In this day and age, it’s hard to find a business that doesn’t have its own website – literally. No online presence means no customers. Modern businesses are completely dependent on the Internet, and it’s especially true for small businesses which have to compete with giants in their industry.

But if you have a website, you are off to a great start. All you need to do is make yourself more visible on the Web – through the means of small business SEO. The path is long, but nothing you can’t handle. Now, what makes a good SEO strategy for small businesses?

1. Create content for your target audience

If you are a pro, this should be a piece of cake for you.

Before everything else, there is content. Websites live or die by it. Your site’s purpose is to convince potential customers that you have what they need; therefore, your site must have every bit of relevant and useful information.

For example, a website for a dentist clinic would benefit greatly from detailed descriptions of each provided service. They would convince visiting users that the clinic is run by professionals who know their job, as well as assist in picking the service they really need. What’s more, detailed information is a direct signal to search engines: this website is actually useful and deserves a ranking boost.

In short: figure out what sort of information your customers need and put it on your website.

2. Find and use keywords

Type a few words in Google search, and websites will appear. You want yours to be there, too – and on page #1. How to make it happen?

It starts with finding the right keywords (for using on your site). But how can you tell the right keywords from wrong?

• They are not too short, simple or vague. Only the most famous businesses can rank for keywords like those. (Examples of what not to use: donuts or tasty donuts.)
• They are descriptive and specific. For example: healthy gluten-free donuts. But we can still do better:
• They reflect user search intent. For example: healthy gluten-free donuts delivery. With a keyword like this, it’s impossible to mistake what the users want when they type it.
• They include words like near me, closest, in (city). Location-based keywords are especially important for small businesses.
• They have a decent number of monthly searches. You want at least a few hundred per month.

So how do you find the keywords you need for your small business? With SEO tools, of course. Here’s what you can do with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool:

Don’t forget to press that Settings button and fine-tune the tool to your business’ location. Do that and you’ll know exactly how effective the keywords are in your area.

Once you have your keywords, put them in these places:

• Page titles;
• Page meta descriptions;
• Page URLs;
• Image filenames;
• Image ALT texts;
• Link texts;
• H1-H4 headings;
• Anywhere you can use them naturally in your texts.

And stick to these recommendations so your keywords don’t cause your site any harm:

• Avoid optimizing one page for multiple unrelated keywords.
• Likewise, avoid optimizing multiple pages for the same keywords.
• Include your keywords in text sparingly, in a natural way. Like you would use them in a live conversation.

3. Identify local competitors and get valuable information from them

There’s no business, big or small, without competition. And if you want to overtake your competitors, first you must know who they are. Maybe you already know a few of them; SEO tools can help you find even more.

You can easily find local rival businesses with the Dangerous Competitors tool.

How do you use it?

First, open the tool and click on the Settings button.

Then follow these steps:

1. Enter your target keywords in the Keywords tab.
2. Enter your preferred search engines in the Search engines tab. Make sure to set the correct location.
3. In the Competitors tab, you can enter the URLs’ of the competitors you already know. If you don’t know any yet, the tool will find some for you soon enough – be sure to enter them here then.
4. In the Search results tab, select all the types of search results that are relevant to you.
5. In the Monthly searches tab, select your target region.
6. Press Save.

And after some scanning, Dangerous Competitors will generate a table with websites who are the most likely to be your direct local competitors. But keep in mind that no tool can think for itself, so it’s going to need a human’s judgment – your judgment to choose the correct websites. Visit them one by one, find out if they are really your competitors, and if they are – only then add their URLs in the Competitors tab in Settings. With that, WebCEO will keep monitoring their metrics for you.

What else can you do with their sites?

1. Check out their content for ideas. Topics, writing style, types of content they post, even just design appearance – you can find inspiration anywhere.
2. Find their weaknesses: what do they do worse than you? Do they have any pages that should be easy to outrank?
3. Collaborate with them. If you can participate in an online event together with a competitor (or even in just a write-up), then it’s a good boost to your online presence in terms of both exposure and expertise.
4. Use their sites for link building. This warrants its own segment, and it starts right now.

4. Find sites where you can make local backlinks

SEO is impossible without link building. You need other sites to link to yours and acknowledge it as worthy of users’ time, or you will not get anywhere.

But first, you need to find sites that could realistically give you backlinks. How?

Meet your new friend, Competitor Backlink Spy.

The idea is to find out which sites are already linking to your direct competitors. Once you do, you can start looking for ways to create your own backlinks there. If you already know who your competitors are, keep reading; if you don’t yet, feel free to go back to the previous segment.

Open the Competitor Backlink Spy tool and click on the Settings button.

In the Competitors tab, enter your rival websites’ URLs and be sure to check their boxes. Then press Save.

The tool will spend some time scanning and generate a table with everybody’s backlinks – yours and theirs. More accurately, those will be pages from other sites that link to you and them.

You want to look for the pages which link to your competitors but not to you: those are your potential backlink donors. Visit those sites and judge for yourself if they could provide you with a relevant and authoritative backlink. And once you find a site you like, it’s finally link building time!

5. Get listed on local business directories

Google can find pretty much anything, but searching becomes easier when you can narrow it down to just the kind of content you need. For example, there is YouTube for videos. And for small businesses? There are business directories.

Some of the best (and completely free!) directories include:

• Google Business Profile
• Foursquare
• Yellow Pages
• Hotfrog
• EZLocal
• eLocal
• Manta

And there are many more you could find. Especially if you do a specific Google search like “business directories for (your type of small business)”.

6. Use social media

Did you know that on average, people browse social media for 2 hours 24 minutes a day? No wonder platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter (or is it Xwitter now?) have proven to be so excellent at promoting content.

Roughly 2.5 hours should be plenty of time for your small business to appear on somebody’s radar. But for that to happen, you need to be present in social media.

What are some effective ways to run a social media page for your small business?

1. Upload a recognizable profile picture.
2. Add as much information about your business as possible: contact info, address (with embedded map), open hours, prices, photos of your location and your products etc.
3. Place a call-to-action in the first scroll.
4. Use an automatic chatbot (if the platform supports it).
5. Reply to users ASAP when they message you.
6. Follow users who follow you. They follow you because they like you, and they will like you even more if you follow them back.
7. Post diverse content: short posts, long reads, polls, photos, images, share interesting posts from other pages.
8. Be active on your competitors’ social media pages – it’s the easiest way to expose yourself to your target audience.
9. Pin important posts.

7. Provide good user experience on your site

Everybody knows this simple rule of the Internet: if a site doesn’t work well, people won’t use it. So it goes without saying your site has to work like a well-oiled machine.

How do you ensure your site works well?

• Have a good, user-friendly design. And if you can fit everything important – your business’ name, logo, links to the most vital pages and a call-to-action – in the first scroll of your homepage, then it makes a good design even better.
• Make it load quickly. A tool like WebCEO’s Speed Optimization can check your site’s current loading speed and offer advice for improving it – for example, reducing your images’ file size.
• Make it mobile-friendly. Likewise, the Mobile Optimization tool checks how well your site works on smartphones and finds where you can make improvements – such as making your site’s design responsive.
• Fix errors ASAP. Find all errors on your site (varying from broken links to server issues) with the Site Audit tool and fix them.
• Use a chatbot. Popup chats are incredibly effective at engaging visitors and turning them into customers. Of course, first you have to fill your chatbot with all the answers your visitors might need.
• Use heatmaps. Apps like CrazyEgg can generate maps showing what users do on your site: where they click, how far down they scroll etc. As you can imagine, it’s incredibly useful for finding flaws in your site’s design.
• Use call-to-actions. A well-placed CTA can turn any site into a money-making machine. Are you nudging the visitor towards placing an order or making a purchase? Don’t forget to follow it up with a shiny button.
• Use A/B testing. When you create a new page for the purpose of making money, it helps to release a few different versions of this page to see which one generates the best response from visitors.

8. Collect positive reviews

Competence. Professionalism. Top-notch service and products. There are so many good things to say about you.

Customers must know how great you are. And who can vouch for you better than customers themselves?

That’s why you should collect customer reviews. Most of the time, customers leave reviews if you simply ask them. It’s the most affordable part of small business SEO!

There’s no better way to signal to the world that you are the real deal. And there are so many places where people can leave their reviews:

• Google;
• Social media;
• Review platforms;
• Your own website;

All of them count. So make sure you are using them all.

9. Use Schema Markup to enhance your search results

Schema Markup a.k.a. structured data. What is it and how do you use it?

Long story short, if you use it on your site’s pages, then Google can add more information to your search results. You must have definitely seen snippets with extra flair and without it. Here’s a side-by-side comparison:

Without structured data, your search results look vanilla and boring. The prettier-looking ones are more likely to steal clicks from you. And that just won’t do.

Fortunately, structured data is easy to learn. Meet Schema.org, a very helpful collection of all Schemas you could possibly want. If there’s a business, no matter how big or small, there is a Schema for it. It’s only a matter of finding the one you want to use.

For example, if you run a law firm, then you will likely want to use items from the LegalService Schema:

Once you’ve identified the right Schema for your small business, what’s next? Adding it to your pages, of course. You can do it manually, or you can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.

Select Local Businesses, enter your site page’s URL and press Start Tagging. Your page will load with the markup tool ready for work. Simply highlight the elements you’d like to appear in Google and choose the right tag for each of them.

Once you are done, click Create HTML to generate the code with all the structured data. And then you just add it manually to your page’s HTML code. That’s it!

Enjoy your new and beautiful rich snippet. Your customers certainly will.

10. Have contact information on your site

It’s a very obvious must have for any local business. After all, how are the customers supposed to find you if they don’t know where you are? This bit of info is so important that Google awards it with a minor ranking boost – or rather, doesn’t award not having it.

Make sure your site mentions every existing way to reach you:

• Phone number
• Email address
• Physical address (and you should also embed Google Maps with your location)
• Links to your social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.)
• WhatsApp, Skype and other contacts

And for good measure, put all this information in every listing you’ve made for your small business: in social media, business directories, review platforms, Google Business Profile. Make it available everywhere you’ve left a record about your business.

11. Analyze user activity and conversions with Google Analytics

There’s a crucial piece of data you cannot afford to miss: what customers do on your site.

Do you know how they use your site? Which pages they visit, which elements they interact with, how many of them click on the Buy button? Sounds pretty important, doesn’t it?

And thankfully, you can find all this information and so much more in Google Analytics. Note that you want the new GA4 version, as the older Universal Analytics version is no longer supported.

So if you haven’t already, connect your site to Google Analytics 4 and start monitoring these reports:

• Acquisition: to see how much traffic you get and where it comes from.
• Landing page: to see user activity on your most important pages.
• Engagement: to see conversions and how users interact with your site. But using this section requires setting up some events first.

You can even type the name of a metric you want like “bounce rate” into the search bar and get an instant answer. But all that is just scratching the surface; the new and updated Google Analytics is even richer with useful data than its predecessor.

So don’t be afraid to explore and experiment. You’ll know you are doing a great job when the majority of your visitors turn into customers and keep coming back.

12. Track your Google rankings

Congratulations on making it this far. You have exerted a truly titanic effort. What comes after everything you’ve done?

Monitoring the results of your labor, of course.

It takes Google some time to notice all the SEO progress you’ve made, so it won’t happen all at once. But if you want to know the exact moment you rise in rankings, then you need to monitor the situation closely. And for that job, we have SEO tools – namely, the My Site Rankings report.

The Tool Summary screen will give you a quick overview of your ranking situation…

And if you like detailed reports, then knock yourself out with the data from the other tabs. Notice the Manage columns button: that’s where you customize your ranking reports by including the data that’s relevant to your cause.

And if you want the tool to generate reports for you automatically, click on Scan Schedule and set the dates when you would like to receive reports.

If anything good or bad happens to your site rankings, you will be informed immediately. And then you will be able to act accordingly.

Start Doing SEO For Your Small Business Add your site and track your local rankings Sign Up Free

The post 12 Big Steps for Small Local Business SEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

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.

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 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.

Those who run a local business, or provide SEO services for small business owners, now have a competitive edge over national brands, because the latter don’t have physical locations in cities where most of their customers reside. Local businesses can have the icing on the cake by grabbing the coveted real estate on the first page of local SERPs.

According to the Google research study “Understanding Consumers’ Local Search Behavior”, 4 of 5 consumers use search engines to find local information. Moreover, local-based searches lead to more conversions than non-local searches. But there is a flipside for the local market players, which is that there are constant changes and updates of the Google local search patterns.

Let’s face the problem: in the last few years Google has made it even harder for local businesses to get noticed in local SERPs.  In 2014, Google released the Google Pigeon Update that totally redefined the way we do local search. The local 7-pack block of Google Places results were shrunken to a 3-pack or “Snack Pack.” The redesigned local pack boxes lack call buttons and exact address information (we can only see directions and website link buttons now). The search giant explained it simply; it’s all for the sake of a better user experience and the unification of desktop and mobile search navigation. Maybe some positive-minded folks welcomed this brave new world, especially if they were in the top 3 of Places and saw an increase of the click-through rate to their websites. But most of the small business owners who were listed 4^th  or lower suffered from a drastic traffic drop and a dearth in phone calls. Then another unexpected update from Google followed: the shocking removal of its location filter in search settings. This caused a lot of discontent from many webmasters and business owners who used this feature to see how local results would look from the locations their clients reside in.

The difficulty of local SERP performance tracking intensifies because of the interplay between the dynamics of local SERPs and the personalization of the Google local search results. There are 3 major local search modifiers that embody the personalization of search results:

• Explicit location modifier is provided on the part of a searcher who adds an explicit geographical term (names of country, city, street, district, etc.) to the body of a search query.
• User location modifier is an automatic identification of the user location by device location service data like an IP address, GPS, Wi-Fi hotspots, in order to deliver the most relevant local information without the user having to manually add a location modifier to her search query.
• Browsing history stores some useful information about the user that helps identify the most relevant search results for a specific user.

There are 5 ways to look at local SERPs from the perspective of your prospects

With the above mentioned pitfalls of how Google serves local search activity, there is still some wiggle room for getting approximate ranking positions for your or your client’s location-based website.

Note that the following methods of getting local rankings for target keywords don’t give a rock-solid guarantee of explicit and accurate results. Each of these methods have obvious drawbacks. They are time-consuming, require manual multistep actions and results are difficult to report to clients.

1. Incognito mode or a logged out option can be activated by clicking on a “New incognito window” that is placed inside the settings bar at the top-right corner of your Google Chrome browser. This is a simple way to emulate an average search. On the one hand, an incognito window allows you to surf the web without caching your browser history and deleting all cookies after you close the window. But this doesn’t actually hide your IP address and location. This means that the results for your local business related terms might differ from those that your prospects see in their localized search. However, the Incognito mode  can be a good solution for those who check ranking positions from the nearby location to their prospects. But keep in my mind that if you enter a search query and get results for it, once you refresh the page or do a new search with the same search query, the results may differ from the previous check. Be sure to clear your cache or open a new incognito window.

2. Google’s AdPreview and Diagnosis tool provides a more accurate emulation of a search from the location of your targeted audience. It also allows you to emulate language, device type and set a Google domain for a specific region. You need to be logged in to use the tool.

This is how the second option looks like in practice:

The website we decided to monitor is http://www.harvesttablenewark.com/. Here it is shown in the 2d position in the local pack results.

3. The isearchfrom.com service is similar to the Google AdPreview and Diagnosis tool, however there is a caution under the settings that says:

That means that you shouldn’t rely on the results provided by this free tool which is supported on a rare basis. According to this tool, the Harvest Table site is ranking in the 2d position within local pack results.

4. Geo-location emulation in the web browser is one of the most reliable but timewasting methods. The whole process will be completed within 5 steps :

• Open your browser (Chrome)
• Press CTRL+SHIFT+I in order to open the Google Chrome Developer Tools
• Click on the Emulation tab next to the Console tab:

You can then click on Sensors and put the specific locality coordinates into the boxes of Latitude and Longitude. The longitude and latitude for a specific location you can find here.

• Open a new window and start your local search.

According to this method, my website is 2d in the “3-pack”.

5. Emulation of location via using a location-specific proxy. This is a relatively easy way to hide your local network data and get precise local ranking results for your website. The only problem with this method is the rake-through for a legitimate proxy for an accurate emulation of your targeted locality. This is how it works:

• Go to your browser settings (Chrome) and click on Show advanced settings
• Click on Change proxy settings and configure your Internet Properties by adding a location-specific proxy in order to transmit your emulated local address to the web.

Using this method of location emulation, I found my website in the 1st position of local pack results.

I want easy-to-read reports with more accurate local rank tracking now!

And that’s what we are here for! With the Web CEO Local Rank Tracker you can just forget these unhandy ways of local rank tracking that take a great deal of your time.

The WebCEO Rank Tracker in action:

• Sign up for a free 14-day trial.
• Add your site URL to the WebCEO new project wizard
• Go to the Rank Tracking tool and click on the Keywords tab in the settings of the tool. Add your targeted keywords and local terms.

• Click on the Search engines tab in order to add all the search engines you want to track your site positions on. We provide our customers with the ability to add country specific search engines (you can add up to 50!), including mobile ones and you should also add a specific location (e.g. state, city, ZIP code) in order to emulate search results as if you were tracking right from your customers’ locations.

• Scan your ranking report in order to see if your site has any positions among organic and vertical (3-pack, ads results etc.) local results. On the screenshot below you can see two digits (1:1) which means that our website has the 1^st position within the local pack Google Places results. We consider the local pack box on Google as the 1^st position and we see your site’s Google Places listing as a subordinate number to that first position held by the local pack When you click on a keyword in your ranking reports, you can see cached results for the keyword from the actual SERPs.

We also let you set a scan schedule on a regular (weekely, daily for an Agency Unlimited plan) basis  for you to keep a close eye on fluctuations, hopefully improvements, in the rankings you track in your local campaigns.

What other features of WebCEO can serve you in your local SEO?

1.  You can track your site listing positions for branded local terms on third-party local business listing directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Zomato etc. To do this, go to the Rank Tracking settings and click on the Alternative URLs and paste your business listing page URLs (if you have them) from business related directories.

And start tracking your Yelp and local directory business listings performance.

2.  Track your site positions alongside with your competitors’

3.  Submit your business details like name, description, address, phone number, categories etc. to high authority manually scoped local business-related directories in the Content Submission tool (Local section)

TL;DR

You must have noticed that the first  2 or 3 results pages are often saturated with local business listing sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, HappyCow, Zomato, etc, which can list your website among others or even present a special page for your business that gets a direct listing on Google, but your own URL won’t be shown in Google. If you really want to be easily found on the first page of Google local search results for localized terms and non-branded keywords, you should definitely evaluate your local business SEO strategy.

The post 6 Ways to See Local Business Rankings Like Your Customers Do appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

How many customers can you attract with a sidewalk chalkboard? Are you still trying to get more store foot traffic? Then, you’d better rethink your local business strategy and put more effort into local SEO.

Today, local search plays a huge role in the life of any consumer. As more and more people regularly use smartphones, tablets and handheld gadgets, it has become easy and simple to find the right product or service in physical proximity to the customer. The popularity of local search is gaining momentum. According to Yodle, 82% of US consumers use local businesses. What is more, they use them more than national chains.

Local SEO is a complex process. Not only that it is necessary to perform all the usual SEO actions, so you still need to make a new batch of complex SEO measures. Google is constantly updating algorithm configurations to provide the most comfortable experience for users online. However, in reality it creates extra problems for optimizers. To achieve success in the developing world today you should react quickly to the slightest changes. This is especially significant for local search and companies that are interested in it, since this area offers many opportunities for growth.

Submit Your Local Business to Search Directories

After the initial Penguin update, some submissions to spammy local directories seemed to be ineffective or even dangerous. However, high-quality and wisely chosen online directories will help you get more traffic and win additional points from Google in the local race.

It’s better to avoid all low-quality submission services as most of them contain and will provide you with toxic links. As a rule, your company should focus primarily on how to get into a handful of really reputable local directories. Make sure that you have a presence everywhere. Open the WebCEO Content Submission tool and submit your site to:

• More than 50 reputable local sites and business directories such as Google Places (Google My Business), Yelp etc.
• Paid directories and shopping search engines
• Media Content Sharing Sites
• Blog Promotion Sites
• PPC engines that do not accept auto submissions

Now you can select where the business is located to submit your project to the local directories and sites.

After submitting your business to local directories, boost your reputation and sales.

Pitch Your Local Business Citations Along With Your Local Directory Submissions

Most SEO experts are undoubtedly familiar with the principle of citations. In the case of local SEO, a citation is as reference to your company name, telephone numbers, addresses, etc… All the information that is relevant to your company.

The credibility and consistency of citation are gaining a lot of weight. At first glance, this approach of the search giant may sound strange, but if you look at the problem more closely, it turns out that Google searches most for signals that allow them to distinguish real businesses from fake ones. Consequently, consistent local business citations help in organic algorithms, and the credibility and consistency of citations from reputable domains provide a greater return.

Every time your business is mentioned on the Internet, you will prefer that the mentions include the company name, address, telephone number. In social networks you should register all the possible information about your company. Addresses and phone numbers should be written into press releases, when placing vacancies, events, etc. Spammers tend to leave this information out.

Achieve success through good local SEO

In general, local search is incredibly important for companies in the field. If you want your visitors to become clients quickly, local search is the fastest way to do so. Such big companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Yelp are in a very real war for supremacy in the mobile sector, and local search for them is a very important factor. Just look at the top apps for the iPhone in order to realize that all of them use local services. If you want to participate and win this war, you have to provide your users with high-quality local services.

With the Web CEO Post-Pigeon Local Guide, you will be able to move your site to the top in local SEO.

The post Local SEO Basics: How to Pitch Your Business in Local Search appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

If you run a local business or manage a local SEO agency, then you must have heard about the great movements in local SEO that happened in 2014 and how they dramatically changed the way most SEOs did their local business. With the expansion of smartphone usage, more and more searches have had local intent. That means that being mobile-friendly and having a strong local presence can be paramount.

At the request of many of our pro-active users, we will continue to educate our users with Local SEO Training Courses in cooperation with Search Engine News. The 2015 is designed specifically for local business owners and local SEO newbies who want to become pros in local search optimization. In order to impress your local SEO clients you will need to master key local SEO aspects. This course is dedicated to mastering 28 critical elements involved in getting a local business ranked in the top of its country specific Google results.

What is on the agenda?

The 2015 Local Search Certification Course will give you 3 basic optimization strategies for local search:

1. The Vision of the new Local Search Landscape.
2. The key aspects of website optimization for local search.
3. Local Link building, troubleshooting and list management

Who is in charge?

The course will be conducted by Mary Bowling. She is one of the best local SEO experts and has been working as an SEO consultant since 2003 and training others in local search since 2007.

What is the schedule?   

Week #1, the dates:

• June 1st, Mon – Session One: Understand the NEW Local Search Landscape
• June 3rd, Wed – Session Two: Putting Your Local Optimization in Place
• June 5th, Fri – Session Three: Link Building, Troubleshooting & List Management

Week #2, the date:

• June 8th, Mon – Complete Q&A + Graduation Day

The course will be LIVE and held entirely online. That’s right; you’ll be attending from the comfort of your office or home.

As a WebCEOer, you will get a generous BONUS:

$200 Web CEO discount

$200 Early Bird discount if you enroll for the course BEFORE May 28^th.

Sign up for 2015 Local Search Certification Course here and register today. Save money and bring your site to the top of local search.

Hint: If you are *not* a Web CEO user yet for some reason – be sure to Sign Up for FREE today and get the privilege to use the above-mentioned discount!

The post Local SEO Training Course: Be the Only Pebble appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Local SEO clients easily become loyal, if you find the way to impress them. We know 3 EFFICIENT WAYS to their hearts!

 1. Optimize Landing Pages for Local Search

Landing page optimization for local search has some special aspects we covered in the Local SEO Guide previously. To summarize I’ll name the most important:

• Make sure your landing pages are unique and informative.
• Add local signals like your address, telephone, map, etc.
• Optimize your Google My Business listing.
• Get more positive reviews on your Google My Business listings.
• Get some great citations. Great means that the quality matters much more than quantity.
• Use social media to interact with your customers.

Tip: Use the Local Search Optimization tips from the Web CEO SEO Roadmap.

2. See SERPs as Real Local Visitors Do

With the Web CEO Rank Tracker you can get exactly the same results as real local searchers do. Go to the ‘Search Engines’ tab of the Rank Tracker settings. When adding a search engine, select a country you want to target – you can also add a target language – and set the location to be sure you get the exact results.

Then go to the ‘Google blended results’ tab and enable vertical search results you want to monitor. The Google Places are a must for local search optimization.

One more way to have your finger on the local search pulse is to add the local social profile. To see how your social profiles are ranked, add them on the ‘Social profile URLs’ tab of the Rank Tracking settings.

3. Reports in Multiple Languages

Recently we’ve added the ability to use WebCEO on your native language and to provide your clients with the SEO reports they would understand. Add languages you want to use through the My account –> Languages menu. Then go to the Client Reporting Settings, choose a specific task you want to change the reporting language for, go to the Message settings and select a PDF report language.

Besides, when exporting any Web CEO report you can briefly change the language of your interface (the language icon is also on the top right hand corner of the main interface) and then export or mail a PDF in that language, before switching back to your regular interface language.

P.S.: Remember that most local searches are done via mobile devices – 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in the hope of finding local results. So make sure your client’s local site is ready before 4/21, which is when the major Google Mobile Update is set for.

The post 3 Ways to Impress Your Local SEO Clients appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

One of our customers asked a question: “How do I get on Google Places with multiple business locations?”  A simple answer might be: “Yes, sure! All you need to do is to visit Google My Business Locations (formerly Google Places) within your Google+ business account where you can import and verify your business locations list. It will take an hour of your time.” Then you may just sit and wait.

The problem with multiple business location management is not new, but still has some unclear aspects. One click submission of your multiple business locations to Google might be important, but it is the last step on the way of your successful local SEO strategy. The bulk locations uploading should be preceded by more important local SEO efforts.

To maximize geo-targeted SERP listings and increase local search domination for your multiple local business areas, you should follow some recommendations from Google Local Business guidelines and experts in local SEO.

Create Subdirectories Under One Single Domain

Keeping one single domain name with separate city-specific subdirectories (http://mysite.com/city) will minimize your SEO efforts and save you a lot of time and money. Having city-specific subfolders (subdirectories) with unique content and contact details for each location is a perfect SEO solution. Remember that we are not talking about creating sub-domains like city.mysite.com.

Create Location-Specific Landing Pages

As soon, as you have built proper site domain structure to benefit your local SEO, focus on creating location-specific landing pages that will contain unique geo-specific content and contact information relevant to the audience you target. What kind of content can you use to attract location-specific residents or tourists? Upload photos, publish testimonials and local news, describe upcoming events and dress your targeted keywords with geo-descriptors by putting them into the most SEO-valuable page elements (i.e.: page titles, H1 tags, image tags etc.). Go heavy on neighborhood descriptions (landmarks, nearby parks, malls etc.) on your local landing pages with images of these neighborhoods properly tagged. Such hyperlocal targeting (neighborhood descriptions) may bring additional SEO benefits and help your online visitors get a good sense of your business locations. Be careful about duplicates in your local content.

Tip: Be sure to submit each of your local landing page URLs to your website HTML sitemap in order to let search engines index them quickly.  You can use Geo Sitemap Generator to give Google accurate coordinates of your business locations.

Implement Local Schema Markup

Next, you should pattern your unstructured local data into structured tags. This will help search engines pick the most important elements from your multiple business location pages and display them in local SERP listings as structured snippets. Be sure to markup the most important local content (address, unique-per-location phone number, prices, business hours, map etc.) with specific schema tags for local businesses.

Run a Technical Audit and SEO Analysis

Run an SEO audit and content optimization analysis of your geo-specific pages in order to fix and improve critical aspects of your content.

1. Check your website’s general and local-focused URL structure for technical issues and access errors.
2. Make a deep SEO analysis of your location-specific landing pages for targeted terms + geo modifiers.
3. Check your local-focused content for mobile optimization bottlenecks since most local searches are made on mobile devices.

Refine citations for your multiple business locations

A citation is a non-linked mention of your local business NAP (name, address, phone number) information on specific citation listing sites. The citation factor is now a part of Google local algorithm hierarchy. So, if you want to be easily found in local SERP listings, submission to local directory sites like Yelp, Bing local, Google+, Foursquare, Yahoo Local is not a recommendation, but a must! Before you refine your local citations on business directories, you will need to check the consistency of your NAP information on all your local service pages and maybe use paid but time-saving data aggregators like Acxiom, Localeze and Infogroup for effective business listing management. Only a few local citation directories provide multi-location bulk submission for free. These are Foursquare, Bing Local and Google My Business.

Create a Google+ Business page

Once you are done with all the on-site local optimization and local citation submissions, feel free to strengthen your online presence for local search by building one descriptive and interactive Google+ Business Page or location-specific business pages. Then all depends on your time and resources in terms of making sure you get a relevant following for that page.

The post 6 Steps to Help a Multi-Location Business Dominate Local Search appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Gone are the days when all that you needed to drive new customers to your local service was great customer service and your address in the Yellow Pages (book). People stopped trusting services that were listed at the top of yellow page listings just because their names start with the first letters of the alphabet. People now look for tried-and-true services with detailed descriptions, contact and location details, timely offers, awesome photos and reviews from third parties that seem trustworthy. The tired old yellow and white pages have been replaced with Google local search results. Google now understands the user’s intent and returns only the best, most relevant results. Your challenge is to optimize your website to fit the most conversational and complex search queries like: “Where can I eat the best Italian pizza in Boston.” Our challenge is to help you optimize your website properly.

Our Post-Pigeon Local Business SEO Guide has been written with the latest Google Pigeon Update in mind and targeted to improve your rankings in organic local search results. Click the image to download the local SEO Guide.

The post Move Your Site to The Top With The Web CEO Local Business SEO Guide appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.