Why Local SEO Might Be the Best Investment You Ever Make

Remember the days that you had to Google a place for lunch before you left the house earlier that day? Or, take it even further back and think about a time that you opened up the phone book to find the closest hardware store.

The growth of mobile technology has made it possible for us to search for nearby businesses literally at the exact moment we need them. If you decide you have a craving for ice cream while walking around downtown, you can take out your phone and simply type in “ice cream shops near me” and be given a list of local spots to indulge in your favorite sundae.

These local search results are an amazing opportunity for businesses to generate traffic and prospective clients in the geographic area they serve, making them ideal prospects. That’s why local SEO is such an important part of any small business’ digital marketing strategy.

Moz recently released their 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors Report that details the elements that affect local SEO. With the updates to this report and the growing importance of local SEO, I figured it would be a good idea to get our SEO analysts to weigh in on ways to improve local SEO. Read on below to find out their top 6 tips for improving your rankings in search results. 

1. Verify and Optimize Your Google My Business Profile Page

It’s important to ensure your Google My Business Profile is set up correctly and maintained for accuracy. Local search results feature the most relevant results for each search. If your business information is complete and accurate, then it’s much easier and more likely that Google will match you to the right searches.

Make sure that you have entered all of the correctly business information into Google My Business. You should select the profile category that most accurately describes your business and verify your location(s). Make sure that when someone looks at your profile they know what you do, where you are, and when they can visit you. List your updated hours, phone number, and any other relevant contact information in your profile.

And it’s important to keep this information up to date. For example, if you’re closed for a holiday, you should make sure that’s in your profile so it says you are closed at that time. Or, if your phone number or location changes, this needs to be updated as well.

2. Get Your "NAP" in Order

If you want your business to rank at the top of the local maps results, it's critical that you keep your "NAP" consistent. NAP refers to your business Name, Address, and Phone number.

You'll want to keep your NAP consistent anywhere you can, including:

• Your website - make sure to include your NAP on the footer of your website so it's on every page
  
  
• Business profiles and directory listings - you can use MozLocal to check for any errors

And if you've ever changed business names or addresses or phone numbers, then you'll want to search for instances of old/outdated info and get it updated.

3. Get LOTS of Citations

"Citations" are mentions of your NAP across different websites and listings. Here are the steps we recommend for getting lots of citations.

1. Submit to the major data aggregators. You can do this via several companies including MozLocal or YEXT or BrightLocal or AdviceLocal. The best deal we've found is BrightLocal which is $55/year.
   
   
2. Get listed in lots of directories. Focus on local, national and industry-specific directories.
   
   
3. Publish press releases. By including your NAP in the byline of your release, you can get dozens or even hundreds of citations when your press release is republished online. You can read about this approach in this case study here.

4. Get Reviews and Respond to Them

Whether customers are finding your business on social media or simply searching in Google, one of the first things they see is your business reviews. This can instantly put a good or bad taste in their mouth, depending on what those reviews say.

From eating at a new restaurant to buying new clothes or choosing a doctor, people are reading reviews. Positive reviews on social media and Google My Business can show your potential customers that your past clients trust you and believe in the product and services you have to offer. By asking your past customers for reviews, you will not only be helping your local SEO, but you will also be helping attract more people to your business.

You can add another layer to this by making sure to respond to reviews. If someone leaves you a positive review, thank them. If for some reason someone leaves a negative review, make sure to promptly provide a response that is nice, professional, and explains why you feel that’s not correct. By connecting with your customers, it shows that you care about their opinions.

5. Optimize Your Website for Service + Geographic Keywords

One way to improve the likelihood of ranking in Local Search Results is to make sure that the pages on your site are optimized.

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is having one “Services” page on their website that lists all of the different products or services you have available.

It is much more SEO-friendly to have separate service area pages for each of the services your business offers. That way, when people are looking for a specific service of yours, that specific page can rank in Google. In addition, if you operate in multiple towns, then you may want to add "service area" pages focused on each of the 5-10 primary towns within your service area.

It’s also extremely important that the title tags and meta descriptions on your site are optimized.

Think of the title tags and meta descriptions on your site as key real estate to promote and describe your business. Title tags can have geographical keywords in them to promote your site to the areas you want to rank in. Meta descriptions can be a little longer and have more descriptive keywords to relay the message your title tags are already saying.

Ultimately, both title tags and meta descriptions can serve as perfect billboards in search results that illustrate your business’ services and improve your SEO presence.

6. Avoid Keyword Stuffing

There has been a long standing belief (mainly through black-hat SEOs) that adding multiple cities or ZIP code keywords into the footer of your website helps boost the ranking of a website for different location-based search queries. At one time this actually worked.

However, Google is smarter than that. They have since released algorithm updates which have penalized sites who try to manipulate the search engine with this frowned-upon technique. Therefore, if you stuff keywords into your site it can actually hurt your rankings rather than help them.

[SEO Case Study] 3X More Traffic and 6X More Leads

One of the things I hear from business owners is that they feel like SEO won’t help them because their rankings are too low or their website has been around for too long. Today’s article is a case study about how we used SEO to generate three times more traffic and six times more leads, proving that it’s never too late to get started.

Do you think it's too late to start working on search engine optimization (SEO)? Do you think you're rankings are just so bad that it's not even worth trying at this point? If you just nodded your head yes, then you need to read this case study because it's never too late!

The Challenge Our client is a leading manufacturer and distributor of a natural resources product. When this client came to us for help, their website was not optimized for search engines so their website was not appearing at the top of Google for relevant search terms. In fact, when we began our work, the client had zero first-page Google rankings for any of their priority keywords. For their #1 top-priority keyword, our client was ranking 63 in Google (that's page 7). In other words, they were nowhere to be found in Google! If this sounds familiar, then you may be feeling overwhelmed or even helpless by how far you have to climb to get to the first page of Google. It's at times like this when it's important to remember the famous Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I guarantee if you do nothing, then you'll never reach the coveted first page of Google. But if you take action, even the smallest action, then you'll start to pick up the necessary momentum to propel you forward. Let's take a look at some of the small steps we took with our client that got them moving in the right direction... The 5 Small Steps We Took The first small step was a website audit. We audited the website to identify all of the specific issues that were preventing the website from ranking high in the search engines. Based on that audit, we created a custom search engine optimization plan... The second step was keyword research. We conducted research to identify the specific terms that prospective customers would use to find our client’s products when searching in Google. The third step was to edit the website based on our keyword research. For example, we documented edits to the page Titles, Headers, Meta Descriptions, and some of the page copy to make it more relevant to the target keywords. Then, since our client had its own web development team, our client’s web developers implemented the website edits that we had documented. The fourth step was to get some inbound links (links from other website pointing to your website). Inbound links are a major factor in search engine rankings so we dedicated a lot of resources towards building new links to the website. We submitted the client to relevant business directories, and we conducted research and outreach to request links from relevant websites. As a result, the client attracted new links to their website, and this helped improve rankings. Finally, the fifth step was to create more pages on the website to increase the chances that our client would rank for relevant keywords. We researched topics for informational articles that would form a “Knowledge Center” on the client’s website. We then drafted the articles for the client’s approval, and the client’s web developers added the articles to the client’s website. As you can see, this was fairly straight forward and none of the steps are too daunting. Now for the best part... Let's look at the results... The Results As I mentioned above, when we began our work, the client had zero first-page Google Rankings for any of the priority keywords that we were tracking. For the top-priority keyword, the client’s ranking was #63 in Google. Today, the client has 10 first-page Google Rankings for priority keywords. For their top-priority keyword, the client’s website currently ranks #2 in Google! Below is a graph of our client's Organic Search Traffic (SEO Traffic) and conversions from July 2015 to March 2017. As you can see, they had 231 visits from search engines in July 2015. Then in March 2017, they had 843, which is an increase of 265%! Conversions (visitors contacting our client about their products) increased as well from only about 3-4 per month to now 10-18 per month.

Now let's compare a longer time period to really highlight the improvement here... Below is a table that compares the periods from July 2015 through January 2016 versus July 2016 through January 2017.

How would your business change if you had a 3x increase in traffic and a 6x increase in sales leads? Remember, it all starts with a small step!

Google to further dilute exact match in AdWords will ignore word order & function words

Not just for plurals anymore, close variants will extend to include word ordering and function words in inexact match keywords.

In the good old days, “exact” meant exact. Then things got fuzzier. Now they’re about to get downright blurry.

On Friday afternoon, Google announced another change to the way exact match targeting works in AdWords. Matching for close variants — plurals, typos, abbreviations, adverbs and so on —  will be broadened to include variations in word order and function words in the coming months. With this change, Google may ignore word order and function words when determining whether an ad should trigger for an exact match keyword.



Google introduced close variants in 2012 as a way to capture plurals, misspellings, typos and other versions of exact match and phrase match keywords to broaden reach and coverage and save time building out keyword lists. Advertisers that wanted tighter control were able to opt out of close variant matching until 2014, when Google removed the ability to opt out of close variants for exact match and phrase match. Bing followed suit shortly the following year. The latest blurring of what exact match means is Google’s increasing trust in its machine learning and the belief that it’s now at the point where advertisers can let the algorithms take over and focus on other things. Google says early tests indicate advertisers could see up to 3 percent more exact match clicks on average while maintaining comparable click-through and conversion rates.

What the change means

There are many cases in which variations can change the meaning of a keyword. Take a recent example of [pancake mix] being matched to a search for “pancake mixer.” Those are not the same thing. However, there are many cases in which variations don’t change the meaning at all. Here are the nuts and bolts of how these changes are meant to work:

Function words

Function words are binding words phrases and sentences like the and that, conjunctions like and and but, prepositions, pronouns, quantifiers like all and some, modals like could and would and auxiliary/hedging verbs like be or might or will.  Essentially, they are words that don’t have meaning on their own. Well, hmmm, unless by will you mean a legal document.
With this change, function words may be ignored, replaced or added.

For example, the exact match keyword [restaurants cleveland ] could match to the query “restaurants in cleveland.” More examples from Google:

Word order

Notice in that last Miami cruise example, the function word changed along with the word order. Word order often doesn’t make a difference (in English), and users often don’t use natural word order when searching even though the intent is the same. Take a keyword like [teacher gift ideas]. The meaning doesn’t change with [ideas gift teachers] or [ideas teacher gift]. You’d never say either of those out loud, but the intent is clearly the same.


When word order is changed, Google says it will not add words to keywords (though it may change function words as shown in the Miami cruise example above).

Exceptions

One of the biggest concerns from advertisers will be whether Google matches queries to keywords that don’t have the same meaning. Google stresses it will not change word order or function words in exact match when it understands changes would alter the meaning of the query.

Take the case of a query like “LAX to JFK flights.” The user obviously doesn’t want to see ads for “JFK to LAX flights” or for “LAX from JFK flights.” That’s a pretty straightforward scenario for Google to recognize.

But something like [android compatible] does not mean the same thing as [compatible android]. Maybe Google will know, maybe it won’t, at least not right away.

These changes do not apply to phrase match keywords. And AdWords is still designed to prioritize matching identical keywords to identical search queries.

Google’s philosophy is: Spread a wider net, and then filter out what you don’t want, rather than build a net that might not be big enough to catch everything you want. Better to waste money on some bad keywords than to miss out on some potentially good ones.

Often this approach works. And it certainly works much more often than it did even a few years ago. It’s the rare person who misses building out endless iterations of keywords, but many will feel the pendulum is swinging too far in Google’s favor with this change. It strips more control from advertisers and puts the onus on them to say what queries they don’t want their ads showing up on rather than what they do want. There are financial implications to putting the emphasis on building out lists of negatives. Inappropriate variations are often discovered only after an advertiser has paid for wasted clicks and the variation shows up in a search query report. Precision control is being ceded to the machines.

How to manage these changes

This change means advertisers will have to be increasingly diligent about mining search query reports and thinking ahead about unintended consequences when word order matters.

There are a few things you can do to prepare for the coming changes.

1. Review existing exact match queries and determine if the loss of function words or a reordering of the words changes the meaning. Add those variations as negatives in your campaigns.
2. Review close variants in your Search Query Reports to see if other variations are currently being triggered that might be affected by these changes. Add those as negatives.
3. Starting in April, step up your mining of Search Query Reports, particularly for close variants.
4. Get ready to update your scripts. If you are using a script like the one from BrainLabs to make exact match exact, it will need to be updated. We will provide a link here when a new version is available.