Video Review
Video Transcription
Being found by your community who needs what you can offer them
is critical to your success as a local business.
Especially right now, right with fewer people out and about for obvious reasons. Your online strategy for funneling people into your business
is more important than ever before. This video will be your
ultimate guide telling you every major step that you need to focus
on so you can show up in local search, making you way more visible.
Of course, more visibility leads to more customers. All stuff that’s guaranteed to move the needle in your favor. And let’s face, it your competition’s probably already doing some of this whether it’s intentional or not. So, if you want to outrank them, you need to do slightly more of it than they are.
So, let’s get into what you can do starting today.
Getting Started with Local SEO
So, let’s get into what you can do starting today.
And, I should say right off the top that when I say local SEO, I mean two different places you can be found.
First is in the map pack as one of these three featured businesses
and second, in the organic search engine results just underneath the Map.
There’s one really important difference between these two placements.
The results change pretty drastically based on the physical location where your prospective customer is searching from. Google’s always trying to show them the closest results to them. The organic
listings underneath that, however, are pretty much the same across the
board no matter what, which is great whether you’re centrally located
or not.
So what I’m going to show you here today is going to work together
so you can ideally show up in both places. Especially for those customers who happen to be close to you. Which you know puts you in a pretty great position over your competitors.
Step #1 - Find Keywords
The first thing you need to do here is to find the keywords that your local customers will use to see you. And, there are a ton of keyword research tools out there, but my favorite one can be found at ubersuggest.com. And, it just happens to be free, and I’ve
got a whole video that I did a while back about how to use
ubersuggest to do your keyword research. I’m going to link to that right
under this video if you’re interested in learning that step.
Step #2 - Setup Your GMB Profile
Next, you need to set up your google my business profile
for success. According to moz.com, the signals you send out with your google my business profile are the single most important factor for
ranking in the map pack. You probably already have a listing
if you’ve been around for a bit. There’s a right way and a wrong way
of filling that out.
If you want to stack the deck in your favor so first off,
make sure that yours is filled out completely 100 percent.
You’ll know how filled out it is because they tell you
with a completion score. But, even if you’ve got a perfect 100
I still recommend going even further than that if you want to dominate.
So, I want to tell you about a few above and beyond measures you can take, starting with the categories you choose to describe your business. Now. They make you choose your top-level category. That’s actually where most businesses stop, but you’re not going to do that.
You’re going to want also to choose a few secondary categories that’ll help you rank for even more keywords. Just make sure they fit at least one of your services, and you should be good to go.
And, you’ll want to pay close attention to the services and product sections on the left sidebar. This will give google some extra content about what you offer, not to mention that these are just really fantastic places that you can naturally work in some of your keyword phrases for extra SEO power.
Now, this is a fairly new development when it comes to google my business. It’s the first time that we see that reviews
are directly impacting rankings. What you should be doing is making a strong push this year to get more of those five-star reviews from your customers. And, you should be replying to every review you get because it’s likely that having your desired keywords in the text of
your reviews will help strengthen your SEO scores.
Not only does replying to a review help your customer service
but if you can work in a keyword phrase in your responses
it definitely couldn’t hurt. Just don’t be obvious about it. The main
emphasis here should always be either thanking them for a rave
five-star review or trying to smooth things over and make things right in the case of a bad review.
Step #3 - Focus On Your Website
Once google my business is an optimal shape for you,
we need to focus on what your website says.
It’s super important to understand that Google is looking for consistency across your google my business profile. Your website should clear picture of what you do and your legitimate business in the area you’re trying to rank.
Even if you can’t realistically rank in the map pack across your entire service area like, let’s say you cover a tri-county area or something, you can create location pages on your website for each city and do the work and hope to rank each of those pages in organic search.
It doesn’t matter if you have a physical location there or not,
but there’s a right way to do this too, and most people do it completely wrong, so, if you want to do it right, a few things to keep in mind.
First off, do not treat these pages as an afterthought. If these location pages are planning on getting actual customers, you need to design them and write the words on them like actual human customers are reading them. In other words, treat them like home pages with actual
persuasion-based copy and benefits sections and testimonials.
While this isn’t necessarily an SEO tip, it kind of is, think about it this way.
If you create these pages purely for search engines, and then you
turn off all your human site visitors in the process; they bounce.
And guess what Google is going to notice? Whose page are they less likely to show to the next person who makes the same? You have to create pages appealing to human visitors, or you know all of your SEO work is
eventually just going to burn itself out due to lack of interest. So, design the pages to look more like well-thought-out home pages. Then, turn that into a reusable template to change the text on each
city location page.
Now, I’m not just saying change the city names. It would help if you changed all the text because unique content is extremely important. After all, if you
reuse the same copy from page to page, Google will only count one version of that page. The rest of the pages are never going to hope to rank for anything.
So, make sure you’re using your most desired keyword phrase along with each city’s name in your H1 header, the main heading on the top of the page. Then, use your main keyword in one or two secondary headings
and a few times in the body copy as well. Then, go ahead and sprinkle in some of your secondary keywords into subheadings and body copy where they read well and make sense.
And, if you have videos, you can upload them onto YouTube and then titling them with that same keyword and city name combination. Then you take that video, and you embed it on your most important pages that you want some extra ranking power. Since Google owns YouTube, having that kind of keyword crossover is just a potent additional signal that you might as well take advantage of.
Finally, give each page a great title and description using that same keyword city phrase in the title along with a little something extra.
This could benefit from working with you or just something that makes you unique in any way. Then, your description underneath the title
should include a few more excellent benefits. The reason you’d want to do this is that you wish your listing to pop out from all the rest of them. So, you can get more clicks than the other listings above you and
beneath you because if you get more clicks than Google thinks you should be getting in your current position, you start to climb up the rankings.
Then, when you have all your location pages live and online,
you want to create a straightforward footer menu and title it something like locations we serve and list them all out using your local SEO keyword phrases as that actual link text. And, of course, for any actual physical locations you have, even if it’s just one, you probably want to embed a Google map on the page for the city that you’re located in.
Just for an example, let’s say you’ve got location pages for every city in boulder county in Colorado, but you’re physically located
in the town of Louisville, let’s say well, then you do all your city pages as usual as we talked about, but then on your Lewisville page you
Just add your Map to the page with your complete business
name address and phone number.
So, doing that will give you some extra power to rank in the map pack within your actual physical location.
Step #4 - Building Citations
Remember when I said that Google likes to see consistency
across your google business profile and your website?
Well, the plot thickens here because they also want to see consistency
between those things and across the entire internet. Specifically, any mention of your business, to be exact. We call these mentions of your
business citations. A citation appears on your social profiles on business directory sites, review sites, anything like that.
The goal is to not only have as many mentions or citations as possible across the internet, but they need to be super consistent, too. I mean consistent with each other and with what your website and your
google my business says.
So, what exactly am I talking about needs to be so consistent. It needs your business’s name, address. and phone number. This is known as NAP.
When you’re building your citations and listing your address on
your website, I recommend starting with the format that they give you that’s listed on your google my business profile.
So, you’ll put in your address, and then they’ll take what you give them, and they’ll put it into a particular format. And that’s what you want to copy and paste. You want to paste it exactly as it’s written out there
and write it just that way on your site and all your citations.
I’m talking about if it says “rd,” don’t spell out “road” on your citations.
If it says number “4C,” don’t start using “suite 4c.”
You can either start building citations manually by doing some research on all the different directories that cover your industry and your local area and then submitting them one by one.
Honestly, this is the kind of thing that I would recommend outsourcing
to a company that specializes in this kind of thing because
it’s not that expensive. And that way, you can concentrate your efforts on the stuff only you can do.
With your location pages, making sure those are as good as they can be
and making sure your Google my Business profile is as good as that can be, too.
That brings us to something good for any businesses SEO, even if you’re a local business.
That’s link building.
Having many good links to your website from other sites has always been a key ranking factor. And, honestly, it’s not any less important
today than it was ten years ago.
And not only do lots of good backlinks help you rank your site
organically, they also can help you in the map listings.
The thing to remember here is you want to make an extra special effort for local SEO to get links, not just from any site out there, but if you can get them from other local businesses, that’s even better because
these links are going to tie you to your local area further.
So, make a list of all the local businesses you may have a relationship with and then reach out to them. Especially if they already have a section or a page on their site where they have links to businesses.
Also, you can quickly get a link from your local chamber of commerce
and your better business bureau chapter. You can also sponsor local events and get some powerful backlinks out of that too.
Still with me? Alright cool.
Now, I know that is a lot. So, if you need to dive deeper into any
of these tips, I put together this playlist of all my best videos
to rank a business locally. So, click right here and then choose the video topic that you want to learn more about. Whether it’s getting more five-star reviews, doing keyword research or, getting backlinks, I’ve got you covered.
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