Search Engines

Hyper Local SEO that Will Survive The Test Of Time

Dallas, hyper local SEOLocal SEO has seen some major changes in the past year.  Since 2010 Google has completely changed the way they handle local keywords.  For example “city name + keyword” went from a 3 pack to a 7 pack, then to a 10 pack and then they created a whole new search result category called blended results.  Now, when you search for a local company, you will see a mixture of “places” results, a few organic results, some ads (of course) and usually a few pictures or videos.

Local search can seam like a volatile market, and even though there have been some major changes lately, there is still an underlining steadiness.  Here are 3 straight forward approaches to localizing your site’s content.  I won’t lie to you and say they are easy, but they are simple.  If you follow them, you will see positive results.

 

1. It’s Ok To NAP On The Job 

Your “NAP” is the foundation of all local SEO efforts.  NAP stands for, Name, Address and Phone Number.  Every year David Mhim releases an exhaustive study called “Local Ranking Factors,” in which he reveals the most important on and off page elements in local SEO.  Every year local citations makes the top of the list.  In fact, this year NAP ranked #4 right behind having an address in the city you want to rank for,  (thank you captain obvious, jk,) and verifying your page with Google (which you can do here.)

Google looks at your NAP wAs you can imagine, there are hundreds of millions of businesses worldwide, and they all have a unique address.  Because of this, Google requires that you have your local citation formatted EXACTLY the same every time you list it.  It would be statistically improbable for Google to figure out different variations of every companies NAP and attribute them to the right place. The best way to format your NAP/local citation is to create a text file that lists your companies information, then you can just copy and paste it into different directories.

 

Your NAP might look something like this. 

BrewSEO

530-636-2412

2920 Veda St, Redding, California 96001

Tags/ Categories: example keywords (sorry fellas, I’m not going to give away my target keywords that easy!) 

Image:  Decide what image to use, and stick with it.  

Description: This is an inbound marketing company..etc. 

 

Once you have your NAP formatted go to every local directory you can find (most of them are free) and create a profile.

Pro Tip: Use yext.com to find a good list of local directories.  Instead of paying them to create a listing for you, download their list into a spreadsheet and go make the profiles yourself.

 

Dallas SEO, hyperlocal2. Hyper Localize Your Content:

Once you have your local citations under hand, it’s time to start optimizing your site. (You do have a website, right?  If not, go find a good web designer and hire them to build you one!) There are a few things you can do to instantly improve your rankings.

 

Have your NAP on every page of your site 

One of the easiest ways of doing this is to put your address and phone number in your site’s footer/header.  It’s up to you how you list it, but make sure it’s uniform and user friendly.

 

Use Local Keywords In Your Page Titles

If you have a carpet cleaning site, you can create a page title that looks like this: City Name Carpet Cleaning | Your Company Name.  When you make a title, put your keyword first, and your company name second.  Unless you have a household brand, it’s better to keep your keywords on the left of your brand name. This will help you rank higher in SERPS, and it will tell visitors exactly what your site is about.

 

Hyper Localize Your Images

When you upload an image, make sure the image is named something relevant to your local keywords.  Use the name of your city, and your keywords in the image title.  After you upload the image also make sure the alt text of your image uses local keywords. Here is an example of locally optimized alt text:

<a href=”where you want the image to link to“><img src=”the url of your image. This is probably going to be hosted on your web-server” alt=” your local keyword. this should also describe the picture.” title=”the name of your image. this should have your city name in it.” width=”xxx” height=”xxx” /></a>

After you’ve localized the images on your site, you can also upload them to Panoramio. Panoramio allows you to add geo tags to your image.  It will set the longitude and latitude of your picture, and give your site even more local emphasis.  When you upload your image to Panoramio, set the coordinates to your office address.  When you do this it will also allow your picture to show up in your Google Places profile.

 

3. Get Creative With Local Pages


Lastly, you need to have locally optimized content on your website.  We’ve all heard the somewhat annoying mortar, “content is king” while every SEO is tired of hearing this, it still holds some truth.  The truth is that yes, content is still king, but the reasons that statement is true has dramatically changed over the past 10 years.For the purposes of these local SEO tips, your content needs to at least mention your city name and keywords.  If you have a company that has offices in multiple cities, you can  create “local page profiles” for each one of your offices.The trick here is to create relevant and high-quality copy that isn’t duplicate content. There are a few ways you can do this. 

Do Local Pages Like Pink Berry 

Pinkberry takes a minimalist approach to local content.  You can use their store locater to find their locations.  Each location has the store address, store hours, the store’s services (catering, deliver, etc…) the store’s name, and a newsfeed from their blog. That’s it!  If you take this approach, you’ll have to do a little extra link building.  But with a few high-quality links, you’ll be able to rank competitively for your keyword.

 

Do Local Pages Like Nerds On Call

The other option is to take an over and above approach to local content and create a sub-site for each store that has completely unique content.  (This is a project that I worked on.)  Each store has a local page that is highly customized, and has unique content.  You can check out a few of them here and here.

The trick here is to create unique content.  Do not copy/past content from one sub-site to another one.  Lazy duplicate content is one of the worst things you can do to your site.  If your company has locations in multiple cities, the chances are you also have enough employees to make this work.  You can easily leverage your employes to help you create unique content.  If you sell a service, then take the descriptions you used for your services. Interview your employees about the services you offer, and re-write the service descriptions using their own words.  Everyone talks, and describes things a little differently, so you’ll have unique copy about your services directly from an industry expert.  You’ll have to do a lot more work if you choose to use this approach, but it will pay off in the end.

Local SEO is under a major overhaul, with the creation of Google + Local pages, and Google’s new local PPC ads.  Not to worry, if you follow these techniques, your site will survive almost any google algorithm change that happens.


About Bryant Jaquez.  Bryant is the founder of the innovative and creative marketing firm BrewSEO.  BrewSEO is full of SEO Extraordinaire, Social Media Moguls, Web Designer Superstars and Branding Geniuses. You can follow us @brewseo

5 Things Your Dog Can Teach You About Marketing

I have a dog. His name is Dubya. He’s My bestfriend.  (I’d like to avoid any political flaming for having a dog named Dubya, so let’s all pretend I gave him that name because he’s a Welsh terrier.)

My weekends are often spent on my back patio having a cerveza and working on my projects while watching Dub get into trouble in the backyard.  These characteristics he’s developed over the last year and a half can help put some perspective into how you can successfully (or very unsuccessfully) market to your customers or consumers.

1. Dubya is easily distracted –  His favorite toy / best friend in the world is his hippo.  The first thing he does when we get home is say hello, and then go into his home and get his hippo out to take wherever we’re going to be spending the evening.  The funny thing is that he loves his hippo until you distract him with his monkey.. then the hippo no longer exists… until he is re-distracted by the hippo again.

Consumers are Easily distracted and distractable.

Marketing works the exact same way. In a nutshell, I am marketing which toy I want Dub to play with (albeit without any personal gain.) Consumers are easily distracted.  In this era of sensational products changing exponentially quicker than Moore’s law should be accounting for, Marketing is playing a larger role than ever before.  How does apple get users to spend 100’s or even 1000’s of dollars on a product knowing that a “refresh” may launch within the next 10-12 months.  Marketing and Distraction.  It works… and i want the iPhone 5…

2.  Neglect is a BAD Thing –  Dubya doesn’t respond well to neglect. (and I promise we don’t actually neglect him)  Sometimes life throws you a curve ball and you have to work late, or get stuck in traffic and you arrive home a little later than anticipated.  Dubya is on a strict schedule, with his diet and bathroom breaks.  Any deviation from that schedule and he will knowingly punish us for making him adjust his needs.  There have been multiple occasions when we’ve been left liquid and solid presents for our less than stellar accountability.

Do Not Neglect your Customers, you will regret it

Marketing requires a schedule and a plan.  You have to be prepared to touch and nurture your clients and customers.  you can’t write a blog post once every three months (which we’ve all been guilty of at some point) and expect your readership or business to grow.  Obviously unexpected life events affect our jobs, but having a schedule and proceeding with as little deviation as possible is necessary for any marketing campaign to succeed. All industries have different levels of acceptable touch. It takes research to know how often you can ping your prospects, but once you’ve figured out those ideal numbers, deviation will result in lost opportunities.

3.  Having a dog is Fun! – It is important to have fun.  I’d be stretching this post way to thin if I correlated marketing in companionship, so I won’t, but having a dog is fun.  Dubya provides entertainment, exercise, and many other endearing traits that increase my quality of life substantially.

Marketing Should Be FUN!

Marketing should be just as fun.  If you aren’t having fun in your marketing job (or any job for that matter) you should consider looking for alternate opportunities.  Marketing departments are the fun departments.  You frequently get to think outside the box and tackle problems in unorthodox and creative ways.  Whatever you’re doing, have fun.

“There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.”
― Henry Ford

4.  Dubya is Unpredictable – That dog has a mind of his own and he always finds a way to surprise me.  From eating his own poop and watching tv, to jumping into the pool to save my wife when he thinks she’s “drowning,” dubya teaches me something new (good and bad) every single day.

The Market is Unpredictable, so the future of marketing is Unpredictable.

Marketing is completely unpredictable.  A year ago nobody could have predicted that pinterest would become a large player for social media marketing.  People were still discussing how QR codes were going to be the next big thing (fail).  With that, we have  no idea where marketing is going in the next year or two.  Newspapers and commercials are fading out, but what does the future hold.  How will we market to consumers that have been raised with complete access to facebook and how will we market to an entire generation of retiring baby boomers.  It’s all in flux and the only constant is change.

5.  Dubya is 100% Loyal – I don’t think anyone can truly understand the feeling unless they have a dog as well.  Not only is he my best friend, but he’s also 100% loyal.  He “protects” the house and my wife at night, he senses trials and tribulations and offers empathy and affection through thick and thin.  This isn’t automatic.  It’s grown, through nurturing, patience, practice, and time.

Treating your customers right will create Brand Loyalty

This one is a little tricky because brand loyalty can be lost by any department in a business.  If a product is substandard loyalty can be driven away.  If Customer Services is improperly trained or under developed, customers will abandon ship.  If marketing creates a substandard message or over promises on product expectations, then loyalty can be lost.  They say it takes a village to raise a child.  If that is the case, it takes an entire organization to launch and maintain successful products.  Work closely with your coherts and drive for success.  If you have a dog, give him a hug for me.

moz.com – a new search engine from Rand and the team at seomoz?

Edit:  Rand was nice enough to respond and explain a few things… his comment –   “No plans to build a public search engine, though we’ll likely keep developing the back end elements and perhaps someday even have a sandbox where one can see how our algorithms/metrics compare to the engines (definitely a few years or more away).”

Rand Fishkin and the team over at seomoz have been on a tear with their SEO tools over the last half decade.  They have slowly and steadily become the premiere source for SEO news and resources.  The have also been working on a top secret project under the domain moz.com.  What are they going to do with this amazingly short and precise URL?

Could a Search Engine Be In The Works?

The seomoz toolset already provides some of the most accurate resources for gauging online content.  The team has continued to roll-out and update their technologies to provide a precise view of how websites are ranking or should be ranked by the current major search engines.  More importantly, MozRank is the generally accepted alternative to googles PageRank algorithm.

Other key developments in 2012 are showing a much more aggressive push from the team in Seattle.  The company reported over 58 billion urls indexed in january of this year.  This amount of indexation is useful for the SEO products they’re marketing, but with an index of that size, there are obviously additional avenues they can monetize.

Additionally, SEOmoz is going to begin tackling webspam with a very “ambitious project”.  If Rand and his team can get a good understanding of how webspam is being handled by Google and Bing, not only can he provide a better service for his clients, but he can also incorporate those tools into his index and potentially create viable alternative to the primary engines currently available.

Lastly,  Moz just received $18 million in venture capital.  This capital is a welcome lift to the already profitable organization.  They have made it clear here that the capital will allow them to be more aggressive in terms of growth, both organic and through acquisitions.  They also discuss growing the index about 3x to 150b and also “Launch one very big, exciting new project we’ve been building since last year, hopefully in October or November of 2012, but possibly early 2013.”

I am not sure if they are actually building an engine, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt.  Faith in google is at an all time low and startup engines like duckduckgo are experiencing nearly vertical growth… literally  .  There may finally be room for another niche engine.  especially one with an already loyal user base.  And if this engine is willing to disclose a little piece of their magic algorithm, everyone may be a winner.

SEOmoz always preaches whitehat, best practices, are the key to online success.  I think they may be creating an engine that can prove it.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves… Bing has proven that creating a new search engine can be very difficult… and very costly..

 

What do you think moz.com is?