Check Out What You Need for Local SEO

Local SEO has evolved over the last several years from a fairly simple proposition to one that is a little more involved. While that may seem “harder” on the surface, what it actually offers is a lot of opportunity for those who are willing to do what’s necessary to get their sites to rank well locally.

Toward that goal, we’ve listed several best practices you’ll want to be aware of when it comes to local SEO. Some might not be new to you, while others will. Bear in mind, it’s a stew, and all of it works together to make it tasty!

Local SEO Best Practices

Increase your site speed – Google loves a speedy page load, and besides, people simply won’t wait for your slow pages to load.

Optimize for Mobile – With half the traffic on the Web these days originating from a mobile device, it’s insane to ignore this any longer. Make a responsive mobile version of your site today.

On-page SEO – Make sure your title tags, descriptions, internal links and website schema are all representing your business the way they should.

Get more Reviews and Citations – Reviews are starting to overtake citations, but for now both are still important.

Acquire high-quality links – Make it your business to get the best links you can, from relevant high authority sites and high traffic sites. This is best if it originates from your content.

Give your content a local flavor – As much for visitors as for anything, ensuring that your content appeals to the local audience is a good idea.

Geotag your images – Geo-tagging your images with local geographic information tells Google what it needs to know, and greatly improves your chances of showing up accurately in Maps.

Encourage social signals – In addition to likely being a search engine signal, social media can become a far-reaching evangelist for your brand.

NAP data – As always, making sure your business information is consistent across ALL your platforms is a must. You should probably start right here!

Local SEO may be a touch more involved than in years past, but the rewards for getting it right are also greater. Don’t let it wait another day!

Why should I buy from you right now, instead of buying anything else from anybody else next week or next month?

That’s your Unique Selling Propostion or as I’d like to call it your Unique Irresistible Offer. If you have a great answer to that  question, you can charge more money, invest more money into marketing or develop new products or offers for your audience, etc. If  you have an awful answer to that question, you’re in trouble before you even begin and there’s no headline or copywriting in the world  that can save you.

You might think you have an Adword, a Facebook Ad Campaign problem or a copy problem but most likely you have a Unique Irresistible Offer problem.

Selling to the right person is more important than all the sales methods, copywriting techniques, and negotiation tactics in the world. Because the wrong person doesn’t have the money. Or the wrong person doesn’t care. The wrong person won’t be persuaded by anything.

Having a Unique Irresistible Offer get rids of the wrong person, prospects, customers or clients. When you have a bad Unique Irresistible Offer you’re constantly fighting downward price pressure. You fight with other people in terms of prices and delivery. You feel the need to justify how much you charge or what your product or service does. You have to knock on lots of doors.

If that’s you, then there’s something you’re not promising, something you’re not guaranteeing or not communicating specifically enough that’s keeping you from being unique and keeping you from making more money.

There are four questions your Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Irresistible Offer Should Answer:

1) Why should I listen to you?

2) Why Should I do business with you instead of anybody and everybody else?

3) What can your product do for me that no other product can do?

4) What can you guarantee me that nobody else can guarantee?

What Can You Make “UNIQUE” about you? Think of these examples:

1. Your product is unique. It has guaranteed result. It’s tailor made for X kind of person. The user has a guaranteed “experience”

2. The market you serve is unique. Your focus is middle schools only or businesses with 15 employees or fewer.

3. Service. Guaranteed delivery in 24 hours or less. Guaranteed personal access to you. Guaranteed 24 hours support.

4. Your Price is Unique. You may have a premiun price. There are guaranteed add-ons that other competitors don’t offer at your price or which let you ask a higher price.

When you have a Killer Unique Irresistible Offer, you have the following: – Your products and services are easy to describe and fun to show off – Customers line up to buy from you – Writing ad copy is a lot easier – You raise your prices and get no resistance

– You dictate the terms of every transaction and your customer willingly follows.

So there you have it. Accept the challenge to be different. Take the time to create your Irresistible Offer before you do anything else in your business. Your uniqueness in the marketplace is what your right customers are looking for!

I challenge you to create your Unique Irresistible Offer right now or if you would like me to help you craft it for Your Lead Generation System, apply for a complimentary “Lead Generation Blueprint Coaching Session” where we’ll help you design a FREE marketing strategy for Your Business.

Click HERE to apply For a Complimentary Consultation. No strings attached.

I’m excited to see if we can help! 🙂

 

If you have a local business and you aren’t utilizing local SEO for all its worth, then you are likely missing out on a huge chunk of your audience! Likewise, if you are attempting but failing at your SEO efforts because of lack of knowledge to flat out blunders, you also will be pretty lonely hanging out at the ol’ website. So in an effort to avoid that dreaded scenario, let’s identify 7 downright daffy local SEO mistakes you’ll want to avoid at all costs!

7 Local SEO Mistakes to Avoid!

1. Create Separate Listing for Each Location – Not having location-specific listing for each of your locations is a lazy blunder. If you want to rank for your locale, be sure to create listings for it, and don’t compound your error by duplicating the content from other locations.
2. Your Content Marketing Isn’t Local – If you opt for the one-content solution fits all approach, you won’t rank as highly for local terms, and, you will fail to win the trust and business of those locals who do find your page. Include local color!
3. Not Optimizing for Mobile – Having a site that mobile ready can make all the difference! Since now more than 50% of people browse on a mobile device, it’s imperative to be optimized for mobile.
4. Flawed or Non-Existent Keyword Strategy – Not having targeted the correct keywords, or worse, no keywords at all, is a recipe for failure. Shoot for a mix of longer tail, more local in intent keywords, and only target one main keyword per page. You will rank for more than that, but you need to give Google a clear picture of what your pages are about. Whatever you do, do not keyword stuff! If it doesn’t read like you really wrote it, or you can read it with a straight face, you may want to look at that.
5. Not Getting Reviews! – It’s a large mistake not to hit up your most satisfied customers for positive reviews. This will help you in so many ways. Whatever you do, don’t pay for or otherwise generate reviews on your own. They will be found out, and your site won’t see the light of day for some time!
6. Bad NAP Data! – If your NAP data, (name, address, phone) is inconsistent across all your web and social platforms, you will not fare well. It’s easy enough to do; simply make sure your business information is presented in a consistent manner.
7. Not Utilizing Videos for Local Terms – As well as Google ranks YouTube videos, it’s a bonehead play to not create videos utilizing local search terms. Moreover, they are easy to produce and very quick to implement! 

Have you made any of these mistakes? How is your business using Local Search results to gain more exposure and increase revenue?

Maintaining your online reputation is a tricky exercise, one demanding equal parts diligence and creativity. In a day when Google is apt to rank the latest news relating to your site on the first page, irrespective of whether it is representative of your business, you have to be able to not only know about these attacks, but be able to react to them.

There are steps you can take on a daily basis to mitigate the effects of these events, and we’ve complied a handy list you can use every day to help manage your online reputation!

6 Tips to enhance your online reputation on a daily basis!

1. Monitor your online presence – The first order of the day is to be cognizant of what is being said about you and your brand. To attempt to handle this on your own without using many of the handy tools created for this purpose is madness. Employ tools like Google Alerts, Mention, and Topsy, among others.
2. Ask for customer reviews – Your customers are your best source for positive reviews and endorsements. Don’t be shy about asking and rewarding them for these! This can usually help push any negatives further down the search results pages, where it’s unlikely they’ll be seen.
3. Try to be pleasant! – Even if it goes against every grain of your being, being pleasant to your customers, even the ornery ones, is a sure-fire way to grow more of said customers!
4. Check the Google search results – Doing regular searches in Google search and in Google Images will help you locate any less than positive mentions of your brand quickly.
5. Add to the positives content about your brand – Be sure to move the meter in your direction by contributing positive content about your brand anywhere you can, the more authoritative the better!
6. Reward positive mentions with links – This can serve several purposes. It not only puts the focus on your content, but in addition gives links to authority and relevance, rewarding them in the process.

Maintaining an awesome online reputation is a bit of work, but is totally necessary in an environment where we can be trashed quite in minutes!

How to Think About Links in 2014

While plenty of people in the post-Penguin Google reality would have you believe that link building as a form of helping you rank better in the search engines is dead, we beg to differ.

Not so fast, as stated by Google’s own Liege of link building Matt Cutts states: “Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover (how relevant or important somebody is) and maybe, over time, social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.”

Now that we have that cleared up, let’s look at some of the best practices for link building in 2014 and likely beyond.

Internal linking on your site – Internal linking means the links you have on your own pages that (hopefully) lad to more relevant content on your site. Google views this as a help to your visitors, and as long as you don’t overuse the linkage with tons of excess keyword links, such as extra menus and tag clouds and stuff like that, you’ll have some love too. Link from textual content to other textual content, and use anchor text that is prudent.

Google+ shares – It may not be Facebook yet, but Google+ can get your pages indexed rapidly, and this definitely benefits you in your search rankings.

Guest blogging – Having your posts featured on popular blogs has long been a way to garner links, but have you considered being the blog that accepts the guest posts? This can also help collect links, in addition to helping you build authority and content.

Curate popular content on your own site – Every now and then we find a post or piece of content that has gone viral in our market and is of interest to your readers too. Curate this onto your own blog, giving attribution of course, and encourage your own readers to share it with their social circles, thus sending them to your pages!

Relevance and diversity – Google is all about relevance now, and so the days of getting a ton of links irrelevant to your niche and having that actually work are over. Obtain relevant links, and make sure to vary the anchor text coming into your site, if you’ve got any control over it.