Why Business Needs Local SEO?

For the past few months, I was struggling to get my restaurant business in Denver, Colorado on the initial pages of Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing. I finally found a solution to all my difficulties - Local SEO. I contacted a professional SEO company offering local SEO services. After evaluating my business and its visibility issues, the SEO team offered me with an SEO package that included a wide range of strategies designed to enhance the search engine page ranking of my website and drive more traffic and sales. Let's look at how these strategies worked to promote my business.

Local Business Listing Sites: Local SEO makes use of local business listing sites (e.g. Yellow Pages, Yahoo, Google, Bing etc) that target geo targeted terms, for optimizing local search results. The SEO Company provided strategies that helped increase the ranking of my local business listing on these sites. Now, when someone searches for Denver-specific data relating to my business, the information on my business that is stored on all these sites appears as a top search result.

With improved online visibility, I found that more local customers have started to visit my website, which is working to promote my brand. My SEO service provider took care to choose only local listing sites authorized by Google for promoting my small business.

Back linking:  Local SEO services include building inbound links to a business website. In keeping with Google's latest Penguin update, my SEO service provider took care to build backlinks to my website from reliable websites with content relevant to my business. I understood that relevancy was important because the search engines identify keywords on the basis of the backlinks. Another significant factor is link speed or the speed at which backlinks are created. The SEO team built backlinks slowly and systematically, as any unnatural speed could make Google look at my links as spam. In addition, they also employed tactics such as social bookmarking, article and forum submissions and other off-page activities. Keyword variations, branded text, and other strategies were adopted to improve results.

Social Media Promotion: They also used effective social media optimization strategies to drive target audience to my website. They built my business profile on popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and more and created posts in them which helped draw local customers to my website. They spread the posts via 'Share' or 'Like' buttons. As search engines, particularly Google, show search results from social media sites (Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and more) these profiles are also helping to drive more organic traffic to my site. The SEO team also promoted my business by creating videos and images of my restaurant and sharing them through YouTube and Pinterest.

Social media marketing involves the maximum utilization of marketing potential with the features (paid advertising facility, contests, business pages in the case of Google+, and more) in social media sites. In my experience, focusing on a particular social media site for marketing purposes (Facebook Marketing, Twitter Marketing) is the best way to promote your business online.

Online Advertising

Pay per Click advertising (paying money to search engines to display your website on top search results) is observed as a powerful way to promote business online due to easy implementation, high ROI and better traceability. The SEO team provided my business with PPC advertising services, also known as geo-targeted PPC. The advertising was focused on the Denver area, which resulted in more local customers visiting my website. Both open-ended keywords and focused keywords were used in my geo-targeted PPC.

The local SEO services provided by the SEO Company help to attract more local customers to my website and helped in the online promotion of my restaurant - something which I definitely couldn’t have achieved on my own.

SEO Strategies after Penguin 2.0

Now that Penguin 2.0 has been rolled out, online marketers are ardently analyzing its impact on search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. Penguin 2.0 features a new generation of algorithms, goes much deeper than former updates and impacts even smaller areas quite significantly. The main aim of this update is to penalize spam websites and ensure that only high value websites achieve top search results rankings. Penguin 2.0 has affected around 2.3% of English US search results.

Matt Cutts states four main issues that Penguin 2.0 will tackle:

Content

Like former algorithmic updates, Penguin 2.0 highlights the significance of quality content. Matt Cutts says that if you have high quality content, then no need to worry about the different changes that the new algorithm has made. Ensuring you have original, informative website content, articles, blogs, product descriptions and press releases are necessary to enhance your SERP. So what this update prompts is the growth of a content strategy for both on-site and off-site optimization.

Industry Authority

The new update has the ability to detect authority in the particular area. So if you are a physician with authority in your space, your website would rank higher in search engines. Google’s search engine algorithms will help your website if it provides visitors with information on their issues, attracts links from other authoritative sites or publishers, gets a lot of attention on social networking sites like Google Plus, and has a decent way of converting traffic to sales. Normally spammy sites will be automatically demoted.

• Author Rank - Google created Author Rank to identify and trace the identity of genuine authors across the web. What you need to do is set up a Google+ account and have authorship markup implemented. Participation in Google+ allows Google to evaluate and rank you based on the content you are sharing, your audience size and quality, the number of +1s, and so on.
• Rich Snippets - Snippets help users to identify whether the search result from a particular website is appropriate to their search. Your Google ranking depends on rich snippets in its search results. Gain more authority with an author rich snippet that allows your name and picture to come up along in search results related to your content. 

Consider these factors seriously while optimizing your content for Penguin 2.0.

Advertorials

Google has imposed stronger measures to deal with advertorials that violate its quality guidelines. Penguin 2.0 will target any site that pays for coverage or advertisements. These advertorials will not flow PageRank. This simply means that you cannot improve your ranking by purchasing authority. This could seem a threat to link building for search engine optimization. But, the fact is that the new algorithmic update supports natural link building.

Link Profile

Clean up your link profile if you don’t want to be hit by Penguin 2.0.

• Link Value - Links from bad neighborhoods that use unethical techniques can affect your website’s ranking. Reliable guest blogging ensures that the links are acquired from reputable sites. Publishing original content with your link in it is a high value backlink.
• Link Velocity - Penguin 2.0 penalizes link spammers. Keep an eye on the rate at which your website acquires links.
• Link Relevancy - Building links from sites that are not related to your industry will affect your rankings in a Penguin 2.0 environment.

Build the Right SEO Strategy

Google is also planning a variety of additional quality signals for sites that close to border zone of being affected by the Panda algorithm. This is expected to soften the effects for sites with some quality that were previously affected, says Cutts.

Penguin 2.0 update has given a new meaning to search engine optimization though Cutts has made it clear that the new algorithmic change targets web spam, and not SEO. However, the right search engine optimization strategy can help your website. Consult a professional SEO company providing affordable SEO packages that can boost your natural search engine ranking in the face of these changing algorithms.

Google Plus Marketing Strategies

Google Plus is better known to be a corporate account providing the facility to share company information among a wide circle and encourage followers. It allows business owners to connect their businesses with customers and attract more traffic to their websites, which will finally lead to more conversions.

The whole process of utilizing Google+ facilities to increase the traffic to a business website is termed as Google Plus Marketing. The most popular strategy to enhance Google Plus Marketing is to link your website with Google + page, either by generating a relevant Google + profile or mentioning about the website in the post. Other than that, there are quite a lot of strategies that encourage successful social media marketing with Google Plus. Let’s look at the best ones among them.

Widen your Circles and Use Google Plus Ripples

Arrange your Google + connections into various groups using ‘Circles’ feature so that you can share posts with specific groups from which you can receive maximum traffic. You can sort connections into Circles of family, friends, social media, news and much more. Ripples is a Google Plus feature which can show up the entire circles of shares with a openly shared post and help you connect with the most important influencers in your business field.

Submit Posts Consistently and Optimize for SEO

Post relevant content consistently to increase the PageRank for your posts. Higher PageRank will drive more traffic to Google+ posts and then to your blog or website. Write original content and use the right keywords throughout your posts for gaining a better place in search results. Add suitable images to your post for increasing the reliability of the content. Approach a professional SEO company and employ search engine optimization on your entire content to make it more competent.

Promote Interactive Google + Posts

An interactive Google+ post will have the facilities of call-to-action button and deep linking. Call-to-action button helps customers to take relevant action based on the product or service described in the post. For example, if you add the call-to-action label ‘Buy’, then it will allow the customers to explore the ways to buy the product. Obviously, it will drive attention of more customers to your post and finally to your business website. Deep linking can direct the clicks received for interactive posts to Google + app installed in mobile devices so that it can drive traffic from mobile users too. Interactive posts also include ‘Share’ button for sharing the posts among circles.

Use Google + Huddle and Hangouts

If you have added your clientele into your Google + circles, you can communicate with them more effectively using Huddle and Hangouts. Customer feedback is also an important factor in any business. Huddle provides group chat facility by which you can keep in touch with your customers and access their feedback. Hangouts provide you with video conferencing and group conversation facility which is an effective communication tool for social media marketing.

Adding +1 Button to Your Websites

If you add Google’s +1 Button to your business websites, it will give you a chance to recommend the content in those sites to friends and followers in your Google + account. Log into your Google Plus account and you click the ‘g+1’ button, now  you can see a window with a text field to enter the e-mail address or Google Circles or Groups and ‘Share’ button. You can add the circles by clicking on the desired group. Like this, your business website can draw audience attention towards the website.

Create a Business Page on Google +

Google + Business Page is the latest feature released by Google + only for entrepreneurs. If you already have a Google + account, you can create a business page after choosing relevant items from five categories such as Local Business or Place, Product or Brand, Company, Institution or Organization, Arts, Entertainment or Sports and Others. Once you fill in this crucial information, you can customize the page by adding photo and tagline.

Google business page can give your business an identity and the details you have entered earlier will help your page come up in top search results during location specific search, product specific search and more. This will drive traffic to your page and slowly to your business website. Other from that, it contains the facilities such as Ripples, Hangouts and +1 Button which open new possibilities of social media marketing.

Google Analytics Updates to Goals

It is very significant to evaluate how people communicate with your website so as to check conversions, leads and user behavior. Google Analytics provides three types of tracking tools for understanding these interactions − E-commerce tracking, Event tracking and Goal tracking. E-commerce tracking is used to measure performance of your sales, while event tracking is used to evaluate a user’s behavior or actions on-site.

However, in addition to sales and user behavior, you need to measure if a visitor performed an action that could affect your bottom line. Conversion results when visitor performs a desired action such as submitting an online form. If you have an ecommerce site, your goal is achieved when a purchase is completed. Google Goals allows you to measure such interactions including media plays, social connections, the amount of time spent on a screen, newsletter sign-ups, or a minimum purchase value. You can set up individual goals to track each activity. Whenever a goal is converted, it is logged into Google Analytics account. You can find out how much the conversion affects your business by assigning a monetary value to each goal. The conversion rates in Goal reports can help you to improve your SEO efforts and marketing strategies.

Google has now announced several updates to Goals to make it easier for you to measure and track all these activities in a much better way with a new set-up flow, new templates, and new verification capabilities.

Setting-Up Goals

The steps for setting up Goals are same in new set-up procedure like going to Admin->Profiles->Goals. The only difference is with the presentation with new visuals making it easier to complete the steps.

Introducing Templates

Google has now added new templates to make goal set up easier than before. 20 new Industry Categories have been added to Google Analytics. The templates are organized into four business objectives, such as Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry and Engagement. You can choose the industry category based on your business from the property settings. When you select a template, it will pre-fill the set-up flow with values specific to your industry. Users can also create custom goals.

You can choose any of these objectives according to the purpose of your goal. However, a ‘Revenue’ goal may not always imply a direct sale. It could be a completed checkout for an online payment or the successful submission of a lead such as appointment scheduling, depending on your business model.

The new templates can help you to add actionable goals more quickly. They also make it easier to find goals that can actually fulfill your business objectives.

Verify Goals

Once Goals have been created, it allows you to check your Goal set up before saving it with a verify option provided at the end of set up flow as shown as below.

On clicking ‘Verify this Goal’ you can see what the conversion rate would have been for past seven days if this goal had been set up. Feedback is instantly available so that you can decide whether to create that goal by clicking the ‘Create Goal’ button or modify the Goal configuration you are considering.

The significance of this update is that you can measure the goals from the moment you define them. This was not so in the past. If you had made a mistake while defining a goal and if someone converted it, there was no way available to measure it. Now, you can test your goal setup based on data over the past week. You know that your goal has to be redefined if the goal was converted but your verification does not indicate this. This preview is available for newly created goals.

Goals Overview Report

The Goals Overview Report available under ‘Conversions’ section makes us understand how often a goal conversion does happen. Google Analytics has added more features to examine correlations between goals or visualize each goal’s performance over a period of time. You can examine the relationships between goals as shown below:

This type of analysis can provide you with a comprehensive view of user interactions and helps you use your marketing resources more effectively.

In addition to Goals overview report, you can look at Mutli-Channel Funnel reports. It now includes off-site interactions that a visitor may have had with your business before completing an online goal.

Analyzing conversion goals is important to find the traffic sources that are actually driving revenue. With more accurate measures of conversion rates, you can adopt the right online marketing strategies to maximize your Return on Investment (ROI). A professional SEO company can provide you with effective conversion optimization services and make a difference to your conversion rates with Goals. 

How to Implement a 301 Redirect

'301 redirect' is the most efficient and search engine friendly way of moving your website. There could be many reasons why your website has changed:

• Redirecting an old website to a new domain address.
• Your website design has changed and has been recoded to adapt to the changes
• Implementing canonical redirect which involves redirecting from one website version to another version of the same website
• You own multiple domains and host duplicate copies of the same site

The most important thing to remember is that 301 redirects is used for permanent redirects i.e it should be used only when you are migrating permanently and not ever coming back. Moreover, 301 redirects have to be implemented properly to ensure that your site can maintain high search engine page ranking (SERP). In fact, not having proper redirects can result in your disappearance from SERPs! So let’s look at some important tips for implementing 301 redirects properly.

Implementation of 301 Redirects Properly

Check the new URLs - Before you start redirecting, make sure that the new URLs for 301 redirects have been configured properly and are live on the internet. If you don’t do this, you would end up redirecting people to error pages.

Use the Right Strategy - The next step is to point the old domain to the new one with proper 301 Redirects. In a Youtube video, Matt Cutts says that the common practice is to put 301 redirects to go to the root of the domain when you are moving from one site to another. Cutts points out this will not help people who are looking for a specific page. He recommends performing the redirect from the old page location to the new page location on the new site.

If you are redirecting to the root domain, you can redirect the entire website at once. But if there are changes to other URL parts such as a new folder structure, you would have to do the redirects one by one. If your site has a massive size, choose the pages you want to redirect. Running a report in Google Analytics or any other relevant platform would help you find all the landing pages that take people directly to your site. If these URLs have changed, use '301 redirect'.

Another way is to look for the pages that Google has indexed. If their URLs have changed, you should 301 redirect them as Google has to know where to find these pages. Google’s Webmaster tools can give you accurate results for Google Indexed pages.

Check Whether the Redirects Are Working - Test whether the old URLs are automatically redirecting to new URLs after implementing 301 redirects. Take a sample of URLs from old sites and put each one in HTTP or HTTPS Header Check tool. The tool will tell you whether there is a '301 redirect' from the old page to the new one. You can also do a Google search and see if each link is going to the right place. For example, enter 'www.viralseoservices.com' into Google and you can find the indexed pages as shown below.

If MOS SEO Services is migrating permanently, then these pages should be 301 redirected. Google’s Webmaster tools can give you accurate results for Google Indexed pages.

Create Sitemaps and Inform Search Engines - After testing, create a XML sitemap with all new URLs for the new site. You should then inform the search engines about the sitemap. Use Google Webmaster Tools such as Fetch as Google with Googlebot or tools from Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center for this.

Wait for some time to see the results. The '301 redirect' will transfer 85%-90% of authority from old URL to new one and this process takes time.

301 Redirects Limits

Is there any limit of using 301 redirects, you may wonder. Cutts says it’s fine – and even advisable - to do redirects from every old page to every new page on your new website. Google will crawl all these pages. However, there are some limits you should know about: multiple redirects can be a problem. If you start with redirecting one page and then keep performing redirects so that you get five or six, in a row, the chances are high that Googlebot would soon stop following these redirects. So Cutts recommends that the best way is to do it in one step because you won’t leave people confused.

Implementing 301 redirects can be somewhat complicated. So the best way to gain maximum search engine optimization benefits from your new URLs is to seek help of a professional SEO company for a smooth transition to your new site.

4 Facebook Marketing Techniques

In the modern world, marketing is a crucial part of any company's success. Most of the businesses are marketing their products and services through a wide range of modern modes of marketing such as email marketing and telemarketing, social media marketing. The most popular social networking sites that are constantly used by businesses are Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn and YouTube. Facebook marketing has become an essential part of entrepreneurs' marketing plans.

There are many reasons why business should use Facebook as their main marketing platform. Facebook marketing services give you an opportunity to directly engage with your customers. The prospect of communicating with your customers not only helps you establish positive image of your business in the minds of existing and prospective customers but also lets you to receive the reviews and complaints about products or services you offer.

4 Successful Facebook Marketing Techniques

There are many Facebook marketing techniques that you can use for launching your new products, finding prospective clients from all over the world and staying connected to your customers? Here are some Facebook marketing techniques that can help business owners stay in connected with their customers and gain global exposure for their products and services.

• Target audience Facebook profile: Your Facebook profile is the very first thing that your potential visitor sees. This is why you have to spend considerable time on your profile. Your profile should have maximum information about your business products, services, specialization, advantages and effectiveness of your products, company history and other relevant details. Providing complete details about your company is the key to create your audience targeted Facebook profile.
• Post highly likable and sharable content: Posting sharable contents will grab the attention of your targeted customers. There are so many ways to get your posts shared. For instance, if you are involved in selling cake baking supplies, talking about cake recipes, celebrity bakers and baking tips will probably be something that your followers can appreciate. Offering discount codes, freebies, contests or sales is an excellent idea to keep them more excited about engaging with your Facebook page. High quality, witty or funny images and quotes, infographics and videos are favorites for followers which encourages them to share the content with their own followers.
• Join groups and create events: If you connect your Facebook account to similar groups, then it will help you find the target audience that may be interested in your products and services. Also, joining various Facebook groups will allow you to increase customers from all over the world. You can also participate in various group discussions which will help you to spread awareness about your business via pictures and videos. Creating events can be helpful for sales promotions, product launches and event-based operations.
• Facebook Ad campaign: Running a Facebook campaign is a great way to show your potential customers what services you have to offer. Create an ad regarding your product using Facebook interface. This provides much faster results and also gets to experience high ROI.

Hire a professional SEO company that provides social media optimization services to boost your search engine page rankings and attract targeted traffic to your website. And also Stay connected with Facebook marketing services to reap the benefits of social media marketing.

Local SEO Strategies for Business

If you want to grow your business in your local area, you need specific SEO strategies to be found easily by potential customers in that area. Local SEO combines the best practices of general search engine optimization with special techniques to help your business get noticed in your local area.

Growing Importance of SEO for Local Business

Local searches have assumed increasing importance in recent years and are critical if you sell your services or products to local customers. More people are searching for local products and services online. For example, if someone wants to find a Chinese restaurant in their area, they would turn to the Internet rather than a phone book to find it. Moreover, with the increasing usage of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets, people are searching for what they need even when they are on the go. That’s why it’s important that they can find you online.

It pays to target customers who are searching locally. For instance, someone who types just “Chinese restaurants” in a search bar is simply looking for general information on such restaurants. However, if the search is conducted with specific local terms added, such as “Chinese restaurant Brooklyn area’, it means the potential customer has advanced along the buying cycle and is more likely to make the decision to visit one.

Search engines provide great local SEO services for promoting your local searches. For instance, Google has Google Maps and Google Places. Local search services can guess where searchers are and provide them with results based on that location. Leading search engines have two indexes that provide data for a local search – regular organic search results and local results which provide information from an entirely different place. If you do well in Google’s local results for instance, your site will appear high on the page next to Google Maps.

Professional Local SEO Services for Promoting Local Searches

Getting your website optimized on leading search engines for greater visibility is not child’s play. Google is constantly changing its algorithms. Moreover, there are lots of competitions out there and only the right SEO strategies can help you rank well on the search engines and attract targeted traffic.  A local SEO company will evaluate your website and business goals to fix on what specific steps have to be taken to optimize your site for locally based search.

A competent SEO service provider would first conduct an effective needs analysis to

• calculate your site’s ranking for business type and your geographical location
• calculate ranking for each web page
• see where is your search traffic coming from
• know the type of visitors you need to attract
• achieve your business goals
• look at your competition to see what phrases they use to rank high.

The SEO specialists would also have to know if you have more than one location and where you typically do business. All this information is then used to optimize your local presence in local search results and business listings using the right combination of on-page and off-page SEO techniques,

On Page Optimization

On page optimization techniques for local SEO would include:

• Choosing the right business-specific and geo-targeted keywords using the free Google Adword tool, Wordtracker, and find the best keywords, including long-tail keywords
• Improving your website’s page titles, geo-specific META tags, title tags, citations, and more: META tags on every page of your website gives search engines a summary of page’s content and also appear in the search results to induce users to click on it.  A title tag with the following structure can get the results you are looking for:

main keyword/city and location first, your business name, and then an additional supporting keyword or information

With right kind of title tag optimization, your business would show up on the first page of search results easily as in this search for “hi definition liposuction New York City”

• Improving your website’s pages and creating search engine friendly content is another important on-page optimization strategy. A search engine optimization company provides you with fresh, informative content that uses local keywords. Several informative content pages are included to your site to create relevancy between your site and your keyword terms. For instance, a healthcare center that hosts a page title “Gerristen Beach Pain Management Services” and uses the right keyword strategically on it is sure to attract prospective patients from that area.
• Put contact info on all pages of your site. Build your local SEO pages and gets traffic to the right pages of your website with your address, phone number and a map. Putting searchers on a page that includes contact information is very useful especially if they are using a mobile device to get information in their local area.
• Other strategies include submitting an XML sitemap to Google and Bing Webmaster tools, insertion of social media buttons on site pages for sharing, and more.

Off Page Optimization

Off-page opt techniques for local SEO would include conventional techniques such as registering your site with top search engines, listing your products in product directories, getting local business listings, article and blog marketing, getting local reviews, and more. Blog commenting, guest blogging, testimonials and forum discussions are great link building strategies. Google+ local is a great place to push for reviews.

Social networking is one of the most significant ways to optimize your website and boost the authority of your business. Being active on Google+ offers many advantages for local businesses:

• Using local tab with personalized and social recommendations for specific Google+ Local pages
• Creating valuable backlinks to their business
• Zagat review data to get your business ratings
• Google+ Local business pages are being integrated to Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Mobile.

Finally, a professional SEO company would provide you with ongoing reports to measure visitors, traffic source overview, landing pages and conversion tracking. This will help keep track of how well you are faring and if necessary, revision of your local SEO strategies for the best outcome.