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.

How to Recover from Panda Update?

Matt Cutts’ announcements of Google’s upcoming Penguin update and the unconfirmed Panda update at SMX West have been reverberating throughout the SEO world. Whereas the latest Penguin update will be rolled out soon, the Panda update can be more gradual and will no longer be announced. Panda updates have been more frequent than the Penguin ones and the possibility of a 25th update already having been felt has sent shivers down the spine of many webmasters. But there are ways to be prepared for Panda outbreaks.

Since the first Panda update, webmasters have been looking to figure out what online marketing practices the updates affect. A permanent overhaul of your SEO strategy may become essential so that you wouldn’t have to waste your time and energy worrying about Panda updates. Here are few things that Panda specifically targets:

Low Quality Content

One of the Panda’s core targets of penalization is websites with lack of original authored content. There are still pages which do not have much original content. Their pages have nothing but links and advertisements. Others have content purchased from the so-called content farms. For genuine searches, websites with shallow or low quality content are of absolutely no use. We all know that Google’s aim is to provide the ultimate search experience, so it is quite easy to figure this out.                

Duplicated Pages to Targeted Keywords

Duplication of content will not be tolerated by Google. We’re not talking about copied content, but pages within a site that are duplicated for targeting keyword variations. There are other ways your site could have duplicated content too, such as session IDs resulting in a website having identical pages. 

Empty Web Pages
There are a number of reasons a website can end up with a lot of empty web pages. Housekeeping issues as well as internal search issues could result in empty web pages. This is also a factor that could invite Panda penalties against the site.     

Too Many Adverts

Websites with large ad ratio are another target for Panda. If ads overrule content and interfere too much with the user experience, that website is not delivering a good service to the user.

Buying Inbound Links

This is a practice which most webmasters may have already given up on, thanks to Google’s relentless algorithmic innovations, but it is worth mentioning. If you purchase inbound links and indulge in such artificial link building campaigns, Google Panda will most likely spot you. This was once rampantly practiced by websites to generate massive revenue at the expense of user experience and satisfaction.

These are the major Panda updates, webmasters should be aware of. Google Panda targets websites following the entire above explicit or subtle black hat SEO techniques and each update only serves to do the job better. This should give you a reasonable idea of what to expect and keep the fears out of your mind each time rumors of a Panda update surface. But something that can really make your job easier would be outsourcing to an experienced search engine optimization company that has a clearer idea of the bigger picture and has years of experience navigating the tumultuous SEO ocean. If you’re looking to urgently remedy these issues, head straight to professional SEO services.