Whether you’re selling personal investment strategies, fitness coaching, or jewelry-making accessories—if you’re selling locally—then aim your SEO tactics locally!
Local SEO is a highly effective way to boost your business to the top of the local results. Here’s The 10 Irrefutable Laws of Local SEO:
Have a local address: If you want to list in the local directories, you’ll have to have a local business address.Even if the bulk of your business is done outside your city location, use your business’ physical address to list locally anyways. The stimulated local traffic will only increase your chances of ranking higher in the search results.
URL Address: If your biz is local, then, make sure to get the city name in the URL address. This, along with quality local content, and locally descriptive title tags and Meta descriptions will help your website become more search-engine friendly.
List in the local directories: If your business or website is locally listed, Google local, Google Maps, and Yahoo local are, in a nutshell—one of the best ways to generate search referrals quickly. The more local information that you give the directories about your business, the more the directories will reward you!
Local keywords: Whether it’s your website’s content, title tags or Meta descriptions, make sure to add locality keywords like your city and state.
Localized content: When your writing copy for your website, make sure it’s properly geo-targeted. The more continuity your website has with localized keywords, the more search engine friendly it becomes and subsequently it’ll be easier to rank in higher local search result positions.
Localized title tags and Meta descriptions: Making your title tags and Meta descriptions localized with local keywords will help add to your website’s continuity as well as help generate more local traffic.
Investigate your competition: One of the best waysto better position yourself in your local market is to spend time examining competitor analysis. Use tools like compete.com to get detailed data on your local market competitors to find out what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what you should be doing differently.
Localized Press Releases: To boost your website’s local authority and subsequently climb up the search engine results, start generating press releases to local media. If you want to avoid using PR firms you can either run your own in-house PR or you can use sites like prweb.com
Blogs: To add even more authority to your local business website, start a local business blog write for it on a weekly routine. The more blogs per week, the more fresh local content the search engines see—making your site stand out in the local search results. Not to mention, you can also start linking out to other blogs, as well as potentially having other blogs link back to you.
Video Marketing: Another method you can use to try boosting your business’ local web authority is to post videos about your business that include your company name, local city names, local keywords and links back to your site.
No matter what types of products you’re selling in your city, these 10 local SEO tips will help you boost your web traffic and your business.
Let’s face it, there are plenty of websites out there that aren’t getting nearly as much traffic as they deserve. You can offer a top-notch product or service, but without taking the right startup steps your site may not get a single visitor. Your best chance to gain online popularity is to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices to get your site up to speed.
In the simplest of terms, SEO aims to increase a website’s organic traffic by helping it place better in search engine results. Here is a list of basic steps to consider when you begin the SEO process:
• Redesign your website. It can be difficult to keep up with the latest trends in web-design, but it is crucial that you have an interesting and professional looking site. Many web surfers will immediately navigate away from a webpage that looks amateurish or too confusing to navigate.
• Research the popular keywords in your niche. Find those that are used frequently, yet are possible to dominate. For example, the keyword “Shoes” would be incredibly difficult to place for, but “Italian shoes” could be narrow enough for your cause. Google Adwords and SEO Book offer great tools that can help you find popular web searches related to your topic.
• Improve your site’s architecture. An easy-to-navigate website offers many SEO advantages. If your important pages are deep within the site, it can be hard for search engines to index all of your content. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that your most important pages are no more than one or two clicks off of the home page.
• Optimize your title tags and Meta descriptions using your niche’s relevant keywords. Title tags help search engines understand that your site is relevant to a specific topic, while meta descriptions convince potential visitors to click through. Title tags should be no longer than 65 characters and meta descriptions no longer than 160.
• Correct any and all broken links. Broken links make it difficult for search engines to index your pages and can prevent you from getting listed in major, online directories. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a great, free tool that allows you to easily identify any broken links on your site.
• Setup necessary 301 redirects. Did you know that yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are recognized as two different domains (even though they point to the same site)? When others link to your site, they could use either of these addresses and split your traffic. You can automatically direct all visitors to the www. version of your domain by using a 301 redirect.
• Correct URL structure issues. Keep your URLs short and sweet. If, for example, you have a page located at www.yourdomain.com/info/brochures/57/faq.php, try to shorten the address. www.yourdomain.com/info/faq.php is much easier for search engines to locate and index. It is also helpful to use keywords in your URLs. If you have a page that is about discount Italian shoes, call it yourdomain.com/discount-italian-shoes.php.
• Install Google Analytics to monitor site traffic. This is a free service offered by Google that allows you to monitor the number of visitors to your site, the keywords they use to find you, where they are from and much more.
• Produce 5 to 10 new, original articles based on keyword research each month. Fresh content ensures that your site will be frequently indexed by search engines. Never post text that you find on other websites, as duplicate content will result in search engine penalties.
These steps should be employed on all websites, no matter the age or existing traffic volume. It’s risky to say that any tactic is guaranteed to boost a site’s visitor count; however, the methods listed above tend to have very positive results whenever they are used.
We are so happy to announce our brand new SEO training program. It consists of over 15 videos, 3 companion guides, and are in total over 3 hours in length. This is truly the best training program on the web. We want to share it with all of you at a special introductory price and even have an amazing coupon offer for readers of our blog. Check out the program here. The coupon code is “200DollarsOff” just enter it at check out to save an amazing $200!!!
PPS - What People Are Saying About Jeremy’s Ultimate SEO
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that’s exactly what it felt like when I started playing your
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Author and Health Consultant
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Hare Auto Group
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This really teaches you HOW to get results. I recommend this
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Jared Hamilton
Founder & CEO
DrivingSales.com
” Finally, an SEO guy who doesn’t use smoke and mirrors to try and
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“SEO is a process, constantly evolving but a process none the less.
It’s a commitment to applying best practice over a period of time.
It’s a commitment to consistency of approach and it’s a commitment
to making your business more profitable.
How’s that ? Better organic listings means more new customers will
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If you are prepared to put in the hard yards, you have a desire to
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“Pay per click marketers tend to “settle in” to a pure PPC marketing effort. This is a serious mistake, not only because they’re neglecting the opportunity for a LOT of extra volume (65% of searchers never click the PPC ads) and dollar cost averaging … but because PPC and SEO are slowly but surely merging as the Adwords Quality Score spider becomes more and more sophisticated.
In this powerful mp3 interview Jeremy and I review Rocket Clicks best practices for a new search engine optimization campaign. Listen carefully and you can implement them yourself, or have Jeremy’s team prepare a SEO Blueprint for you to use on your own”
-Glenn Livingston (more…)
I just wanted to update the readers of this blog a little about my spare time events. Friday night my good friend and I started recording some demo’s that have been songs for a long time, it is my hope that this is the first of many I will be posting here over the following months. Take a listen:
Unnamed Song Demo:
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I have had the pleasure recently of being a part of a call with Internet Marketing Guru Dr. Glenn Livingston. I wanted to share the conversation with you. It is a little long but there is some amazing information in there. Turn it on, and just work away, if you have any questions please feel free to email me at support@indieresults.com.
Learn how to list your local business on Google local business center. Listing in Local Business Center will help give your business instant visibility online whether you have a physical address or not. There are a lot of things you can do once you have submitted your business to make sure it ranks well within the Google Local results. Whenever people search for a business in your area they are likely to be served Google Local results and having your business there is huge. Here is how.
This is a little more advanced than our typical blog posts but it a concept anyone running a website should always keep in mind as they design their overall site structure or add additional pages to their current structure. To get the maximum about of bang for your buck so to speak when you create web pages there is a very specific formula you need to follow. We will use our orange website for an example and also remind you before taking on any web project it is a really a good idea to chart out your pages, keywords, and title tags before hand. We will include a nice little excel spreadsheet you can use to help stay organized.
We will use a little more complicated example other than a home page, let’s say this is an inner page selling t-shirts made from oranges. (Yes I know that’s crazy)
Best Example:
Title Tag:
T-Shirts Made From 100% Oranges Best Selection Online | Site Name
On Page Content:
Lots of great content about orange made t-shirts, and important keywords relating to searches on that topic
Meta Description:
Come See The Nations Best Selection Of Orange Made T-Shirts. 100% shirts made from oranges. Special Internet
Use this format whenever you create web pages on your website and you will tend to rank much better than those who choose to not be so diligent. Google really appreciates a nice quality flow of information from beginning to end, and really so do the web surfers. If they see a listing in the search engine results that makes sense, has a great message, and communicates well is always far more likely to get the click over one that doesn’t.
Making your message clear and easy to follow is a good practice for your potential clients as well as any search engine spiders. We as people like everything to be neat and clean.
If you have ever done any Pay Per Click advertising, or even considered it you know there are a lot of things that can affect what you pay per click. It isn’t all about who offers to pay the most. Google and others want to see continuity on your ad copy, your sites URL, and the on page copy. For many pay per click advertisers this is a afterthought, or something they passively work on. For our clients that start out on the right path for SEO find their cost per click drastically reduced, their cost per acquisition as much as 50% less, and their overall conversion ratio higher. The point is an early commitment to SEO whoever small will help your website greatly when you want to add some pay per click advertising for a couple of reasons it will also save you a lot of money in development costs since you will have to redo very little work. We will list a few of them below.
Relevant URL Structure
One of the early steps in search engine optimization is creating a nice clean relevant URL structure. It should be inline with the content on the page. If it is a page selling discount widgets naturally the site address should be something like www.yoursite.com/discount-widgets. The reason having this already done helps is that Google likes to see a nice relevant URL on your website especially on landing pages. If you have already make a commitment to this it can save you loads of time and money with it comes to launching a Pay Per Click campaign.
Good on Page Content
Another basic exercise of traditional search engine optimization is having relevant on page content. If your website is about selling oranges, you would have content on your page about oranges not apples. Now while this seems sort of obvious when put to an example like this we see it all the time when taking on SEO clients. The problem isn’t so much on the index or home page but on the inner pages. If your orange website has sub pages about say mandarin oranges don’t make the content about oranges alone make sure it is specific. This is the basic fundamental behind getting a great quality score with Google’s Adwords program as well as ranking well in traditional search results. Making a commitment to this early will groom you in the future when you start doing PPC.
Good Meta Descriptions & Title Tags
Another beneficial step on all organic search engine optimization plans is having relevant title tags and Meta descriptions on each and every single page of your website. When it comes time to start running pay per click advertising you will already be trained to produce top quality title tags, and meta descriptions further helping you when you have to develop landing pages and increasing your quality score.
Just these three items are only a small part of what is important in pay per click advertising but we can guarantee they will have a big effect on your websites quality score according to Google and reduce you cost per click significantly. As always any questions feel free to comment or submit an email to support@indieresults.com
While everyone knows search engine optimization is no easy task regardless of what niche or vertical you are in, there is something important to note about businesses with a physical location. On Most SEO jobs we take projects for businesses that have a physical location, and also target the area around that location have achieve a very dominating position online with a few simple tasks. While we understand sharing these with our blog readers might cost us a little work that’s fine by us. Other than servicing our clients accounts we also like to keep everyone informed on some of the little things they can do on their own to help their business grow online. The point of this post is simply to bring light to an untapped resource many of the sites we audit have.
Local Identifiers Multiply the Effect of Your Efforts
You may be first wondering what a local identifier is. Basically someone looking for a shoe store may type into Google or another search engine “shoe store” but what is far more likely is they would type in “shoe store city”. For example, if they lived in Dallas Texas, they might type something like “shoe store Dallas” or “shoe store Dallas TX”. When they type is local information this is when Google and other search engines tune into their local maps, and local links, content, and listings for the results they serve the person searching. The point is, if your business serves a particular area, and you are located in that area, scream it from the rooftops!
How to Scream It from The Rooftops (and search engines)!
There are a few easy steps most businesses can do to can a competitive advantage over their local competitors.
*Have a Nice 5-10 Page Website (more content is better)
*List the Physical Address of Your Company on Every Page (Use The Footer)
*List Your Business on Google Yahoo and MSN Local (this is free)
*Write On Page Content to Include Local City Name & Surrounding Ones
*Find Local Business Directories to List Your Site & Physical Address
*List Your City Area in Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Obviously this is just a short list but it is unlikely many of your competitors are doing even the simple entry level things like this. These steps are some of the first things we do with any account local or otherwise and they show some of the quickest and deadliest results. If you run a local business regardless of size local SEO should be part of your marketing plan no matter what and many of our clients fit right into this mold and find themselves at the top of the search engines within a few months of focusing on local search engine optimization. If you have any questions please comment below or email us at support@indieresults.com
Let’s face it, there are plenty of websites out there that aren’t getting nearly as much traffic as they deserve. You can offer a top-notch product or service, but without taking the right startup steps your site may not get a single visitor. Your best chance to gain online popularity is to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices to get your site up to speed.
