Archive for category SEO
5 Ridiculously Easy Things You Can Do Today To Improve Your Google Local Search Listing
With the ever-increasing popularity of local search, it’s highly important for businesses to do everything they can to be found within their own communities online. Landscapers, roofing companies, bake shops, doctors, lawyers, scooter dealerships, and wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube man retailers, along with countless others, are all types of businesses whose target market is their local area. The following tips will help your customers find you on the web — even if you don’t have a website yet! (Amazing, I know)
Google’s Local Business Listing algorithm is very much different from the traditional search algorithm. What this means is, your local listing rank does not depend entirely on your website rank. For example, take a look at this:
Notice the first local search result for “italian restaurant atlanta” is Alfredo’s, but the first and second organic search results are totally different.
While reading this article, some of you may find yourselves saying, “This is common sense type stuff”, and you’re right — it is! But the fact is, you wouldn’t believe how many businesses don’t have these simple things taken care of on their listings.
By using these tips, you will improve your local business listing in the eyes of your customers, and simultaneously improve your rankings.
1. Claim your business!
The first thing you have to do is find (or create if you can’t find) your Google Local Business Listing. This is one of the most significant things you can do to help your local search presence.
Open a new tab in your browser, go to Google Maps and search for the name of your business and the city/state where your business is located. When you find it, click on the “more info” link next to the title. In the top right corner of the listing, you’ll see another link that says, “Business owner?”. Click that link and follow the instruction on the page to claim that business as your own. You can also verify the information at this point, such as the address, phone number, etc… which bring us to the next tip.
2. List your local telephone number and not an 800 number.
It’s important to list the local telephone number for your business as the main contact number. Not only do your customers really like this, but Google likes it too.
Some businesses may be using call tracking services as a way to maximize their advertising ROI; this can be a good idea when dealing with traditional mediums, but can be detrimental to your online presence. (For a more technically in-depth read on call tracking and local SEO, check out David Mihm’s article over on SearchEngineLand)
Thankfully, there are other effective ways to track calls. Optimize Atlanta, along with the majority of the search marketing industry, recommends making sure the receptionist is asking every caller “How did you hear about us?”, and logging the information. It’s a bit old-fashioned, but it gets the job done.
*Note: The same local contact number that you’re using for the local business listing should also be used everywhere else on the web.
3. Make sure all information matches everywhere on the web, and is correct.
This is critically important for local SEO. All of your contact information on the web must match the contact information on your site, and your local business listing. For organic SEO purposes, links are vitally important to ranking well in search engine results pages (SERPS). For local SEO, citations are vitally important. Citations are essentially any mention of your business + contact information on the web. Making sure all of your citations are correct will not only boost the ranking of your local business listing, but it will also make it easier for your customers to find you in places other than your site, such as directories.
There are a variety of things that can happen to cause your information to be wrong, such as:
- You’ve recently changed offices
- You have a new phone number
- The name of your business has changed
- Another business has a very similar name to yours
- You share a building with another business (suites, co-ops, etc)
- You’re a newer business, but the previous tenant also had a business at the same location
- Human error
This list could go on and on. The important thing is, it can be fixed.
If you have a unique business name, it will be easier to find all of the places that mention you online; you can simply do a search for your business name and scroll through the results, clicking and updating any incorrect addresses or phone numbers. Look for directories such as Yellowpages, Superpages, Yelp, Citysearch, and any other online directory that might have your business listed. Also look for Chamber of Commerce listings, Meetups, and any other organization or group you might be a member of. Make sure the name of the business, address, and phone number match exactly on all of them.
If your business has a more common name, you might have to manually check the sites listed above, along with any other sites that you can think of who may be promoting your business.
4. Take the time to make sure your listing is in the proper category
Another thing you can do to appease your customers and Google is list your business in the appropriate category. I’ve seen car dealerships listed as repair shops, community banks listed as mortgage brokers, and so on. It’s true that the dealership probably has a repair shop, and the community bank undoubtedly handles mortgages, but that is only a portion of their business. Make sure your listing highlights all the main products and services your business provides. Spend a little time creating a really solid listing.
5. Ask your customers to give you feedback
How do your customers perceive you? Are they happy with their service? Would they recommend you to their friends and family members?
It’s easy to find out, just ask them to give their feedback online. They don’t even have to go to your site or listing, Google aggregates reviews from all over the place and imports them directly into your local business listing for all to see. You could even offer some incentive for posting reviews, such as 10% off the next purchase, or a free draft beer with the next slice of pizza.
The bottom line is, potential customers love to see reviews. It’s easy to get a good idea about a business by reading what other people have experienced already; it builds trust and manages expectations. If I read 4 great reviews about a specific pizza bar, I’d feel pretty confident that I could go into that pizza bar and get great food and service, and maybe a free beer. The same thing goes for law firms, fitness clubs, and any other business that serves the public. It’s the modern day testimonial, but you know that it’s (usually) not a fake.
The key to remember about reviews is that it’s the volume of reviews that counts more than the content. Your goal should be to get as many reviews as possible from your customers. Now with that being said, you don’t want more bad reviews than good ones, so make sure you’re taking care of your customers. This also gives you the opportunity to improve your service by reading suggestions and recommendations from the very people who use it. That’s invaluable information.
CASE STUDY: Optimize Atlanta’s Law Firm SEO Campaign Propels Martin Law Offices’ Web Traffic By 1,533%!
Posted by Brian in Case Studies on November 20, 2009
The Law Offices of T Michael Martin have been providing elite legal services to the south metro Atlanta area for almost thirty years. Mike Martin, a well respected member of a myriad of law organizations, also has served as Municipal Court Judge for over twenty years. Experience counts for everything in the courtroom, and Mike has defended jury trial cases numbering in the hundreds, with more than a dozen of them being cases where the State sought the death penalty. He has yet to have a client executed.
Clearly this Fayetteville Lawyer provides a level of service that clients would clamor for. Any person in need of credible, reliable legal representation deserves to know that the services of this firm are available to them. Up until recently however, the firm’s website couldn’t be found anywhere in search engine results pages, where a vast majority of potential clients were looking.
A high-quality search engine optimization campaign was sorely needed, and fortunately Optimize Atlanta fit the bill.
After only 3 short weeks, the Martin Law Offices website was ranking on the first page of Google’s search results for a majority of the terms targeted by the law firm SEO campaign. Needless to say, the firm was elated. Even the Optimize Atlanta Team was shocked at how quickly the program generated these kind of results for such a competitive market. The firm’s website traffic skyrocketed 1,533% within the first month!
Now, only into the second month, traffic continues to multiply and the firm has already booked clients that found them online via search. Perhaps the greatest thing about this particular campaign is the fact that it has just begun. With ongoing search engine optimization efforts, the probability for future success is remarkable, and The Law Offices of T Michael Martin will continue to get quality visitors who are in need of their services.
Summary of Key Milestones:
- Ranked on first page of Google search results within 3 weeks
- Increased website traffic by 1,533% in the first month
- Already booking clients who found them online less than two months into campaign
What Exactly is SEO?
This is not for the tech savvy. This is written for the small business owner that wants someone to answer the question “What exactly is SEO?” without having to use a technical jargon translator to decipher the code.
After speaking with several business owners recently in the Atlanta area, I realized that a good bit of you really wanted to understand SEO and online marketing better, but didn’t know exactly where to begin. This is my attempt to get you started down a path of learning, and if it helps even slightly shed a ray of sunlight on the cloudy subject that is SEO, then it was worth it.
SEO is a widely used abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. That’s as technical as we’re going to get today, so don’t worry. What this means to you, the business owner, is that SEO is a way to get your website to show up when people are searching for products or services similar to what you offer. Often they will even be searching for exactly what your business offers, but if your website isn’t properly optimized, you likely won’t be found.
Modern search engines have changed our culture. (For more on this, read John Battelle’s “The Search”) People use search engines for everything. For example, let’s say you come home from work and you have a water leak in your basement. (It has happened to me) It’s far easier and much faster to google “Plumber Atlanta” than it is to pull out the phone book, find the yellow pages, flip to “P”, and sift through all the irrelevant other businesses that start with the letter “P”, finally find “plumber”, then…well you get the point.
Now most cell phones are even equipped with a full browser, or at the very least a basic search function. It’s how we find everything, from the latest electronic gadgets, to the newest Coach purse design, to the plumber that is available 24/7. The only caveat is, your site has to show up when someone searches for it.
That’s where SEO comes in.
Most people, when searching for something specific, typically won’t go beyond page 2 or 3 of their search results, so it’s important that your site ranks fairly well for your industry in your target market. Ideally you’d like to be on page one, because that’s where the vast majority of clicks occur. The organic search results here are highlighted. These are the first 3 results for the search term “shoes.”
SEO takes practice, and can take some time to get the results you want, especially if your business happens to be in a very competitive market. It’s better to think of it as an on-going process in which you are constantly learning, testing, and tweaking. There is, however, a good bit of bad information available on the subject, so you have to be careful about where your information comes from. Search engines will penalize you for using less than noble practices. It’s important to use the current best practices to make sure that the campaign will have the most impact, and also fall within the guidelines of preferred techniques for the major search engines.
Many business owners are finding that it’s far more beneficial to budget for making sure their websites are ranking well and getting good traffic than to budget for newspaper or magazine ads. The ROI is simply much better for online marketing campaigns because of the sheer volume of people that use the web. Think about how many searches are performed each and every day. Now compare that with the number of people that have time to read the newspaper everyday. Admittedly, I didn’t survey everyone for this article, but I can guarantee you that it’s not even close.
There is a plethora of different SEO techniques that can be used to improve your rankings and make your website easier to find. Just like with any other aspect of business, some techniques are harder to master than others, but anything that you can learn and implement will be a step in the right direction.
I encourage you to take some time to read and learn as much as you can about SEO and online marketing in general, and how it can help your business grow.