Question about SEO for local businesses

Additional Points that make it a bit harder:

They don't want to change their domain name/ URL

They are on shared hosting - and don't want to change or mess around with their hosting.

Thank You for your help!!

thanks for this help i really very happy with your this information about seo

It's usually not hard to rank for local businesses, unless you're dealing with a really competitive keyword. I suggest you create mini sites manually and hire someone from fiverr to bookmark your client's site and create backlinks (through whatever method) for the mini sites to make the links stick.

The principle thing to keep in mind for ranking any site, local or nationally is having a firm foundation in which the site is built upon.

It begins with keyword research so you can actually find the phrases you want to rank for, and once that's done you need to properly structure the web site so its optimized for those phrases.

At a local level one can rank a web site without having to do any of the offsite stuff like back linking and such, and I don't recommend doing any of offsite SEO until the site begins to at least rank on page two at a minimum.

What you'll find is that many local sites aren't well optimized so you have two choices. Either spend the time dealing with the clients existing web designer to make the necessary changes, or get a new domain to use for them so you have more control over the process.

I'm not sure I'd worry too much about SEO for locals (did I just say that?). Depending on HOW local I'd say that building the person-to-person visibility, likes, followers, email list for weekly deals etc, is more valuable. In my experience cheap and consistent outreach to the people that already know about you is a great way to build business. If they don't have a site - build on, if they don't collect emails fix that, if they don't send out consistent offers schedule them, offer referrals ... be everywhere - the SEO will take care of itself.

Great info koaxfrax and rus sells!! Thanks a lot.

I'm more with Rus Sells, do your keyword research ahead of time. It really depends on the market whether you need to even worry about backlinks. Most of the time just getting the site and major profiles optimized properly take care of the problem.

If you decide to do some offsite backlinking like you were talking about then you are right don't risk your customers reputation with low quality backlinks. Make it look natural leverage social media sites, bookmarking and micro blogs to help you build some links back. This way you can use quality content but don't need to go have tons of articles written.

I have also used the old but proven Mike Koenig technique of using Q&A video mini interviews to rank for harder terms. By the time anyone met my client they thought she was a rock star or something, lol. And it didn't take a super advanced video camera either.

You should not spin articles

Personal experience by working with 2 offline clients.

In both cases, although they had a website they had very poor onpage optimisation and also targetting keywords which had very little traffic.

To this end, I did the research for high traffic keywords, carried out onpage optimisation and then started working on offpage optimisation.

In both cases, I have used warriors from this forum to assist with back links and I am pleased to report that both my clients have achieved Page 1 ranking for a farily competitive keywords within 90 days.

Hey Amy,

Let me just say this up front - don't use spun articles or any other dodgy elements for any work that you do for any client - online or offline!!!!

All that has to happen is that their site is sandboxed because of some dodgy practice and YOUR reputation is severely compromised. Rather charge more and do a proper job.

As Rus and enavagate have already mentioned - do your research first:
- evaluate the competitive Google Places listing, see how many images and or videos as well as reviews/citations they have. For instance, say the top listings have 10 images and 1 or 2 videos and 13 reviews, then you know exactly what you have to do to beat them.

- Keyword research is massively important....you have to know what local people are searching for and use those terms to appropriately optomise your images etc

-You make the comment "I learned sometimes a site needs SEO to be able to rise up in Google Places local search." - I think you need to realise that On-Page SEO is vitally important. In fact, all the search engines are putting more and more controls in place to validate the ranking of websites. So if you are offering an website development....please, please make sure that you include SEO as a STANDARD offering. If you don't you will hurt your client sites.

I firmly believe that On-Page optomisation will become more and more critical in the near future.....

Read what Matt had to say in this recent Google blog post:
Page layout algorithm improvement - Inside Search

Now you might argue that he is talking about too many adverts screaming at you on a webpage.......but if you read between the lines, he is actually talking about good quality, relevant content and "a good user experience" Where do you think SEO fits into that?

Now ask yourself the question - "if I have good quality content that is extremely relevant BUT I don't do SEO - how will Google return my webpages to meet the search query????"

Just one thing - some time ago, Google started rating the speed at which a website loads.....everything in the speed test relates to On-page work.....everything!
See here: Page Speed Online

Anyway, I hope that helps you a bit....

Regards

Greg

There are many backlinking sources you can use for offline companies, that look natural and not spammy.

The first thing is Business directories that are free and accept links. This includes Google Places, yelp, brownbook and others.

Optimize their major social media accounts (facebook, twitter, linkedin, google+) with followers and activity. Constantly test new social media sites and make sure the business looks good on each.

Create powerpoits, videos and images and use as content on the large sharing sites. Make sure to optimize the profile with content and a link back to the website. On many of these pages you can also submit a link in the description field for each piece of content. Most of these are nofollow, but will often bring some traffic and minor link juice.

The more content and more regulary you use these sites, the better the profile will become in terms of SEO and often also followers.

Build web 2.0 websites presenting the business and their products. You do not need to make 100's but rather spend some time making pages you can proudly send to your client.

You say that local businesses brand, image and reputation are important to you. Is your charging price high enough??

Local SEO is actually really easy but SEO is something I've been doing for 7 years.

Structure and optimise their website - even if they don't pay you for it directly - they are paying you for results so just put the time in to ensure the website HTML is perfect.

Often I just use a software I own, we have only opened it up to the public for the past 2 days and have almost filled up our allotted slots available.

If it isn't available at the time of reading then the first thing you can do is add to places like Yelp, optimise their Google Places listings and get on the directory's that get traffic.

web 2.0 works, so do articles and any other backlinks. Do them from different ip's, proxies and sydicate everything - also don't forget the social side. Doing SEO yourself can have a relatively steep learning curve so try not to get frustrated and ensure you are constantly learning and doing.

Good luck

You should put some quality content in your site and optimize the content for such keywords that will generate targeted traffic to your site.You should do keyword analysis for that.You should do good On page SEO for your site.You can hire a web designer to build structure and content of your site.