Pay attention to your sitelinks and how they rank for local SEO

local seo

Some of my local SEO musings for today:

If you rely on queries for business names to generate a lot of search traffic to your site, like most yellow pages sites do, you just got pushed way down the page, like Yelp appears in this example.  Local directory sites will need to beef up their review efforts to try to at least get attached to the Place Page result for these queries.

This may have made brand reputation management campaigns a bit easier.  Sites that want to push down bad results for brand queries can do strategic linkbuilding around URLs that are likely to get added as sitelinks (e.g. navigation links, URLs with decent inbound links, etc.).  That said, in doing a little (unscientific) research it does appear that sites with what I would consider weak brands are only displaying two sitelinks.  So go search for your brand and you may be able to get a quick idea of how strong it is in Google’s eyes.

Personal rep management campaigns also seem to benefit.  Check out this result O2business phones:

local seo

You can see the ‘corner the market’ strategy, right?

The moral of the story:

On the plus side, the sitelinks now give businesses even greater control on how they appear in the SERPs.  I fully expect to see further enhancements of this functionality where eventually the SERP looks more like a Place Page/Website/Plus combo than just a boring old SERP.

This means that unlike early fears, local SEO is a not the death of SEO operations but just another expanding opportunity, if you have the right guide.

Chuck Taft is an Asheville Local SEO expert who is the author of the book Topranked: The Straightforward Guide to Local SEO

Comments

  1. rizecorp on August 26th, 2011 at 11:37 am

    Website promotion in search engine optimization includes submitting website to different search engines, submitting your Site to Directories and Writing and Publishing good content Articles.

  2. Katheleen Skrocki on December 19th, 2012 at 3:07 pm

    I don’t quite understand this: “I do want to keep the card active since it is my oldest card and has the highest limit.” You don’t need to charge a single penny to a card to keep it “active” the company will be happy to let you keep charging until the end of time.

Leave a Reply