Archive for the ‘Local SEO’ Category

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Local SEO with Google Maps and Google Places, etc.

Sunday, December 5th, 2010

Every business wants to be on the first page of a search when someone is searching for local businesses. But, how do you maximize your chances of getting on the first page?

There are a few ways to help optimize your local SEO:

First, get listed with the search engines. Getting listed by Google Maps will help tremendously. You have to fill out an application, get verified, and then wait a few weeks before your business will show up. Yahoo Local is another important listing. You can do this without the verification and your business gets listed faster. The more exposure you get on these sites, the more customers you will get.

Another way to optimize your SEO for you local region is to get listed in yellow pages type directories. Yellow Book, Yellow Pages, Yelp, and CitySearch are all examples of these types of directories. People utilize these just like they used the Yellow Pages phone book in the past. They need a service or a product and they look it up. Your business will get much more exposure when listed on these sites.

You should also list your business on free local classifieds such as Craigslist, Backpage or USFree Ads. People look to these sites to find service every day. These are very popular with Internet users and will get maximum exposure for little cost and effort.

Another way to get more exposure is to get reviewed. Ask your customers, or your friends and family to review your business on the various directories and online review sites. You can also attempt to put a link to your business on various local sites such as a Chamber of Commerce site.

One of the most important thing you can do is to manage your business profile. Your profile contains the basics: business name, address, phone number, and business description. This is what information will appear when someone does a search. This information will also appear on sites for national data providers. You certainly want this information to be correct and give a true description of your business.

If you have a web page, you can do a few things to make it more local search friendly. You should have your address on every page of your site. Furthermore, even if you have a toll free phone number, you should put your local phone number of every page of the web site.

Creating a page on your site titles “location/directions” will also help make it friendly to local searches. Have a link to Google Maps and Yahoo Maps on your location/directions page. If your business serves other surrounding towns, list as many of those as you can on your site.

Local SEO has become very important since Google introduced Google Places. Also, the proliferation of netbooks and smartphones have increased the important of getting listed on top locally. If you have a business that is living for local customers, learning how to get the maximum exposure on search engines is vital to the health of your business.

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Posted in Google Places, Local SEO | 1 Comment »

3 Top Local SEO Tips

Sunday, November 28th, 2010

Top Ten Competitors Research

The foundation of a successful local search engine optimization campaign begins with researching your top local competitors. Taking note of data such as page titles, content headers, site descriptions and keywords used to name a few, can give you great insight and a jump start on which direction to point your campaign. Browse their blogs and forums to see who is linking to them and which conversation starters got the most feedback from visitors.

Take a second look at the site layout, does it flow from a marketing perspective? Are the contact details readily available? How about a visible phone number? Take all into consideration when researching your competitors and compare your lists to map your foundation.

Keyword Research


Working in conjuction with your top ten local competitors research will be your keyword research. Now its time to find where these clients are coming from. Using online tools such as Wordtracker, Wordpot and the Google keyword tool can give you great insight to who is typing what search term the most to find your category.

Using these terms to determine how you will organize your site layout, page titles and content headers can give you an enormous advantage over others less savy. There are several SEO tools available on the net to help you perform these simple tasks and while some vary greatly aesthetically; in the end, they all spit the same information. Just be sure to stick to the most popular!

Content Management

Optimized content management holds great value in organic search engine optimization search results. Adding fresh relevant content on a regular basis (often referred to as “Spider Food”) keeps the search bots happy and more & more search moguls like Google give rich rewards to web sites that create fresh original content.

Research is key in content development & content development is a large piece of the organic pie and local search engine management plan

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Posted in Local SEM, Local SEO | No Comments »

Search engine optimization: not inventing the wheel but rolling it

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

Local search engine optimization is not a huge mystery but it does take some time and energy. If you are already familiar with SEO you don’t need to unlearn everything you have learned, but just to add new knowledge to your online strategies.

If you are aiming to get a high ranking in local Google searches you have to be aware of the criteria Goggle use to rank your website. One thing you can obviously take into consideration is distance. However, the power of the internet makes sure the competition is healthy. This means that a store that’s only a few miles from your store and is nearer to a major city doesn’t mean that it will be ranking higher than you. The only way this has any of affect at all is when your store is at a large distance, over 20 miles. In that case, the distance becomes a factor but otherwise it will be local search engine optimization that determines your rank.

The crucial aspects such as on page and off page SEO will still play a major role in the ranking of your website. If your locally targeted website contains content that’s SEO optimized with the right keyword density, then it will definitely be ranking higher than the others.

As with any regular search engine optimization, when you use the right keywords on your site, your rankings will dramatically improve in Google’s local searches. Just make sure your address appears at various places on your website, so that it can be crawled. Also have your city name inserted in important places such as the headings and of course, the title tags. When you do this, the chances of your site coming up when someone searches using your local keywords get strong.

If you’ve tried Google SEO for a while now, you know how much value Google gives to anchor text, so it’s important to have your related local keywords in your anchor text when linking to any external site that’s relevant (Example: SEO Pro Asheville). Keep in mind that Google gives high emphasis to the position of the text appearing on the page. If all your targeted keywords are brought together and aren’t spaced out, it may affect your local ranking.

You also have to keep in mind what kind of rating your business has in the real world. For instance, if you own a 5 star hotel, it will automatically be ranked higher than a 3 star hotel. That’s how Google works. All those sites that have a good reputation and a well-known business are going to get a higher rank in Google local searches.

Apart from this, manually adding your site to Google by going to their site is a good idea. This can give you a faster ranking. Remember, the longer your business stays on their listing, the higher it will be ranked. Businesses that aren’t long term and don’t stay around for long don’t get to rank well.

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Yahoo Interview on Local SEO Marketing

Monday, November 8th, 2010

Here’s an interview I did with Yahoo about the importance of a fully realized SEO campaign:

Local SEO Expert Talks About Search Engine Marketing

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Posted in Local SEO | 1 Comment »

How does a local SEO expert help YOUR business?

Monday, November 8th, 2010

What is local SEO and how can it help your business flourish?

Well, do you find yourself a local business with a nice website that just isn’t bringing in customers like you had anticipated? If so this article, and local SEO, are for you.

Perhaps you’ve heard about local search engine optimization but don’t know precisely what is and how it can help your business flourish through being quickly discovered by customers in your own local area and surrounding communities who are already looking to purchase your product.

Creating a smartly designed website is the only the first step in increasing your profile and your profits if you are a local business. The crucial step two in the process is smart, local website promotion. If you have a great-looking website but only a few people are looking at it then the efforts at creation and design are wasted. Instead, a proper promotion method convinces many eyes to be instantly trained on your website seeking what they are already looking for. That is the key to “optimizing” cyberspace and the idea behind local SEO.

An ideally realized website uses search engine optimization to tell search engines like Google and Yahoo exactly what your business is all about and to reach out to local customers searching for this information. That way when local customers sit down and begin searching your business comes up first on the pages of the product they are looking for.

Search engine optimization contains several strategies that can get you higher search engine rank when someone uses Goggle or Yahoo to find services in your local area and beyond. Your goal is to be visible on page one of the search results and as high up on the page as you can be. You can try implementing some of the available optimization strategies yourself, and a perhaps undertake it successfully. However, there are also tricks to the trade that only professionally trained and experienced people can provide.

After you have established a smart web site for the enterprise (or even if you currently have one) the task is to get it found, and once found, returned to by your top customers and the local prospective clients in your area.

Precisely what is SEO for a local company?

Getting seen in a world wide web search depends on where you are ranked. If you are using the correct tactics for search engine positioning like key term in most page of your webpage, and search engine optimization key term in your paid-for on-line ads, your website will begin to boost in the rankings. Determining what the key phrases are and where to use them is the solution to your ultimate success.

What can a SEO advertising firm actually do for you? An experienced local SEO provider will be able to:

Assist you in building links to your website and website optimization in ways you may have never thought about.

Submit online articles daily related to your products or services to major magazines to build your audience/client base.

Get you noticed in blogs and forums – like commencing the buzz about you and your goods and services.

Submit on-line press releases to announce corporation news and firm activities.

Make sure your organization is present and noticed on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Create e-mail internet marketing search engine optimization campaigns and distribute them on a timely basis.

Local SEO is an ongoing, dynamic variety of marketing techniques that demand close awareness for updates, revisions and new ads. SEO can be a Do-It-Yourself project, but a dedicated local SEO campaign takes a local SEO expert.

The main function a local SEO expert is to prepare a program that is certainly exclusively developed to cater your business needs and make you instantly visible to customers already prepared to buy your products. A local SEO expert fully grasps the goals of your business and your target audience when they create your search engine optimization campaign.

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Posted in Local SEO | 3 Comments »

Targeting customers with local SEO

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

Using local SEO you can target your website to countries or territories, or to specific regions and cities. When someone enters your keyword on a search box, the search system uses several factors to determine whether to show your website:

Search engines analyze the actual search query the user submits. If someone enters a search query that contains a recognizable city or region, search engines will show related regionally targeted websites. For example, if someone searches for Asheville Dentist, search engines may only show websites targeted to Asheville, regardless of the user’s physical location.

When possible, search engines determine the user’s physical region based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) address. This also applies to regionally targeted websites. For example, if someone searches for Dentist, and the computer performing the search is located in Asheville, search engines will only show websites targeted to Asheville even though the location was not specified.

Look at this screen shot and you’ll see what I mean:

Unlike country-specific search engine domains (such as Google.fr), search engines consider a user’s IP address for ads that show on Google.com. For example, if a user with an Australian IP address visits Google.com, Google will display ads targeted to Australia, even though the user isn’t accessing Google.com.au.

Local SEO practices are conductive to generating huge gains in local, targeted traffic. Instead of getting random, useless traffic you have targeted customers waiting to buy coming straight to your site.

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Avoiding local SEO mistakes

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

Local SEO work is always a flowing dynamic art, full of maintenance and upkeep. It’s necessary to stay on top of the game and it’s also important not to make key SEO mistakes.

Search engines use algorithms to determine search engine ranking, with Google recently changing its algorithm. Google’s change just shows that you have to constantly be up-to-date with search-engine changes.

Avoid the following local SEO mistakes at all costs:

Redesign that doesn’t work

The first thing you need to think of when planning to redesign your company site is if the redesign will work to your advantage in search visibility. You have to factor in page layout, content and keyword usage, navigation, links and redirects in the grand equation that is local SEO.

A Content Management System without a Migration Plan

You must have a migration plan if you’re installing a CMS. A change in your content management system means a change in the templates that format Web pages, navigation, and often the URL structure of pages.

Letting inbound links drop

Stay updated with your inbound links, and think of new ways to prevent inbound link loss. You prevent or minimize link loss through constant content creation, promotion, and social participation.

Replicas

Do not use duplicate content. For example, if you are promoting a press release, RSS feed, or an article then make sure you have the original on your site first, then you can link any duplicates back to your site.

The one thing you can do you prevent your site from dropping in search-engine ranking is have a local SEO expert stay active and updated with your site. Site maintenance and innovation are the keys in local SEO when trying to reach the top.

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Posted in Local SEO | 1 Comment »

Finding the power in local SEO

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Everything you have heard about the power of local SEO is true. It works here in Asheville the same way as it does everywhere.

About 85% of your potential clients will search on the Internet for what you are offering.

They will either find you or your competition. It’s up to you.

Chances are, you did not just run into this website by accident. It’s likely that you found us by running a search in Google, Yahoo or Bing. You may have searched for a custom web design firm or an Internet Marketing firm that specializes in building your online exposure.

As you can see, we didn’t simply leave it to chance that prospective clients would somehow stumble across our website. Instead, we’ve worked extremely hard at testing and developing solutions that effectively influence search engine rank and bring prospective clients (like you) to our site.

Local SEO can include some simple tricks, but adding dedicated local SEO to your business site takes a professional who can utilize a comprehensive local SEO plan.

Within the last few years the search engines have been providing improved local search features. The largest search engine, Google, has in fact been embedding these “Maps” inside their search pages as part of their Universal Search results. This has opened new opportunities for local businesses and requires different techniques, from original “organic” SEO, to get exposure they couldn’t have before.

Look at the following screen shot to see how Google now favors local posts:

When the Internet hit its first big boom most users were thinking globally. They were excited about the prospect of finding far flung customers for their products and services all over the world. The reality is that this concept simply doesn’t work for most businesses. However many potential customers, local to your business, sit down at their computers with their wallets out. They are looking for the nearest business that will suit their needs. In most instances, they will conduct a localized search and not a global one.

Local SEO experts simply aim to get your name, website and business in front of the people that are most likely to use it – those that are physically located near it. Think of it as the local section of your yellow pages. At the end of the day, local SEO means that if your hardware store is located in Asheville, NC potential customers will find your shop by searching locally.

Don’t forget that people are trying to find you, you are not trying to find them. Utilizing local SEO techniques will make it much easier for potential customers to find your local business. Having a traditional SEO campaign is fine, but if you are looking to increase traffic with local prospects, a local SEO campaign is a necessity.

There are specific tactics and techniques that can and should be used to ensure that your SEO is targeted to a local audience. If you want this kind of powerful local SEO to work for you contact us at SEO Pro Asheville and find out how.

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Posted in Local SEO | 3 Comments »

Getting a start on local SEO

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

Local SEO, which is the art and science of ranking well in search engines for local results, is one of those things that is easy to learn but hard to master, so let’s focus on the easy part. Say you’ve got a website and it’s not ranking in Google very well for whatever search term you desire results from. What is there to do about it?

These are some simple things you can do, or even better get someone else to do for you, to start off your local SEO campaign.

Figure Out Your Target Audience

Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing local SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? Are they big spenders or are they cheapskates?

In general you should pick terms that match up with your service, that you think will convert well and that have good search volume. To get an idea of search volume use Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool.

Then once you come up with your target keyword list…

Update Your Page Titles

The “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of SEO and local SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly.

Make Each Page Title Unique and Add Your City Name

It is also important in local SEO that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. Make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service in your city.

You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

Add a Few Internal Links

The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most and add links from other pages to these pages. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “pasta” use the word “pasta” in the text of the links that go to that page. Try not to use the exact same phrases in each link to make it look more natural. For example in some of the links use “best pasta” or “terrific pasta”.

Add Your Address to Every Page

Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. It would probably be a good idea to list as many location names as possible on the home page too.

Also use these tried and true tips for local SEO improvement.

Get Links

None of this stuff will work very well if you don’t have any links to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust. So you should spend some time thinking about what other sites you think you can get links from. Here are some of the obvious ones:

– Chambers of commerce/local business groups
– Local business directories/Local newspaper site
– Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)
– Partners/Vendors

There are hundreds of other ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, etc.

It’s important to understand that local SEO is not a one-time thing just like running a TV ad campaign is not a one-time thing. It’s a marketing tactic like any other. And as more people use the Web to find local services, local SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. So get familiar with it today so you can master it tomorrow.

If you have any more questions about local SEO please use our contact form for Local SEO Asheville.

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Tried and true tips for local SEO improvement

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Working in local SEO there are a few things you immediately learn that can help a client with local search engine optimization. Some are easy to implement, and some sound a bit easier than they are, something that makes my services valuable to my clients.

Here are a few of the many SEO tips that are among the most common and first approaches used when running an SEO campaign. As a business owner you can implement some of them yourself, but the time needed may be daunting to you. These components to a good SEO campaign are things I stress as an Asheville SEO expert.

Deep linking

Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? It says that you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

Social bookmarking

Make it easy for your visitors to social bookmark your website, creating important links that the search engines value. There are plenty of free social bookmarking widgets available. Here is a recent look at social bookmarking popularity:

Article exchanges

You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links.

Article marketing

Writing your own articles (or having an local SEO expert do it) can be a valuable way of obtaining local search engine optimization. Go here for my blog post on Local SEO Article Marketing.

Be bold

Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do not use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Newsletters

Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

Become a foreigner

Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

First come, first served

If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page

Multiple domains

If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

Titles for links

Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Not anchor text.

Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation – something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times.

Site map.

A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It’s called the navigation bar.

There is a lot more to local search engine optimization, and there are always more details when looking at an individual site. But these tips should help any website significantly improve its rankings. The services of a local SEO expert can make your SEO improvement times exponentially better.

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