Indeed, while looking for the best law firm in your city is only a matter of a few clicks, it’s not such a walk in the park for the firm that wants to be found. Even a team of the world’s greatest divorce lawyers may find themselves at a loss if you ask them to place their company’s site on Google’s first page. And yet, without an SEO-friendly site, they’ll have but to watch how less outstanding firms are getting the clients that could be theirs. Driving traffic and clients to a legal service office’s website can be a tricky business, but it’s really about figuring out the proper approach to this niche. So let’s see how SEO can help your law business take over the market.

1. Research Local Keywords in Your Niche

Since you’re running a business in a physical office with walls and windows, your goal is to make your clients walk in through your door after they’ve visited your website. Before that, however, you’ll need to attract visitors who’ll want to do just that. The way to do that is to speak the language they use, which is known in SEO terms as local keywords.

You can find the necessary location-related keywords through several means:

• Keyword research tools. There’s a variety of free and powerful tools, such as WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions or Google AdWords.
• Google’s autocomplete function. When you begin typing a search request, Google will attempt to finish it for you. The options it offers are the most popular requests typed by users.
• Local forums. They are bound to have topics related to your business. You can find the keywords you need inside the topics’ titles and comments left by posters.
• Question-and-answer sites. Those offer even better key phrases than forums. Quora and Yahoo! Answers are the best-known Q&A sites.

2. Don’t Overstep the Boundaries of Your Niche

When setting up a niche website, the most important thing to keep in mind is the audience you plan to attract. People who look for the nearest law firm in Google are unlikely to require a blog post about 10 ways to tell a competent lawyer from a fraud. Instead, they’ll want help with a very specific problem, which will show in their search request: for example, “bankruptcy law firm London” or “criminal lawyer Manchester.”

Being a representative of your office, you know better than anyone what kind of services you provide. That knowledge is the foundation on which your site will stand. Aim precisely at the audience that wants what you have to offer. A legal service firm is meant to help people with a narrow set of very characteristic problems that you may find only where the law is involved. Some firms specialize only in a certain area, such as family law, and therefore deal with issues like divorce, alimony and child support. Other firms take on multiple areas; they cast a bigger net and occupy a wider niche.

Takeaways: the content of your firm’s website must be optimized strictly for the issues you deal with. Act within your niche, or else you will attract an audience that needs something your website cannot provide.

3. Create a Listing on Google My Business

This is an absolute must for every business with a physical location, I cannot emphasize its importance enough. Creating a listing on GMB will make your office visible on Google Maps; not doing so will turn it into an even better place to hide a dead body than Google’s page 2 of search results. Believe me, living clients are much better to have in your office than dead bodies.

4. Be Efficient at Using Your Keywords On-Page

While you’re busy keyword hunting and handpicking the best of them, I’d like to say a few words about squeezing the most out of them. Other than your site’s content, there are four places on your website’s pages for your keywords to be:

• URLs (both in the domain name and the slug)
• title tags
• description tags
• H1-H3 tags

5. Create a Page for Your Attorneys’ Profiles

Your clients will want to know who will be their heroes; introduce them on a dedicated page! Each lawyer working in your firm should have a professional headshot and detailed information about their education, practice areas, work history and success rate.

6. Start a Blog and Share Your Expertise

Articles that are relevant to your field of practice will be helpful to your visitors and drive additional traffic to your site, too. Even better would be if you write a stellar post that gets picked up by Google and lands in its News results. This might bring you even more visitor traffic than a regular blog post. Other types of content that are worth having on your blog are Frequently Asked Questions and case studies.

7. Employ Calls-to-Action

Yours is a law service site; act like it. Write calls-to-action that will make your clients feel like they are about to receive help from a real professional (which you must be, anyway). Help them contact you now!

8. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Google likes sites that succeed in providing users with a nice experience, which quite often translates to avoiding the opposite. The mobile age is flourishing; you’d do well to optimize your content for handheld devices. An Ultimate Guide to SEO Mobile Ranking Factors 2017 on our blog goes into great detail about this process.

Don’t forget to test your site’s pages for mobile friendliness with WebCEO’s Mobile Optimization tool!

9. Use Voice-Search Oriented Keywords

Mobile users don’t just type their search requests; they prefer to say them out loud, too. In fact, voice commands are expected to become the main search medium in a few years. You can see where this is going: how we perform search on the Internet directly affects SEO, so expect it to adapt accordingly. The sooner you start using spoken requests as keywords on your site, the better.

Check out this post to make your website voice-search friendly, and you will have rightfully deserved every client who finds you that way.

10. Earn Reviews and Proudly Show Them Off

Create a page on your site where clients can write and submit what they have to say about you, as well as read what others have said. Don’t be shy to ask the clients you’ve helped for reviews and praises; money isn’t the only reward you deserve for your work! It’ll send a positive message to anyone who considers hiring you in the future, as well as search engines.

11. Create a Schema Markup for Your Site

Marking up content on your site will give Google extra information to display in search results – and which users may find valuable. Direct links to important pages, as well as your firm’s telephone number, address, schedule, rating – all displayed for potential clients in the form of a rich snippet before they even open your site. Schema.org has a dedicated schema for attorneys which you’ll find helpful.

12. Be Active on Social Networks

Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and others that may come to mind – they are all business-friendly, so make sure to set up a page on each of them and update it regularly. Google looks at social signals and turns them into a ranking bonus; besides, it’s all extra publicity for your law firm and people do conduct searches from within their favorite social media platforms.

13. Sign Up on Popular Business Directories

Creating profiles for your lawyers on authoritative directories like Avvo, Justia and Nolo is definitely a must. Be careful with other, less specialized directories, as not all of them possess substantial authority to make them a good place for submitting a listing. If you manage to pick the right directories, though, they’ll be a great source of citations and backlinks (although far from the only one), which are crucial for moving up in SERPs.

14. Stalk Your Competitors

No, not in real life, or else you’ll end up needing legal defense yourself. I’m talking about their sites and any useful gimmicks and tricks you may learn from them. If you can’t find inspiration by just looking, then spying on their backlinks may be of more use to you instead.

In fact, make sure to fully utilize WebCEO’s Backlink Quality Check tools including Competitor Backlink Spy in order to keep a close eye on your inbound links.

Uplift Your Law Firm
with In-Depth SEO
Sign Up for a Free 14-Day Trial!

The post 14 Secrets of the Best SEO for Law Firms in 2017 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Ok Google, why is voice search so popular on the Web? It’s all about the laziness of people. They don’t always want to search the Web using a traditional keyboard search. Most of the searchers want to get the right answer right away without having to explore multiple blue links and digging deep into search results pages. With the explosion of semantic search, long-tailed keywords and conversational phrases have become the primary search queries. More and more people now use mobile devices and inbuilt personal search assistants to get information quickly without typing.

The Death of Traditional Keyword Typed Search

According to Google, 20% of searches on mobile devices are now voice searches and by 2020, 50% of all searches will be committed via voice commands. It’s become a primary search strategy for specific personal assistant-type search needs, such as:

• Fun & entertainment (21%)
• Search for local content and businesses information (22%)
• Personal voice assistance (27%)
• Search for general information (30%)

People interact with voice search mostly on the go, when they are short of time and need accurate info ASAP. Among the most popular means of interacting with voice search are personal virtual assistants: the inbuilt voice recognition tools like Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant which help with everyday tasks, set reminders and answer questions promptly. With this hype of voice search use popularity, it’s about time to change your SEO strategy in order to target all those people who use voice search on their devices. Listen to the following SEO recommendations which will help you make bold steps towards making your website voice-search friendly.

3 Best SEO Practices that Will Help Make Your Website Voice-Search Friendly

1. Optimize your content for conversational search queries instead of standalone keyword phrases

After the release of the Google Hummingbird Update that uses LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) technology, search technology moved us closer to semantic search with the improved natural language processing and a better understanding of a searcher’s intent.  When writing new blog posts or creating new website pages, think of the context behind the search terms you take from your Google’s Search Console search query reports, or keyword research tools like the WebCEO Keyword Research Tool. Here are some tips that will help you properly optimize your content for voice search.

• Size really matters.

I mean the size of your target long-tail keyword phrases. People can speak 150 words per minute vs type 40 words per minute. Long-tail voice search queries are less competitive and are more likely to convert. The longer and more natural your long-tail keywords the more chances your content will appear in top results for relevant voice search queries. Try to imitate as many conversational “keywords” people may speak out via voice search as possible. Start by adding to your keyword list the search queries which already bring you some traffic. Go to the WebCEO Marketing Analytics Metrics tool and dig into the Google Search Console Top Queries report. Make them more complex by adding some descriptive characteristics or geo location landmarks specific to your business.

• Enhance your content with answers to customers’ questions

According to Google, question queries have seen a 61% growth in recent years. First thing you should do is to understand what kind of question-like queries are applied to your niche and your brand and stick to those that apply to your website content. Expand your keyword map by adding 5W (What, Who, Why, When, Where) and How questions which help:

– Find your business

– Understand your business

– Identify the value of your business and benefits for prospects.

Use the Answer the Public tool and Q&A platforms like Quora to generate question phrases from your long tail keywords. Use this list of question phrases to build a FAQ page or write blog posts on specific topics. Such places are perfect venues to host long tail question keywords on your site.

• Provide answers to searchers from within featured snippets.

Well-optimized microdata can be a powerful way to convert your potential customers right from search results. How? According to Jennifer Slegg, an expert in search engine marketing, 43.3 % of featured snippets are used to answer voice search queries. People expect to receive a direct tit-for-tat response to I-want-to-know, I-want-to-buy, I-want-to-do search queries and you can give it to them with the help of optimized structured data markup. Be it directions, business hours, phone numbers or other general info, schema.org and Google Structured Data Markup Helper will help you with any kind of microdata optimization.

2. Make your local business vocal

As being mentioned above, 22% of voice search commands have local intent. So, if you have a physical business location, make it easy to be found when people search for places near you. Here are some quick local SEO tips which will help you make your local business near and dear every time people use their inbuilt voice search assistants for local intent searches.

• Make sure your business citations (Name, Address, Phone aka NAP) are consistently listed on local directories. There are some useful tools like Yext, Placesscout or WhiteSpark to run NAP audits and manage your local citation optimization.
• Earn as many online reviews as possible on Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor etc. Thanks to the Google Pigeon Update, those businesses which have more positive reviews, have higher rankings in local search.
• Spy on your competitors’ local rankings in order to learn where your business misses out. Use the WebCEO local Rank Tracking tool to get detailed insight into the local positions of your competitors.
• Enhance your local business attributes with the help of the Google Business Center.

 3. Go Mobile

As the lion’s share of voice search commands happen on mobile devices (20% of mobile queries are voice), it’s a must to make your website mobile-friendly, if you want it to be voice-search friendly. Another push for you to make your website mobile-friendly is that Google is rolling out a mobile-first index. Make sure your website passes the Google Mobile-Friendly Test and has good Page Speed performance.

The post “Ok Google”: How Do I Make My Website Voice-Search Friendly? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

With all the Google search algorithm changes, you will never know when and where your site will appear in Google search results. According to Google’s John Mueller, the search engine giant rolls out hundreds of  SEO updates to its core algorithm throughout the year. Nothing scares more than the unknown. There were times, when we knew menace by sight, we were given a heads up on upcoming updates and knew how to recover from them.  Now Google search is frequently invaded by a legion of search algorithm updates, which are like Agents Smith who keep order within the google search ecosystem by eliminating SEO threats assumed to be coming from humans’ never-ending desire to implement black and grey-hat SEO techniques. Welcome to the Google Search Matrix.

What is a Google Search Algorithm Update?

Google Search Algorithm Updates were originally designed as filters to track down and penalize websites that flooded search results with low-quality content, link spam or which provided a poor user experience. In the course of time, Google changed its manner of rolling out updates. As a result, some of the algorithm changes run on a real-time basis, others are integrated into the core ranking algorithm with no new refreshes or public announcements on new updates from Google.

There have been so many SEO updates released by Google over the last 15 years, that you might get confused.

Google Updates Related to Content Quality

November 2003 – FLORIDA UPDATE. This was one of the most noticeable updates that blew out the high rankings of some e-commerce sites and product affiliates like a hurricane. A lot of websites lost their top rankings and even disappeared from the search index itself. Among the key aspects of the Florida Update were:

• The SEO filter that was activated when the over-usage of search terms was detected;
• Stemming which helped to rank websites based on the matches to the search terms.

February 2004 – BRANDY UPDATE. This update resulted in the expansion of Google’s index, a better understanding of context and the consideration by Google of synonyms of search query terms. There was also an increased focus on anchor text relevance and close attention was paid to your backlink neighborhood quality.

May 2010 – MAYDAY UPDATE. As a precursor to the Panda Update, it penalized a lot of websites for using thin content.

February 2011 – The beginning of the PANDA era. The first Panda Update targeted websites which provided low-quality, thin and duplicate content.  Panda 1.0 affected 12% of search queries. Since then, this most important content-quality update has survived 26 tweaks and refreshes. The last update made Panda part of the core algorithm.

August 2013 – HUMMINGBIRD UPDATE. This content-quality SEO update was aimed at understanding a searcher’s intent and the context behind a search query. Made up of more than 200 SEO factors which affect both ranking and search, Hummingbird was designed to deal with conversational and voice search queries which are mostly popular on mobile devices. The update gave a boost to semantic SEO.

Google Updates related to Links Quality

April 2003 – CASSANDRA UPDATE. Cassandra was the first Google Update designed specifically to filter link spam. These were hard times for websites that built links from co-owned domains and hid links and text in order to manipulate their rankings.

May 2003 – DOMINIC UPDATE. The SEO community assumes that this update changed the way Google counted backlinks.

January 2005 – NOFOLLOW UPDATE. These were rainy days for black-hat SEOs and webmasters as Google, in cooperation with Microsoft and Yahoo, introduced the nofollow attribute in order to fight with spam.

September-October 2005 – JAGGER UPDATES. Google rolled out this series of SEO updates to filter low-quality link schemes, like paid links, reciprocal links and links built with the help of link farms. The updates took 3 months to fully roll out.

April 2012 – The beginning of the PENGUIN era. Google initiated a war against link spam. Penguin 1.0 affected 3,1% of English search results. Over-optimization, spam links, keyword stuffing were the reason of website penalization.  The next major and heavyweight Penguin Update (2.0) was rolled out in May 2013 and affected 2,3% of search queries.  On September 2016, Google released a real-time Penguin 4.0 Update and backed it into Google’s core algorithm. The key difference of Penguin 4.0 was that it re-indexed and re-evaluated sites in real time, demoting only specific pages with spam signals on them.

Google Updates related to Mobile Search Quality

April 2015 – MOBILE-FRIENDLY UPDATE. Dubbed as Mobilegeddon, the Mobile-Friendly update was not actually a penalty update, it just favored those websites with better rankings which were SEO friendly on mobile screens. Optimizing for mobile search has become paramount, and tools like the Website Audit can ensure your site is fully optimized for mobile users, addressing the critical factors that influence mobile search ranking.

Google Updates related to Local Search Quality

October 2005 – LOCAL MAPS UPDATE. Google merged two products, Local Business Center and Google Maps into one complex in order to simplify local search.

July 2014 – PIGEON UPDATE. Local SEO changed dramatically after the launch of the Google Pigeon Update. By improving its location and distance ranking parameters, this had a huge impact on both Google Maps and traditional Google search results. Among the most significant changes was the boost in rankings for local directories, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor etc.

September 2016 – GOOGLE POSSUM UPDATE. The new local search update was designed to filter out local search spam, specifically in Google Maps results.

Google Updates related to User Search Experience Quality

July 2003 – FRITZ UPDATE. With this update Google switched from monthly index refreshes to indexing on a daily basis. This was a great improvement for the average search experience because Google started to return fresher and more accurate results.

June 2005 – PERSONALIZED SEARCH UPDATE. Another enhancement in the user search experience was the usage of search history in order to deliver more personalized and relevant search results.

August 2008 – GOOGLE SUGGEST UPDATE.  Search experiences were improved to a greater extent thanks to Google Suggest which eventually evolved into Google Instant.

August 2010 – CAFFEINE UPDATE. This update was designed for users and with the help of users. Everyone was invited to test the new infrastructure of the Google search indexing system and leave feedback. The key features of the Caffeine update were an expanded index, faster crawling and real-time indexation. As a result, Caffeine provided 50% fresher results than with earlier updates.

December 2010 – NEGATIVE REVIEWS UPDATE. The update changed the way websites are ranked based on experience provided by users.

June 2011 – GOOGLE SCHEMA UPDATE. This SEO update aimed at enriching search results by allowing users to optimize their structured data with the help of Schema.org.

November 2011 – FRESHNESS UPDATE. The update affected 35% of search queries, mainly time-specific ones. As a results, Google started to pay closer attention to fresh, regularly updated content which portends a good user experience. Searchers were now regularly filtering searches for content from the past hour, day, week, month or year.

May 2012 – KNOWLEDGE GRAPH UPDATE. This update provided direct answers to common questions about specific people and places and other subjects. In the long run, the Knowledge Graph feature evolved into Knowledge Graph panels.

In the next post we will give some advice on how to recover from Google Penalties, provided to us by a former Google Employee.

The post The Google Search Algorithm Matrix: The Timeline of Crucial SEO Updates appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.