Signs Indicating Your Business Needs Local SEO

Signs Indicating Your Business Needs Local SEOWhen your business has a certain physical location then it is likely that you are already aware of the significance of achieving and maintaining visibility in the eyes of local search engines. Almost half of the searches on the internet are intended to be a local search. They use search queries such as [keyword][city][state] for finding out about the products and services specific to the locations where you are running your business. In most cases, these searchers are ready to spend money. If they cannot find your locations listed on the first page of SERPs they are likely to turn to your competitors. Let’s see some signs you can observe when a business needs the services of professional local SEO services.

1. All locations of the business are listed on a single page of your site: This is a common oversight that can cripple the visibility of your business. For optimizing every location effectively you will need a specific webpage that gives you the capability to target important locations and keywords in the Meta description and HTML title. This is impossible with a single landing page mentioning all the locations.

2. Illogical site structure: Don’t make it difficult for the users otherwise they will find the information they need elsewhere. The location pages have to be structured with a logical hierarchy for the search engine to understand how every page can fit into a section of content. Although it depends on the number of locations you have, here is a typical structure for the content: domain-URL/locations/state/city/store. Independent pages can also give you an indexable content area required for adequately describing unique services offered by that location.

3. No deep links to the locations: While you are updating the listings on Google My Business or any other map feed, you need to give deep links that will take the searcher directly to the location details they are looking for instead of leaving them on a high-level page or a Home page where they will be left stranded having to further search for the best alternative. In most cases, the local searchers are looking for a phone number, address, or other services that are specific to a location. Do not make it even more difficult for them.

4. Lack of knowledge about the amount of traffic coming to the site by using local search: Sometimes you are struggling to monitor the performance of your local landing pages. This is the right time to talk to pros that can get into the local analytics and give you a report mentioning the action-to-be taken items. The two sources of data viz. organic local traffic and maps can provide valuable insight into your local search campaign. They need to be tracked and reported to have granular insight into the current performance of every location.

5. Being unaware of the business citations needing work: One of the significant aspects of local SEO that is overlooked many times or avoided is the management of citations. A citation is the mention of NAP information of your business with or without a link that is present on the local-based sites or directories across the internet. Some of the common examples of the influential sites that keep the listing data are Yellow Pages, Yelp, Merchant Circle, and Facebook.

First, decide whether you are in the need to take the plunge and optimize the local search for making your business grow. In the beginning, you can start by assessing where your company stands at the moment and develop a list of tasks according to priority to decide the areas where a direct impact has to be made quickly. If you are looking to investigate the local search services available in Jacksonville, you can place a call to Local SEO Jacksonville Company.

5 Local SEO Tips for Boosting Up Your Business

5 Local SEO Tips for Boosting Up Your BusinessIf you thought that SEO or search engine optimization that used to be a sine qua none for businesses looking to boost their online sales was losing its edge, then think again. That SEO and SEMM promotional methods are still a force to reckon with can be gauged from the following statistic: Agencies manufacturing or marketing different products and services and having an online presence will be investing upwards of $79 billion in local SEO. So, if you have a storefront in a residential neighborhood or a retail outlet in your city’s CBD, then you’d be better off spending more on local SEO promotion for increasing the online visibility of your brand.

Following are some local SEO tips you can abide by for improving the popularity of your product or service across the Internet:-

1. Rich Answers

Many users and online shoppers searched for a specific product or service or browsed for info on a particular subject not by keying in keywords but by typing questions. The practice of browsing on the net by framing questions has now become an established trend. Google cemented its popularity as the world’s most favorite search engine by providing ‘Rich Answers’ to users and they don’t need to click on SERP results for getting the relevant info.

Info via ‘Rich Answers’ is furnished in the form of snippets, maps, sliders, tables, forms, and charts. If you own a bakery establishment and the business is cataloged in ‘Google My Business’ listings, users or consumers will be directly driven to your site when they’re looking for baked goods recipes.

2. NAP

Contrary to what you may think, NAP is not an esoteric acronym or abbreviation but simply stands for name, address, and phone number. Though it doesn’t need to be emphasized, providing this elementary info on your site is crucial as search engines consider NAP data when they embark on local SEO drives. Also, make sure that your NAP details are identical across all listings.

3. Reviews

Positive reviews can impact your site’s ranking during a local SEO initiative. If your product or service wins rave reviews across the different automated social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, these will go a long way in boosting your ware’s popularity. However, it can be a challenge to encourage consumers to upload positive feedbacks or testimonials. You can begin getting in touch with your steadfast customers and requesting them to write their genuine opinions regarding your product.

4. Register your site on local business directories

You’ll be giving a good fillip to your business if you register the same on local business directories and yellow pages. At the same make sure that the NAP information you provide is consistent with the data already visible on other citations.

5. Smartphone friendly

People are increasingly using their smartphones for going online in order to complete a host of routine activities like shopping, researching for information, and so on. So, making your site smartphone-friendly is crucial if you want to stay in the competition.

Local SEO is the New Yellow Pages

http://www.localseotampa.com/newsjacking-as-an-seo-strategy-201512/The days of big, fat yellow books being found in every corner of every office building, home, and commercial area is long behind us. While the iconic Yellow Pages still exist, they are often much smaller in size and less ubiquitous than they were 10 years ago and that trend is likely to continue into the future as the Internet has replaced much of the function in this space. Local SEO and the investment that companies like Google have made in local search is really what has driven down the need for physical directories on local businesses and services.

This is especially important for small businesses which are looking at optimizing their marketing strategies. No longer are Yellow Pages registrations as valuable as they once were and in turn, local SEO is more important than it ever has been. For those starting out with local search strategy, it is important to first make sure that your basic business information (such as phone number, name, address, and maybe a small description) is appropriately listed in the major local search engines: Google+, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.

Beyond that simple first step, there are a number of tactics that need to be carried out and will result in essentially every part of your online strategy being centered around local success. From choosing the right keywords and keyphrases (“dry cleaner in Hoboken”) to building content and links around those search terms, it can be a large task to effectively target local results, but the payoff can also be equally large. This is because the most targeted visitors will be local, especially for brick-and-mortar small businesses. By increasing local traffic by even 10%, it can be a substantial change in sales and may even beat out a much higher increase in non-local traffic. At the end of the day, absolute traffic does not matter, but targeted traffic does.

As with general search, local search is all about relevancy so it is important to have the right content and online presence to support that. Reviews play an additional role in this so it is important to encourage your happy customers to leave reviews for you online whether it be on Google, Yelp, Facebook, or another site. A mix of reviews in a number of places is the most natural way to do it and Google and other search engines will notice.

We are quickly moving to a point (if we have not already passed it) where local SEO is more effective than Yellow Pages in terms of return on investment. It is a must-do for any business looking to really succeed in today’s marketplace and thankfully it does not have very high barriers to entry. So what are you waiting for? If you don’t have a local search strategy in place yet, it might be time to start doing some research on keywords and building your strategy and tactics around that to effectively get all of those people in your town searching for your service to actually come to your website or shop. Go get them!