"Local SEO is just too hard."
Those were the first words of a conversation I had earlier this week coming from a potential client we'll call "Luke." Luke had been working on building his own local SEO presence internally for his dental office for over a year and had not seen the results he expected in a popular top 100 US city. We talked about citations, his trouble getting reviews, and how hard it was for him to get links. He told me he had followed the best practices but had not seen the kind of #1 ranking results he was looking for. Luke was a bit defeated, so I dove a little deeper and asked him more specifically what he'd done. He told me that he had done the following:
- Optimized his Google My Business profile
- Gotten a handful of reviews
- Built the basic citations
- Removed the citation issues I found
- Gotten a few links
- Posted new localized content from time to time
So I prodded a bit further and tried to get some details about his competition. I asked Luke what his competitors had done. He told me that they had done the exact same things he had done. He told me that he watched them and tried to just "replicate" on his own site what he saw from the top performers. This perked my interest and caused me to ask him a real-world question.
"Luke, if you're doing the same things as everyone else, why do you deserve to be rewarded or ranked higher than them? What makes you better?" - Casey Meraz
This basic question had major implications and he finally understood why I'd started asking about the rest of his website's health. As an SEO, it's easy to make assumptions as to what's causing ranking gains, but keep in mind you can never really know the whole picture. We don't know what links they disavowed, and we sure don't know which links Google sees but that other link detection tools are not picking up.
It's time to break free from local SEO tunnel vision.
In this article, I'm going to talk about some tactical things you can do to market your business and increase your local SEO presence. To do so, we have to break free from our tunnel vision a bit and bring in new strategies on a constant basis. But why should we do this?
With the recent local pack shake up and 2016 around the corner, I think it’s time that SEOs and marketing managers start to look to the future.
What do I mean? Almost any post you read online pertaining to local SEO is quick to point out that you need the basics, such as a strong citation profile with no duplicates, quality links, and some local on-page optimization. But does it really stop there? Should it stop there? Or should we be looking at the signs Google’s been giving us? It's no secret that Google has been moving towards taking on more organic signals. What does the future really hold for us and how should we be advising our clients?
What I'm going to be covering can be broken down into three main sections:
- Don't ignore the basics.
While I am telling you to think outside of the box, I'm not saying you should ignore the basics. Having a strong basic foundation to local SEO is key to your long-term and short-term SEO success. - Think more about traditional organic ranking factors.
We are going to do a deep dive here where we'll talk about the reasons and implications of having a solid website with more of an organic SEO mindset. - Don't stop believing in citations and links.
We know that links are important both for local and organic SEO. Why stop with the basics? As long as they're healthy, keep trucking along.
1. Don't ignore the basics in local SEO.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time covering this, but it's important to reiterate it. Local SEO is built on a strong foundation of best practices. These include everything from having consistent and non-duplicated citations — which consist of your NAP (Business Name, Address, and Phone Number) on the top directories and data aggregators — to ensuring your landing pages are properly optimized.
Worry about the basics first, then move onto step 2 — traditional organic ranking factors.
To get an idea of what I mean when talking about "the basics," read these cool resources:
– How to Perform the Ultimate Local SEO Audit
– Website Optimization Basics for Local SEO
– Local Search Ranking Factors for 2015
2. Think more about traditional organic ranking factors.
Google really loves their traditional organic ranking factors. How do I know this? Well, whether it was Pigeon, Mobilegeddon, or other updates, you can see that Google is trying to provide users with the best online experience. They don't want to show non-mobile-friendly results when a user is searching on their phone.
It’s no secret that Google’s algorithm is getting more sophisticated every year. As they do this, it becomes clear that they want to provide a great search experience, as well as a great user experience.
This is why we need to take a step back, shake our heads, and start looking around. If you want to be competitive for your clients in the long-term, it would be wise to start taking steps toward the future now.
Below are a list of some of the most common issues I see. For a full list of items to audit, check out Steve Webb's SEO audit here.
Common on-page errors that hurt or hinder local SEO efforts
- Not having a mobile-friendly website
Ok, seriously. You've heard of Mobilegeddon (which was a bit over-exaggerated). But if you're taking your time and still haven't built a mobile site, you need to fix that ASAP. With so many searches being mobile now and with Google caring more and more about organic ranking signals, don't be surprised if you're not rewarded in mobile search results if you don't have a mobile-friendly website.
- Using a bulky and non-SEO-friendly theme
The problem with buying a website theme without testing it for speed considerations first? Page load time. We'll talk more about that in just a minute, but it's a real problem. The reason that websites range from as low as free to thousands of dollars is typically because great websites require a great deal of work. Minifying the code and ensuring that every element loads quickly and properly on browsers is essential. Check out this handy web developers cheat sheet to get a better grasp on the factors that are most important.
- Having slow site speed
Recently I was consulting for a client in the dental field who had atrocious site load times. Google cares about the user experience — if your site takes forever to load, you can bet that will have a negative impact on you. Not to mention, this might mean the Google crawlers will spend less time checking out your website.
- Having a lot of 404 errors
Log in to the Google Search Console and run a site crawl with Screaming Frog to figure out where 404s exist on your website. If you have a bunch of broken pages, you're both missing out on their link juice and you're showing that you're not taking good care of your website. Show that you care about your site and clean these babies up.
- Using 302 redirects
302 redirects from the outside in aren't passing that valuable link juice you need. Since we know link equity is a ranking factor, we need to keep as much of it as we can. Do not use 302 redirects for permanent changes. Fix these and update them to 301 redirects.
- Using 301 redirects internally
If you update a link on your website and it creates a broken link, don't take the easy way out and just create an internal 301 direct. I see a lot of issues with these where, over time, webmasters will lose sight of them and multiple redirect levels will take place. Use a tool (like Screaming Frog) to identify these errors and their source. Make sure to clean them up to prevent issues. Remember, if your links are taking multiple hops, you're diminishing their link value.
- Missing title tags
If you're using Wordpress, you can easily add title tags in a number of ways. I prefer the Yoast SEO Plugin. It's solid, it's regularly updated, and it works to easily update title tags on your pages. Make sure all of the pages on your site are taking advantage of title tags and localized title tags.
- Missing H1 heading tags. Seriously, check this.
Not having local-centric H1 tags is a common problem I see with local pages. One of the problems is that you might think you have H1 tags on your Wordpress theme, but in reality they're not coded that way. Sometimes there are disconnects between developers and SEOs, and this sort of thing occurs frequently. Use a tool like the MozBar browser plugin and page analysis tool to quickly point out if your web page is using an H1 tag. Make sure they're localized, too. :)
- Not having enough hyper-local text content
Remember that Google is very granular on location detection now. If you list that you serve or do work in surrounding local neighborhoods, you're going to get some benefit out of creating content around these areas. It really proves that you know the community and you're a part of it, as well.
- Not taking advantage of hyper-local images and videos
Hyper-local content is not just text on a page. It can be a localized video or photo, as well. If you're serving a specific geographic area and creating content around it, you can tie local visitors into the content and get them to engage further if you're using photos of places they recognize. Localized photos are a great way to create unique content that's relevant to your local audience.
Common off-page errors that hurt or hinder local SEO efforts
- Citations using 301 redirects to other 301 redirects to...
I feel like this is a pro tip, but it really isn't. This is an interesting one that I actually find is commonly overlooked. Let's look at a common scenario for this one:
A common issue is when your citation or link sources were set up years ago, yet you've changed your website landing pages at some point since then. In this case, you probably would have created a 301 redirect so links from your citation sources redirect and pass link juice to the appropriate page. However, what if you've done this several times? What if you built strong links to these old URLs and then redirected them multiple times? It's a link value loss and it needs to be rectified.
The solution is to update your links and citations to point to the proper landing page URL when possible.
- Stop adding new citations due to their citation value alone
Everyone is quick to tell you that the top citations carry the most weight. I don't disagree with that. But I also think there's not a hard-and-fast decision that says you need to stop building citations. Most citations also have a link source to add a link. Nofollow links seem to help local SEO. Why ignore them? If you find quality directories, localized websites, or other places that you can get listed on, be sure to take advantage of them. - Not getting enough reviews
It's cool to rank in the top three results, but our click test studies have shown that many users will bypass the first or second result and click on the third if the number of positive reviews is greater. You need to have a solid review strategy in place in 2015. If you're running a great business and don't have a program for online reviews, then you need to get your act together.
If you need a review solution, check out Get Five Stars — it's a review platform that allows you to easily acquire customer feedback and encourage online reviews.
- Your competition is spamming you in Map Maker
In this post, Linda Buquet over at the Local Search Forum pointed out one way that businesses were scoring a Google One Box by cheating. Basically, either intentionally or through a data update, businesses were taking advantage of the Google Map Maker Alternate Names tab and keyword stuffing them with localized keywords, as you can see in the example below. If you see this, be sure to report it and get them addressed. You can search for these in Google.com/MapMaker by viewing the alternate names.
Something you need to overcome
Keyword-rich domains
They can be "exact match domains," "similar match domains," "keyword-rich domains," or whatever you want to call them. The reality is that if your competition is beating you because of this little trick, you need to step up your game. There is no denying their benefit in local organic SEO; you need to create enough signals to overcome them. Below, I'll discuss how you can do this. With some hard work and elbow grease, you can beat out your competition in this area.
3. Don't stop building citations and links.
So you've taken care of all the SEO best practices and you're still not winning? Where's your elbow grease? Do you think your competition stopped? Do you think they stopped because you're winning? If so, you'll be up for a rude awakening when they surpass you. It's far easier to maintain superiority than to fight to get it back after you've lost it.
This is one of the most common SEO mistakes I see resulting from tunnel vision. As a marketer, when you start thinking, "Well, I've done everything I need to and it's working, so I'll just sit back and relax," all I can say is no, no, no. This is a detrimental mindset to both you and your clients' success. Always keep building the exposure and the brand. Never stop. Please don't stop believing, and please don't ask me to sing that at karaoke... because I will.
Now, let's get tactical with some things you should be doing outside of the usual.
- Don't forget video creation & its benefits
Did you create a video or two and lose steam? Did you forget how powerful videos can be and how easy they are to make? You can get a legitimately good video made on Fiverr for $50 that will blow your clients' minds. The key to this is doing your due diligence and not taking shortcuts. Create the outline, write the text, and order a well-made video. Whether you have a news announcement or want to just repurpose content on your website, video is a great medium. Good video will help your site flourish; don't produce crappy video.
So, what can you do with a video? You can upload it to a number of sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion, earning a cool-looking citation and links to your local landing page. - Don't stop with competitive citation analysis
Competition analysis is easier than it ever has been. We have tools like Whitespark, Brightlocal, the N.A.P. HUNTER Extension, and Places Scout to easily identify competitors' citations. There is no reason not to keep a running list of these and a small commitment of, say, 10 new additions per month based on your top ten competitors in a space.
If you don't have access to the tools listed above, you can also just do a Google search and see what listings come up for the competition that you don't have.
- Start getting new links & don't stop
Luke mentioned during our conversation that "getting links was too hard." Let's think about that statement for a moment. If links were easy to get, wouldn't everyone go for them? Or perhaps they already earned the easy links. Of course, you can always gain links the traditional way by seeking them, for which I'll show you a couple of good resources below. However, some of the best companies are always newsworthy.
The attorneys Sutliff & Stout ran a drunk driving campaign for the holidays. It got them on local news stations complete with real interviews, great links, and a very positive impact on their local visibility. These were real business actions they were taking that resulted in media attention.
If you need ideas, here are some you can take home with you right now. I suggest reading these posts and making a schedule or a goal. Go after a couple a week. But don't just stick to one link building idea. Diversify, and be careful with your anchor text.
– 11 Ways for Local Businesses to Get Links - Written by yours truly on the Moz Blog
– 35 Sites Which Increase Your Domain's Trust - Shared with me by Adam Steele
– 52 Link Building Ideas from Point Blank SEO
– Building Links with local events from Kane Jamison
– 8 Local Link Building Tactics Beyond Business Listings - Whitespark
– Get Five New Links a Week (Lawyer-centric) - Juris Digital Blog - Integrate your offline marketing and your online marketing
How many times have you participated in an offline initiative, but didn't coordinate it with your online efforts? Real companies tend to be active in the community or have a presence. Whether that means they sponsor a Little League (link opportunity), they host an annual event (event link building), or they get local TV station interviews, these efforts and signals should be coordinated to have the maximum SEO benefit.
And finally... Set realistic goals for your efforts
If you're quick to promise results, make sure you can deliver on your timelines. I work mostly in the legal field with personal injury attorneys. In this field, you're competing with some of the best SEOs, people who have been doing this a lot longer than many of the "fly-by-night" guys. This means that, even though we're doing the right things and following best practices, we still need to be promoting the business everyday. Even taking this approach, the results will take time. It's a long-term investment and you have to stick with it. Set realistic goals up front with your clients and make sure they understand the competition.
With this knowledge, time, and power, you should have the resources you need to think outside of the box and dominate local SEO.
Good ideas. For writers writing local SEO content, I can't stress enough the value I get from Google Maps. I've written about specific areas of London that I have no idea about, all so we can pull in a bit more of that mobile search traffic...hopefully.
I've done the same for many other areas as it allows you to get those smaller subdivisions and counties or whatever that people are searching for with "pizza in Hamilton" or "plumbing in Troy."
I know we're getting more toward keywords here, but that's how people are typing local service businesses into Google. Think about that when you write your blog posts and include some of those rural areas those in the cities often forget.
Good feedback Greg. Do you find yourself using a lot of different subdivisions in an post or sticking to one smaller area per post? How has the traffic been?
I couldn't really say because most of the content I write like that is for others and I can't track the analytics.
I will tell you that in my own state of Montana I've analyzed my Geo Analytics using Google Analytics and it's a real eye-opener to see the map with the large and small blue circles.
That can give you a good idea of areas your content is resonating, areas where it's just being noticed, and areas where you really need to do some work. It's a free way to get a simple snapshot and I'd suggest others give it a look.
I will call it a complete article to understand the SEO Methodology.
Each and every point you have mentioned is really effective and practically they are proven. I am in online marketing since long time and i was lacking and confused about few things like Keyword Rich Domain and 302 redirection. After reading your post i got to know where i was lacking. It helped me to get improve as an SEO Analyst.
Brilliant post.. @Casey
Thanks Nazre, I'm glad you found it useful.
"Don't ignore the basics, but think outside the box."
I used this quote nearly word-for-word in a presentation I gave for local marketers recently. Great post.
Thanks Ben I appreciate it!
This is very informative post. It help me lots while i am performing SEO , It should be perfect and compatible with your websites.These tips will really help to improve brand visibility online. It will increases keyword ranking and traffic to our website also.
Thanks for this article..
Hi Casey,
Love to read your comprehensive guide on Local SEO tips.
When we talk about 404, 301 and 302 errors, we need to fix it to salvage link juice as you mentioned in your post. But we need to fix internal linking as well, chances that your website has internal linking with these 404, 301 and 302 pages. So instead of having internal linking with these links it should be update with 200 OK pages. You can use Webbee SEO spider tool to find out the internal linked pages on your website. I will also help to extract Page titles, Heading tags, meta descriptions, canonical and many more.
Fantastic Article. Explain everything regarding local SEO. All the parameters are very important, I learn some new strategies from this article. I will try to implement these things to improve my local seo ranking. Thanks again.
Great Article! If we ignore the basics in local SEO we'll lose the potential of SEO
Nice article, its has detail description about local SEO, from this article I have learned lots of new strategies and I have tried it and I got really such good result from these changes. Thank you for sharing such nice post. - MoonTechnolabs
Hey Casey, great information as always. I'll be sharing this today at my big G+ Community and Priya already shared it at the forum. As I told everyone there, anything written by Casey is worth a read and a bookmark. This is another classic!
Oh and thank for sharing a link to my competitive spam post.
Thanks for the feedback Linda! I appreciate it. Your community is essential to anyone who wants to succeed in local search.
Hello Casey,
I am in internet marketing business since 2 years and I always feel that I am missing some important factors in doing website SEO, but know through your informative article I understand the basics of local SEO and now I try to think beyond the box. Thanks a lot for the wonderful article.
The local SEO or the SEO on page are a metric which is forgotten in a lot of cases. The quality of your website depends directly to local SEO. If you don't repare and optimize it, the user experience in your web site going down!
As is the case with any SEO program, local SEO has to be built around the core basics. In this day and age, it's so important that the website be well optimized, have a fast page load speed, and to make sure the website is mobile friendly. Beyond that, it's important to regularly work the core of your SEO program and to continually publish great blog content, use social media on a regular basis, address any 404 errors, etc. With consistent effort, traffic and rankings will continually increase.
Hi Casey,
Love to read your comprehensive guide on Local SEO tips.
I totally agreed that common on-page errors can hurt local SEO efforts, so we need to focus on it vigilantly. In you post you mentioned some common on-page errors that we need to be concerned about it. Here I want to add one more thing that we are missing:
When we talk about 404, 301 and 302 errors, we need to fix it to salvage link juice as you mentioned in your post. But we need to fix internal linking as well, chances that your website has internal linking with these 404, 301 and 302 pages. So instead of having internal linking with these links it should be update with 200 OK pages. You can use Webbee SEO spider tool to find out the internal linked pages on your website. I will also help to extract Page titles, Heading tags, meta descriptions, canonical and many more.
The local SEO or the SEO on page are a metric which is forgotten in a lot of cases. The quality of your website depends directly to local SEO
Thanks Casey
You have touched on a couple points I hadn't thought of. We do pretty well with local SEO but it is important to keep improving or our clients competitors may catch up. I have shared a link to your article with a couple collegues.
Chris
Please explain everything about local SEO helps us a lot.
Omg. There is so much here, so many resources. Thank you. With citations, what do you mean avoid duplicates in your citation profiles?
A lot of great information here, great job Casey! We've also found that improving traditional seo signals help boost their ranking in the local pack results, as well as being mobile-friendly.
Very interesting your article . I agree with you in many ways. I've been two months by the local seo my website and position it achieved in the 3 pack . If I were asked for advice, is certainly constancy. ADDING information be provided in conjunction with google + . And on details that have been very effective , apart from NAP , is placed in the business description placing keywords and even more important to place the city where the business is in bold and with a link to google map . Another relevant factor is constantly upload images of products and business with global positioning. The key is perseverance, patience and quality content targeting the interest of customers.
I hope you have been a contribution . Thank you.
Thank you for these tips, they are really helpful especially for an SEO beginner like me. You mention alot about not forgetting to include citations. To be honest this is the first time I've even heard about the importance of citations so that was definitely something new for me.
Hi Casey,
Thanks for giving us a wonderful article.
Thanks again for sharing..
Hi Casey,
Thanks for the helpful article. I'm curious as to what type of content you recommend for hyper-local targeting? We built a page for a nearby city which discusses all of our services. We have a properly optimized picture of a popular beach at the head of the article, lead off the content with facts and friendly information about the city, before delving into the services we offer in an effort to capitalize on city-related service keywords.
I ask with this in mind: a home service business may hit every city in a 20 mile radius from their address. I feel like creating multiple city-specific pages to target organically would be redundant content-wise.
Example: Seattle Power Washing, Redmond Power Washing, etc. all having a list of their services and such.
Also, a follow-up question: Do you think if your homepage is strong enough topically for your industry, you could get away with city-specific pages that don't heavily discuss your services on-page?
Thanks again for the article. Sorry if I rambled on there. :)
Thanks for the information!
Not so long ago we have started to utilize this approach as well. Google sees everything and everything is connected - local, organic, user experience, social media, etc. If you want to be good on one of those, you have to be good in the rest as well.
Fantastic post Casey!
This is one of the best reviews I've read, a lot of valuable information about SEO to start implementing in our websites.
Thank you.
Well done, Casey. This is a very well thought out article with great references.
Good article. If you are serious about going beyond the basics, I couldn't agree more that hyper local content, hyper local images and reviews are the keys to the local rankings (and subsequent conversions). They support everything evolving with semantic search and the new AI from Google - Rankbrain as the next evolution of hummingbird.
I'd suggest combining all three using a tool like Nearby Now to automate the capture of fresh, hyper local content, hyper local images and reviews and then dynamically publish all of it (with appropriate schema) into client's websites on a city by city basis.
this is one of the best posts ive ever read
WOW that massive amount of accurate information and good resources, I'm going to read it again and again, I do not want to miss a detail of the post, as the density of quality words in the post shows a great expert, no blah blah.
I take my hat Mr. Casey.
Thank you
Thanks, I appeciate it!
Wow, that is an amazing source of awesome info and the list of sites and tools to go along with it. I am going to too busy checking out all these sites when I should be working.
Hi Casey,
Thanks for the great article; I have a local client and they are not seeing improvement from last 6 months. You post help me move to right direction. I will work on the tips you have given. Hope to get better rankings after this.
Thanks,
Thanks Casey! This post gave me so much inspiration
Excellent article and useful info, especially liked about 35 sites to trust, thanks for the article
Wonderful post and also something I took away, is what I try and tell people who are trying to understand how to properly approach the basics of optimization, and that is if it can be optimized then do it. This includes everything all the meta data, schema, linking, page elements, load speed, and more.
Great job on this and something that can be both helpful to the client or an SEO.
Great job Casey! Thanks for sharing :) thumbs up
What I find really annoying is that Google doesn't follow these recommendations. :-)
I manage a Google My Business listing that was in the 7 local listing for many years. Either in the top or in the middle and it was fine because the listing has many real positive reviews, so the CTR was good. The company has positive reviews on Google and other 3rd party review sites, the website is optimised, has relatively good Domain Authority, there is fresh local content on the company blog every week, but since the 7-pack is gone, they lost 50% of the previous local search impressions.
If I click on "More Places", the listing is in position 4 or 5, so just under the TOP 3. Annoying as.
What's even more annoying is that two out of the TOP 3 listings have no reviews, the GMB listings are far from optimised, the websites are crap and they still outrank my listing.
Great information and Massively informative! Thanks sooo much!