Intro. Class is in session.

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2 Intro Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your business s website is vital for bringing in customers. Seem complicated and overwhelming? Don t worry! We re here to break it down and make the subject a little comfier for you. SEO, you say. It s the process of optimizing your website in order to rank higher in a search engine s (like Google s and Bing s) organic results. But we re here to teach a short course in Local SEO. Class is in session. 1

3 What you need to know Local SEO. It s a subset of your overall SEO marketing program. If you ve already optimized your site for search engines, you might find yourself thinking that you re done with SEO. Before you get too comfortable, you should know that if your business has a physical location, additional optimization for local search is more than worthwhile. In fact, it s actually an integral part of your SEO planning. And even if you haven't tackled SEO at all, local SEO is a great place to start. There are 7 billion local searches in the US each month. That s more than seven million local searches, or about 235,000 each day, in each of the nearly thousand metropolitan areas in the US. No matter how you cut it, that s a number you just can t ignore. Google tells us that local optimization accounts for around 18% of Google s ranking factors, and it s rumored that this will increase in importance with upcoming changes. 2

4 Why is it so important? Gone are the days when consumers sit at their kitchen tables flipping open a 25-pound copy of the Yellow Pages, skimming through a bunch of listings to find local businesses. The first thing one of those 125 million US consumers with smartphones does when they want a smoothie, massage, or guitar lesson is to whip out their smartphone, open their favorite browser, and search to find the nearest, best, or generally most appealing business to satisfy their need. whopping 7 billion monthly unique local searches. Just think back to the last time you were craving a strawberry-banana smoothie. Did you type smoothie into the search bar? Probably not. Most people include their physical location in the search as well smoothie seattle. And that s exactly why local SEO is important. As a business owner, you want to make sure your business shows up when potential customers perform those local searches. According to a recent study, 78% of local searches on mobile and 61% of local searches on laptops result in offline purchases. And that s out of the 3

5 Local SEO Guide Why else should you optimize for local? To pursue higher exposure in Local Organic Results To get listed in the Local 3-Pack Results To have your business s Pin featured on the Google and Bing Maps To have your own Local Knowledge Panel 4

6 Local SEO Guide What s typically searched for locally? If What you need to know any of the following items are things your customers might be searching for in relation to your business, you need to optimize your local search. To locate an address To search for a business with certain product or service To find a phone number To discover hours of operation To get driving directions To find coupons and special offers To read ratings and reviews The first step in any local SEO strategy is getting citations in local directories. Here's a little more that you need to know, and then we promise you can start doing! Citations or local directories. A local citation is a mention of your business on any webpage other than your own. Citations include your business name followed by your address, phone number, or both, and don t have to be linked to your website. 5

7 NAP: Common acronym used when talking about citations: Name, Address, Phone number. Important: Your NAP needs to be listed the same way everywhere! This means every little thing in your business name and address. If your business is at 123 Fun Street on your G+ profile, it better not be 123 Fun St. on your Yelp profile. Details really count in local SEO. Keep these four main factors in mind when creating your listings: 1. Business name. Your business name, or business title, is probably the most crucial factor when it comes to ranking well in local search engine results. Your business title needs to be the same across the board meaning that every single data source must list your name the exact same way. This helps to establish Google s and Bing s trust of your location and existence. Google provides these Quality Guidelines to explain further: Your title should reflect your business s real-world title. Marketing taglines, phone numbers, store codes, and URLs aren t valid descriptors. In addition to your business s real-world title, you may include a single descriptor that helps customers locate your business. 6

8 2. Examples of acceptable titles with descriptors are "Starbucks Downtown" or "Joe s Pizza Restaurant." Examples that would not be accepted would be "#1 Seattle Plumbing," "Joe s Pizza Best Delivery," or "Joe s Pizza Restaurant Dallas." Physical address. Again, the most important thing is to be consistent. For example: Your actual NAP: Mary s Music School, 123 Fun Street, Seattle, WA, Your Google Places account: Mary s Music School, 123 Fun St., Seattle, WA, Your Yellow Pages listing: Mary s Music School, 123 Fun, Seattle, WA, The slight variation in street address might not seem like a big deal but search engines are extremely fussy about details so these addresses will be seen as three separate businesses, and they d lower the search engine s overall confidence in your business and, as a result, lower your rankings. 3. Phone number. Not to sound like a broken record, but focus on consistency! If multiple phone numbers are attached to your business name it will trigger Google and Bing algorithm alarms and your 7

9 Local SEO Guide alarms and your site rankings will suffer as a result. 4. Proper categorization. In search engines, when you create a local listing for your business, you ll be asked to pick 2 10 categories that best fit your business. The engines will use these categories when giving search results for related keywords. Your rankings will be DESTROYED (what? too dramatic?!) if your categories are incorrect or nonexistent, so make sure you choose wisely. Wondering which are the best categories for your business? Here are 13 best practices to help you make the best decisions on choosing categories. 8

10 What you need to do As promised, it s time to create citations (or local listings) for your business Where should you be listed? Local search engines. Make sure you ve covered all your bases. Google Places Bing Places Yahoo Local Yelp YellowPages Foursquare consistently and correctly list your NAP on all profiles Tip Want to see if someone is using your brand name? KnowEm can check and help you secure your name on 500+ social media sites. Local blogs. Reach out to local bloggers! Ask if they ll feature you in a post or review your business in exchange for a free service. How to be featured in local blogs? You re gonna have to get your hands dirty. Social media sites. Set up all the social media profiles that you think you need (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram). Remember, You can find local bloggers by searching [your city] blog. Contact every publication on the first page of search 9

11 results-they re the ones that show up the best Google and Bing results. If you re looking for something more specific, you can also try searching [your city] [your industry] blog. Example If you happen to be a yoga studio in LA, is a perfect online publication for you to go after. Reach out! Keep in mind that these bloggers and sites probably get a lot of outreach from businesses asking for links and coverage. Check out these tips for gaining blogger respect and forging solid partnerships. 10

12 Data aggregators. Pull out the big guns. Give a data aggregator your business's listing information (and some $$$), and it will automatically create 100s of listings for your business cutting out hours of tedious busy work on your end. Here are a few data aggregator companies you can use: your blog search. Search for [your city] business listings or [your city] directory to find even more places to list your local business. Don t forget to get listed on your city s Chamber of Commerce website. What you need to do Acxiom Infogroup Neustar Localeze Factual Local directories and newspapers. Go back to basics break out the papers. Switch up your terms a little from Now that you re armed with all this information, it s time to figure out how to start and avoid being overwhelmed. Depending on many factors (like your budget and the size of your business), there are three main ways you can go about implementing and managing your local SEO strategy. 11

13 Do-It-Yourself Get yourself prepared before starting Moz put together this handy Local Citation Building Template that provides a way to track all of your citation sites as well as a storing place for the most common information required on the sites. Use roboform to autofill signup forms on many sites. Even though you need to be sure to review each site, it s definitely a worthwhile timesaver. Plus it gives you the ability to share across your team With those two tools in place, you re fully prepared to dive in. Here s the game plan: Check to see if your business already exists on the listing. If it does, make sure it s accurate. If it doesn t, add it! Be sure to keep your template updated as you go. Hit all the top sources that we already mentioned? Don t reinvent the wheel. Look for where your competition is listed. You can use Whitespark or just search for your competitors NAPs! 12

14 Local SEO Guide Example If you re a gym owner in Seattle, Mode of Fitness might be a competitor. You find their NAP, search for it on Google and Bing, and, without doing any of the heavy lifting, find pages of different sites your competitor is listed on (in other words, a bunch of sites to consider listing your business on). 13

15 Local SEO Guide Use software. Here are a few tools to help you get listed consistently in for the retail version. UBL. Universal Business Listing multiple directories. While that can be a is another option you have great option, depending on your when wanting to create and situation, make sure you know what you maintain all your business are getting into. listings across the web. Moz Local. A tool that creates Hire out. If you don t have the your business listings and manpower (or willpower) and you have maintains their accuracy, the budget, an agency or consultant consistency, and visibility across might be a good idea. If you want an the web. Yext. A service that easily publishes to dozens of directories. Some will start showing instantly, and some will come up within a few days with very little work. But think twice about it it s over $475 a year 14

16 idea of how much you d be looking to pay if you went in this direction, check out this survey by Moz. So now that you know what review sites you should be listed on, it s time to start racking up those reviews. How to get reviews The best way to get clients to review you? Just ask! But wait don t send that blast review request quite yet. Each review site has different policies around reviews. Yelp, for example, is strict when it comes to businesses soliciting reviews, and if they notice any funny business they re not afraid to act. On the other hand, many other sites go so far as to recommend that you ask your client base directly for reviews. Remember to familiarize yourself with their review policies before campaigning! Note: No matter what review site you're dealing with, it s never a good plan to pay for or unfairly reward positive reviews over negative reviews. Reviews are a learning process for you, too, and a great way to gather feedback that helps you improve your business. 15

17 What you need to do Managing reviews. Let s recruit some reviews. Here are some easy ways to get started. Coach your staff to ask for referrals, especially if an interaction goes well. Create handouts highlighting the sites where customers can review you. This Review Handout Generator will give you a template to create a PDF to send to your clients with simple instructions on how to give you a review on Google. Add badges to your website that link to your review profiles. You can also include links in any thank you s your customers receive when they interact with your business. All right, you ve found the best review sites for your business, you ve got yourself some reviews...but, good or bad, how do you keep track of and handle all the feedback? Be proactive! A good first step is to set up Google Alerts so that you ll receive an each time your business name is mentioned online. Your first negative review might be hard to handle, but it s on a public forum so bring your blood pressure back down and deal with it rationally. Your plan of attack should be to diffuse the situation and appease the customer. Offering a 16

18 a discount or something to make up for the issue is never a bad idea. In the end you should make yourself look as good as possible and can even refer the angry customer to good reviews. Not only are negative reviews a place for you to make an angered client happy, they also bring attention to an area of your business that not might be as good as it could be. This gives you the opportunity to fix something that you may not have realized needed fixing. What else you need to do Optimize your pages: Even if you ve already optimized your website for search engines (or even if you haven t), you need to be sure to cover your local SEO bases too. KW title tags. Keywords are very important, but you don t want them to seem forced or spammy it s not good for anyone. For SEO beginners and experts alike, it s always a good idea to freshen up and expand your keyword list. If you ve done SEO previously, you ll have a good head start on your keywords, but you still need to revamp your list to focus on local SEO. The best way to go about this is to decide your #1 keyword based on what your business does and then add your location. For example, Vinyasa Flow Yoga in Stockton has done a good job. 17

19 Local SEO Guide If you can t select the text, that means NAP in HTML. As we said before but it s actually an image, and search can t stress enough, having a consistent engines can t read it. Get that sucker in NAP (name, address, and phone the HTML! If you create your website number) is vital. Make sure that this info yourself, that just means you have to is included in the HTML of your website. make sure your address is typed out in Note It might look like you have your the source and not inserted as an NAP in the HTML, but it might only be an image. And if you have a designer, image, which Google and Bing don t make sure they know to write out your recognize. Check this by pointing your content. mouse at your address if you can highlight individual characters, it s text, Local website content. Having site in the HTML of your website, and you re content that is specialized to your city is in the clear. a great way to appeal to local searches. 18

20 This is usually done through a blog. Don t be intimidated! You don t have to update it everyday, and it will definitely prove to be time well spent. Need some inspiration? Here are some topics to get you going: Write about what your customers are interested in. A fitness business? Outline some tips on post-work recovery. Music school? How about an article on tuning your guitar? Write about your story how your business came to be, your founder s story, introduce the team, and give the history of what ever it is you sell. Partner with other local businesses that your customers would be interested in to do guest posts on one another's blogs/sites. Everyone wins with this strategy. Your customers and readers get more helpful content, you and the partner get more links and mentions, and all the while you're building community partnerships Write about any upcoming events and how your business is taking part. Leverage common local searches terms. Say you re a yoga studio in New York City. You can host a yoga session in Central 19

21 Park and then blog about it! Imagine the SEO on that one. Write up a spotlight on a current customer or client. Maybe you interview long-time clients, new clients, interesting clients you get the idea. Not only will you get great blog content, but you ll also increase client retention! What s schema? Schema markup is the code that you put in your website to tell the search engine what your data (or HTML markup) means in order to provide more informative results for users. Schema.org explains how important Schema is to search optimization: What more you can do You have a great action plan for nailing local SEO, so here s a bonus tip. Come back to it after you ve mastered the basics. Schema. Not to throw something completely new into the mix, but this is important! Schema, man. 20

22 Local SEO Guide HTML tags tell the browser how to Why should you pay attention to display the information included in the schema? tag. For example, <h1>avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string When you do schema markup correctly, Avatar in a heading 1 format. However, your business will show up with these the HTML tag doesn t give any awesome details in Google and Bing. information about what that text string means Avatar could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user. Where can you add schema markup on your site? Reviews Services or products for sale Events Name, address, and phone 21

23 Hours of operation Now that you got a quick overview of Schema markup and why it s important, it s time to put it into action! Here are two tools that you can use to automatically generate markup to embed in your website: Google's Structured Data Markup Schema Creator Now that you ve learned the basics of local SEO, how to get citations, listing yourself on review sites, and tips for optimizing your site, you can go forth and conquer the local search rankings. We ll see you at the top of the Google results. Class dismissed. Learn more about how you can grow your business. Give Front Desk a call