In this blog post, we'll talk briefly about "Why Your Local SEO Sucks" and what you can do to improve it. Most of the steps outlined below are pretty simple and can be done pretty quickly. If you aren't feeling up to the task up updating potentially hundreds of pages, feel free to call us or send us an email at [email protected] and we'll be happy to help you out!
You haven’t claimed your Google Business Listing.
Creating your local Google business listing is probably one of the first things you want to do. This is not only where customers can find you, but where customers can also leave reviews and read reviews to decide whether they want to do business with you or not. Make sure you upload plenty of pictures and include your company logo. Of course you want to fill out the basic information such as your local phone number, address, opening hours, and choose the correct category for your business.
NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) isn’t consistent.
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. This needs to be 100% consistent across all of your webpages and even other websites that cite your business information. One tool that can help you correct these issues of other websites citing your information incorrectly is fromYext. When you go to that webpage, it will check all the citations of your business and let you know where your business is and is not listed and any misinformation out there.
You have no local reviews and have spent no time trying to acquire them.
We’re not just talking about reviews from Google. There are plenty of other places you want to try to score reviews from such as Yelp and Facebook. Talk to your current customers and see if they would be willing to write a review for your company. Do not buy fake reviews. These are easily spotted and will hurt you a lot more than that will help you. You might even have some customers who don’t know how to leave reviews. Leave some instructions for them at the bottom of a service page or contact us page with a URL to your Yelp page or Facebook. You might be surprised at how far that can go!
No local on page SEO efforts
You’ll want to make sure you have your city and region across your important landing pages. For example, if you own a car wash in Dallas, Texas then you will want to have something like this:
URL: example.com/dallas-tx-car-wash
H1 Tag: <h1>Our Dallas Car Wash Location</h1>
Add Dallas somewhere a time or two in your landing page body text.
Use Dallas in your image ALT attributes.
You can also find a creative way to implement a Google map marker on this page as well. Doing these on page SEO tactics will have a big impact on your SERPs.
You don’t have any backlinks relevant to your industry or local area.
SearchEngineLandsays “Compared to standard SEO campaigns, local SEO relies much more on links from other local websites that are really relevant to your business. It’s less about getting links from high authority websites (although that obviously helps) and more about getting links from websites local to you that are talking about similar things to what you do.” So one thing you can do is sign up with your Chamber of Commerce. They have member directories and you'll most likely get a do follow backlink from this. You can also use SpyFu to spy on your competitors and see where they are getting their backlinks from. It is a wonderful tactic to take the guesswork out of building back links to rank in the SERPs.
Final Word
When performing local SEO, put yourself in the consumers shoes. Make sure you have an account set up at Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, and Google at the minimum. Make sure your name, address, and phone number are consistent across all your webpages. Fix any errors right away. If you already have local service pages, run through them and make sure your title tags and other tags we talked about above are optimized for local SEO in your service area. Your customers want to find you and you want them to find you as well, because that means potentially more business for you!
why-your-seo-sucks.jpg
In this blog post, we'll talk briefly about "Why Your Local SEO Sucks" and what you can do to improve it. Most of the steps outlined below are pretty simple and can be done pretty quickly. If you aren't feeling up to the task up updating potentially hundreds of pages, feel free to call us or send us an email at [email protected] and we'll be happy to help you out!
You haven’t claimed your Google Business Listing.
Creating your local Google business listing is probably one of the first things you want to do. This is not only where customers can find you, but where customers can also leave reviews and read reviews to decide whether they want to do business with you or not. Make sure you upload plenty of pictures and include your company logo. Of course you want to fill out the basic information such as your local phone number, address, opening hours, and choose the correct category for your business.
NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) isn’t consistent.
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. This needs to be 100% consistent across all of your webpages and even other websites that cite your business information. One tool that can help you correct these issues of other websites citing your information incorrectly is from Yext. When you go to that webpage, it will check all the citations of your business and let you know where your business is and is not listed and any misinformation out there.
You have no local reviews and have spent no time trying to acquire them.
We’re not just talking about reviews from Google. There are plenty of other places you want to try to score reviews from such as Yelp and Facebook. Talk to your current customers and see if they would be willing to write a review for your company. Do not buy fake reviews. These are easily spotted and will hurt you a lot more than that will help you. You might even have some customers who don’t know how to leave reviews. Leave some instructions for them at the bottom of a service page or contact us page with a URL to your Yelp page or Facebook. You might be surprised at how far that can go!
No local on page SEO efforts
You’ll want to make sure you have your city and region across your important landing pages. For example, if you own a car wash in Dallas, Texas then you will want to have something like this:
URL: example.com/dallas-tx-car-wash
H1 Tag: <h1>Our Dallas Car Wash Location</h1>
Add Dallas somewhere a time or two in your landing page body text.
Use Dallas in your image ALT attributes.
You can also find a creative way to implement a Google map marker on this page as well. Doing these on page SEO tactics will have a big impact on your SERPs.
You don’t have any backlinks relevant to your industry or local area.
SearchEngineLand says “Compared to standard SEO campaigns, local SEO relies much more on links from other local websites that are really relevant to your business. It’s less about getting links from high authority websites (although that obviously helps) and more about getting links from websites local to you that are talking about similar things to what you do.” So one thing you can do is sign up with your Chamber of Commerce. They have member directories and you'll most likely get a do follow backlink from this. You can also use SpyFu to spy on your competitors and see where they are getting their backlinks from. It is a wonderful tactic to take the guesswork out of building back links to rank in the SERPs.
Final Word
When performing local SEO, put yourself in the consumers shoes. Make sure you have an account set up at Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, and Google at the minimum. Make sure your name, address, and phone number are consistent across all your webpages. Fix any errors right away. If you already have local service pages, run through them and make sure your title tags and other tags we talked about above are optimized for local SEO in your service area. Your customers want to find you and you want them to find you as well, because that means potentially more business for you!
Why Your Local SEO Sucks | NexaCore IT