Posts Tagged ‘chuck taft’

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

Friday, August 26th, 2011

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

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Critical local SEO tips from an Asheville expert

Saturday, August 20th, 2011

Local SEO is becoming a highly important skill nowadays with more and more companies starting to offer location based services. In my position as an Asheville local SEO expert I help a lot of companies get a quick jump start into the local SEO game. The old rules of SEO are just that, old, and small business owners need to pay attention to the latest trends in order to get ranked highly and draw more customers.

Even though there are lots of reasons for you to use local SEO, one of the most critical is that you can gain entry into less competitive but highly responsive markets. Since there will always be clients in your area, you can take advantage of local SEO no matter the type of business you run. Thus, you will be able to increase the size of your company in a new direction and find more targeted prospective clients.

local seo

It’s important that you get on Google and get your offline business profile made so it’ll be in their database. Registering with the three major search engines is easy, and be aware that they’ll call you so they can confirm your business address. Compared to the millions of offline businesses, there are very few profiles listed on the search engines, and that suggests people may not be aware of this. This simple step will help you with your local SEO efforts, and you really should do it asap.

If you want your site to be recognized on a local level then you need to be open about asking for reviews. You will be missing out on a lot of opportunities if you don’t use this strategy. The majority of the local sites are completely fine with your interacting with your customers and asking them to review you. So, why shouldn’t you enjoy all the advantages of this technique?

It’s simply an issue of taking enough time to ask your customers personally to provide a review for you. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to go out and ask people face to face. All you have to do is put up a request such as “We would really appreciate it if you could post a short review of our business on Bing/Yahoo local / Google.”

This message could be put on your thank you page (after they contact you or sign up for your ezine), in your email signature and on your website. Your business will get more customers in time because these reviews, no matter whether they are great, horrid or ugly, will increase the credibility of your business.

Last but not the least; make sure you have your complete mailing address mentioned all over your site, on every page. You always want to provide convenience to your website visitors, and that will help if they want to know. Local SEO involves much more, but these practices will help you with your site visitors.

Chuck Taft is a local SEO expert in the Asheville, NC area.

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Asheville online marketing expert Chuck Taft publishes Local SEO tips book

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

chuck taft asheville seo

Asheville professional marketing expert and SEO consultant Chuck Taft has just published his first book, full of local search engine marketing tips for any business that has a website and needs more customers to land on it.

‘Top Ranked: The Straightforward Guide to Local SEO’ is written with the average small to mid-size business owner in mind and contains everything they need to know about optimizing their commercial website in order to increase visits and sales. This new book contains tons of online marketing and web optimization strategies, most of which can be implemented by business owners immediately to improve site ranking as well as customer traffic and purchases.

Taft’s book includes plenty of hot and current tips and techniques for ranking on top search engines like Google and Yahoo, designing web pages optimized to a target audience, and maximizing social media presence the smart way. It also includes plenty of insight into internet marketing and how to analyze your web presence.

Most importantly, Taft’s book is specifically written to help businesses increase their local SEO presence. With all the major search engines such as Google focusing more and more on localization, and customers looking more and more for local results, this book is a treasure-trove of techniques and guidance for companies that might already have a web site and social media participation but aren’t yet fully integrated with powerful local SEO.

‘Top Ranked: The Straightforward Guide to Local SEO’ by Chuck Taft is available on Amazon.com and at all the finest bookstores such as Barnes & Noble.

Chuck Taft is an SEO and marketing expert who runs Green-Light-Strategies and SEO Pro Asheville, two consulting firms which specialize in SEO, local SEO, and web marketing strategies. He has successfully helped numerous businesses optimize their web presence and their properties and services online.

Chuck is an expert at not only getting companies top ranked but in converting their success to increased sales. As the web moves from a focus on SEO focus to total Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and internet strategies, Chuck is on the forefront of virtual marketing and positioned to help guide companies into the future.

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