Local SEO

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Hey guys, I love this forum and I love the members here. Thank you in advance!

What is the best way to succeed at local SEO?
Sometimes stupid Yelp would take up the first 3 spots.
Then comes google local.
Then comes the local businesses websites.

So how do you succeed with local SEO for a standard retail store that sells to only people in their radius?

Have the city name as much as you can on the homepage?
Blog content? How do you tie it in with local city names in the blog?

I am thrown off now with Google Penguin and all these google no/no things.
Need to know whats the correct legit way to Local SEO?
I hope you guys get my question
#search engine optimization #local #seo
  • Local SEO is not much different from regular SEO.

    The website need to have content with proper kw optimization - about 1-1.5%. If the store only sells to locals then having the name of the city in your content is a must.

    Creating backlinks is the same as for a regular website. Pay attention to diversity and link anchor.

    From personal observations, it seems that having active social media accounts helps rankings too.
  • Local SEO is all about citations. Scrape a list of good local directories in your area and try to get listed in all of them.
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    • You need a little more SEO then listing your site in local directories unless you are doing SEO for business in a small town

      Nowadays there is much more competition for local searches because businesses spend money for optimization
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    • Local SEO is not only citations..

      It also needs Website optimization and add site backlinks because they are connected, which means if your website have good seo and higher backlinks, your google places business page will rank as well.

      That's it
  • I agree with the comments above. Local SEO campaign is different from the regular SEO. You need to target keywords locally, meaning choose keywords that are often searched within your area. It is best that you conduct keyword research for local keywords then perhaps it may help if you also check your competitor's site. Some useful tools you can use for your keyword research (other than keyword planner by Google) are Traffic Travis and Affilorama Premium tools.

    Make sure that you properly optimize your on page SEO. Try to optimize your local keywords within your meta tags and within your content.

    For your off-page, just like what was said, local SEO is all about citations. Get your site listed in local listing like Google Places. Also try to build links to related, local sites as well. Ans lastly, remember to build a good following through social media sites

    Good luck!
  • you just need to concentrate on the place or location or field where actually this website can hit more. local places are very important to get this data online. you can do some local directory in this case.
  • For Local SEO, you will need to target keywords like keyword+city (i.e., house cleaning houston) in order to rank in your area. This should also help you rank for house cleaning and house cleaning services when a user searches from the Houston area. Also, make sure to build only quality links from authority domains with well-written content.
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  • Concentrate local listing and local ads to build your strong position on your local marketing.
  • Local SEO is quite different from location-agnostic SEO. The ranking factors used to rank local listings are different from those used for "normal" listings.

    When you do local SEO, the goal is often to rank the listing, not the website.

    So, what matters for local is:

    - Citations (online mentions of your business)
    - Google+ ratings and reviews (Plus rating and reviews from other review sites Google used to display them right on its page, until TripAdvisor and some other sites sued them for it).
    - Proximity of your business to the searcher
    - The quality and relevance of the site associated with your local listing
    - Being listed in major local directories with your correct name, phone number and address (you can use getlisted.org to see where you're already listed)

    By the way, as others have mentioned, try to find location-marked keywords. The new Google Planner lets you specify the city and borough when you do keyword research.
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    • Loved the way you sorted out the necessary parts of local SEO. I have got one question, Does typical backlinks like blog commenting, forum posting etc helps local SEO at any way?
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  • Updated content does not mean squat for SEO.

    For local SEO it is mostly about building citations. Get into every local directory you can... Yelp, Foursquare, iBegin, Localeze, YellowPages.com, etc. You should be able to easily find 60+ directories to put your business in. Find all the ones your competitors are using too. In many markets, that might be all you need.
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    • It's all about citations like Mike said and he is on top of the game here.
    • No offense to Mike or LinkAssistant .... but why is everyone mentioning JUST citations?

      Citations are great for ranking a google local but there is so much more to local marketing than citations.

      Here are a few things -

      1) Reviews - Reviews have a huge impact on conversions and also help your Google local rank. I also remember when I was trying to rank my google local and was building tons of citations and nothing would happen. The real magic didn't happen until I got about 30 reviews on various different local listings. Thats when our Google local became really prominent, and people actually started calling.

      2) Geotargeted Pages on Website - Google local all by itself.... isn't all that its cracked up to be. Local directories in general don't generate that much traffic (at least in home improvement niches that I'm in). We might get like 4-5 calls a month from Google local, 1-2 calls a month from yellow pages, 1-2 calls a month from Yelp, but most our calls come from our website.... not local listings.

      So on top of ranking Google local, yelp, etc rank a website for your state keywords (service + state) county keywords (service + county) and town keywords (service + town). Run lists of geotargeted keywords through the keyword planner and see which ones have data, then target all the largest / closest areas in your state.

      I realize that Google is pushing Google local more and more, so its good to have a Google local, but the majority of our business comes directly from our websites, and geotargeted pages.

      3) Geotargeted Youtube Videos - This is something that noone ever mentions. I have channels with between 50-150 geotargeted videos. And these videos rank like cake in Google SERPS. Many of these videos will rank right above google places, and you get a HUGE thumbnail. Considering how few businesses actually do this, its an excellent way to get dirt cheap, highly qualified local traffic.

      Youtube is responsible for at least 20% of all our traffic. That may not seem like a lot, but the traffic we get from YT is unlike traffic we get from anywhere else. I've heard it time and time again from my brother (who I send leads to) and other companies I work with, that the traffic they get from YT is the easiest to sell.

      It took me a while to figure out why. But the only think I can think of is when a person sits down and watches a 3 minute educational video, when they see the company working, see testimonials, see how professional everyone is... credentials, warranties, etc etc, it qualifies the hell out of the traffic. And these people are always the easiest to sell.

      So many people these days don't even trust Google reviews anymore. But when they see a personal review in a video, that catches their attention. So if you're in local marketing, do NOT ignore YT. YT is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get traffic. It takes time, but over the years I've learned how to cut up and spin video content around, so every video looks different, but they're all made from the same basic scripts / images / video content.

      Facebook - I personally despise facebook and do not use it personally. I haven't logged in to my own facebook account for like 3 years. So it kills my motivation when it comes to building up profiles / pages for companies.

      But that doesn't change the fact that if you build up a profile or fan page with friends, if you post on certain fan pages (for me I do a lot of posting on NJ 101.5's fan page and other radio stations) you can get leads. I still haven't perfected facebook, but getting a referral on facebook is a sure sale. If someone recommends you on facebook, that client is not going to research other companies. They will have a certain trust for you that is hard to get otherwise.

      With that said, we don't get enough traffic from facebook for me to say its really worth it. But I've never put enough time into it either. So my bias against facebook shouldn't stop other local marketers from using it the right way.

      Craigslist or Backpage - I don't use backpage and mainly use craigslist. I have ads I've optimized over the years for craigslist, and they are very simple, yellow ads. Almost like ads you see in yellow pages. But the copy is really well done.

      And I have 8 different accounts I use on Craigslist. It takes 2 minutes to login to each account and renew ads. And although Craigslist isn't amazing for lead generation, the work vs reward ratio is definitely worth it. Because you could have renewed an ad 3 days ago, and if a person searches your keywords (you should always tag your ads) they will still find your ad. I've had people find certain ads 2 months after I posted it. And since this is home improvement work, it doesn't cost me a dime, and takes very little time to renew these ads.

      In fact, I know someone wrote a program that autologs into your CL account and renews ads. The problem is it doesn't change proxies / clear cookies, so you can't use it on multiple accounts.

      ---------------------------

      Before I end this, I have to rant about something that bothers me on WF.

      I see a lot of SEO guys on here selling services to dozens and dozens of clients. A lot of these guys work with local businesses. And I've NEVER understood how any of you people can provide effective local marketing for your clients.

      So much so, that I think the general model on this forum (for local marketing) is FVCKED.

      It takes A LOT of work to build out a local funnel for just 1 company. And when I look at the most successful franchises or businesses in my state, they don't work with SEO guys who have 30+ clients. They hire 1 person, who will work exclusively for that business, and nobody else. Or the hire 5 people who work EXCLUSIVELY for that 1 business.

      But you come on here and see the total opposite. You see people serving dozens of clients, and it confuses the hell out of me. Just to learn 1 industry inside and out, takes a lot of work.

      To grow a business in the long term, and run a profitable company, to grow a salesteam, to reduce customer acquisition costs, this all requires A LOT of work. Which is why I only work for 4 different companies and that is already OVERDOING it for me. It forces me to cut corners and there are a lot of things I can't do that I know I should be doing.

      My main point is, there are always 2 sides of the spectrum. Marketers who do a little work for a lot of companies, and don't really give a shit about providing real results. Its more based on a model of "pay me first, then I'll do what I do regardless of the results I produce & if you don't like my results I'll just find a new client so I don't really GAF either way". Then there are marketers who work exclusively for just a few companies. They learn the industries inside and out. They develop huge, well diversified marketing funnels. They don't just generate leads but generate more leads than a company can handle. So it forces them to expand their salesteam.

      And I see very little of that type of marketing on WF.

      -Red
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  • Pay attention to local keywords as well as local citations
  • local seo is not all about citations but citations is a big factor in Local SEO. you have to do correct citations building and build as much as you can like 500+ if you have a huge competition. ask your clients to post real reviews on your GP listing. do KML site map submissions, image copyrighting and geotagging, youtube, twitter and FB page for your business. etc things. If you cannot do these. PM me I am glad to help you.
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    • Getting visibility locally was an easy task earlier. But now it has become very competitive as more local businesses invest in SEO. Here are a few things you can concentrate.
      • Have a thorough analysis on the keywords.
      • It is wise to have a backlink audit to see whether you have any low quality links. Remove them if you have any.
      • Optimize your page, its content, meta content, header tags with respect to your keywords
      • List your business in Google local, yahoo and bing
      • Don't forget to analyze your competitors
      • Submit your business in local directories
      • List your business in GPS
      • Have a review audit done
      • Create citations. Be sure that you use the same NAP everywhere
      • Create social media profiles and update them regularly
      • Have a blog in your own site. This will help in driving traffic to your site.
  • Hi,
    I believe Local SEO is easier than the global SEO, because there are no higher competition in Local SEO. In my country there are very few people who have actually heard about SEO.

    Best way to rank better is to create content with the Primary Keyword and variations of that. Then promoting those pages in relevant websites.

    Make sure to do every possible OnSite SEO, before you start OffSite SEO actions. You can use this WordPress Plugin called SEO Advicer to get OnSite SEO Actions in your WP dashboard.

    Yes, that plugin is mine and I add various SEO Actions in both OnSite SEO and OffSite SEO with how to instructions or links to Tutorials.

    Hope this helps to achieve what you want.

    Best Wishes,
    Shyam Chathuranga.
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    @RedShifted

    I agree with most of what you said but not the part about ranking YT videos on Google, that's just creating traffic for competition on YT. Nobody will get on YT & watch a single video, they'll be clicking that right sidebar on YT (competition). Rank your own self hosted video thumbnail image on Google SERPs & keep 100% of the Google traffic that clicks your link/s.
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  • My advice is make your websie mobile friendly or build a separate mobile website. Because a lot of local searches are from mobile. And it could be easy for you to dominate google mobile search first. For your desktop website, you should try to get some backlinks from local websites in your area. That can be very helpful.
  • Some local business get traffic not just by keyword+city but keyword+suburb. Plumbers, movers, lawn mowing e.t.c

    It is much easier to build an internal page to target each keyword+suburb and rank for it, than the city based phrase. Of course the traffic is very low for these terms but you can build dozens if not hundreds of pages and rank for them all.

    For these suburbs searches most of the time you do not even have to do any external SEO, just standard on page optimization.
  • I genuinely appreciate all of your responses and thank you.
    I was researching around and I read that having a FAQ page will help SEO.
    I guess from the articles I read they said with Google Hummingbird update, it shows to Google that the website provides good content that will provide good content to the reader. Also, already having new fresh good content.

    Let me know your thoughts. What do you think about a FAQ page?
  • I think it is much faster to outsource the Local Seo to an organisation until you learn it yourself. It truly is a long process. That way you can hopefully close some deals in the process of learning. All the best.
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  • Here's a good guide for Local SEO starters: hxxp://blog.remotestaff.com.au/5-factors-that-boost-up-local-seo
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  • The strategy is same, you need to focus more on keywords, tags, do listings, ads, directories submission, blog posting and more importantly quality of content on your site is also effective.
  • Id say just spread the word to friends near by, then if they like your site they will spread it meaning more traffic, but apart from that its basically the same as normal SEO.
  • You need to expand your local business into sites like Yellowicons.com Find Business Online, where people look for local businesses and reviews. Surely it's just common sense that even the extra click traffic when people are searching for local business is just relevant, not to forget extra exposure and links to your website on the internet. That's where I'd start.
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