Local SEO is absolutely critical for any business that has a local customer base. Whether you are a restaurant looking for more diners or a car dealership looking to attract more customers, your main focus of online marketing is to attract the attention of people in your area who are interested in your products and services.

So how do you go about improving your visibility with local customers? Local listing optimization happens when you focus on the right avenues for promoting your business online. There are many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can help you to determine the effectiveness of your local SEO work and find out which tactics are right for you. Several of these tactics involve effectively gaining citations with local directories.

Among the KPIs that you need to track your local SEO performance:

Track Local Rankings for the “Big Three” Search Engines: Finding out where you rank in your local areas for searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing is the easiest way to get a sense of the strength of your local online presence.

Go Beyond the Big Three As Well: You also need to track your rankings for search engines, directory and niche sites outside of Google, Yahoo and Bing. This can be an extensive process, so it’s a good idea to use automated tools to help you to stay current.

Check Your Rankings on Local Search Sites: Do searches for your keywords on sites such as Yelp, Superpages and Citysearch to see where you are ranking. Make sure you do enough searches on different variations of keywords to get a strong sense of your rankings.

Maintain Consistency: If you have out-of-date or incorrect business information on a local search site listing, you are confusing your customers. This can also be confusing to search engines as well. Perform regular searches to make sure that your listings are up-to-date.

Track Your Links: You need to know how your website’s visitors are interacting with the links on your site. Tracking these links allows you to review the layout of your site and its content to see if changes should be made.
Monitor Review Quality and Quantity: When a potential customer reads lots of great reviews about your business, it gives them confidence in your goods or services. Along with checking local search sites about the quality of your reviews, it’s also important to be concerned about the quantity of reviews. It’s possible that having more reviews will improve your search rankings. Get creative with ways you can reward customers for reviewing your company on sites like Yelp.

There are many different types of local search sites — each of them are potentially great placement opportunities for your citations. Some of the options include:

• Local Directories (such as Yelp or YP.com)
• Niche Directories (including directories aimed at specific industries)
• General Directories
• Social Platforms (such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn)
• Local Media
• Event Sites

Before you start adding citations to these sites, it’s important to know where you are already listed. There are several free tools available that will allow you to see the local sites that are already listing your company’s information. This is a great way to clean up and outdated or incorrect listings before you start on a local SEO campaign.

As with any part of SEO, local search optimization doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It needs to be part of your overall online marketing campaign — and you need to have a game plan in place in order to maximize your ROI. A few steps to consider before starting:

1. Define your goals for your local SEO campaign. Are you looking to get more visitors to your site? Phone calls for follow-ups? People buying directly from your site? Knowing what you want people to do once they get to your site will guide your SEO tactics.
2. Perform web analytics on your local landing pages. This will give you a way to track your clicks and conversions to tell which tactics are working and which ones are not getting customer’s attention — or getting them to do what you want.
3. Measure your rankings against goals and past performance. Automating this process means you can spend less time compiling data and more time reviewing the results to get the information you need to effectively adapt your SEO campaign.

Doing content marketing and doing it right are two separate things. Most people recognize that having lots of content is important to your search engine optimization efforts along with your online marketing program. However, fewer people take the time to think about the type of content tactics that will be most useful in building a successful strategy.

You can go beyond basic content marketing strategy by thinking about it as one part of your overall marketing efforts. A well thought out content marketing plan can help you to build your brand, create new connections with customers and improve your sales. As you get ready to plan out your content marketing strategy, here are five questions you need to ask first:

Who Is Your Target Audience?

You can’t craft a message designed to connect with a potential customer if you don’t know who that person is. You need to review all of your available resources in order to better understand who your target audience is and how you can effectively reach them. This can include researching your competitors and reviewing your current web traffic and demographic information. Use this information to answer questions about how your customers access product information and what information they are looking for when they go to a website.

Why Is Content Marketing Important To You?

This is ultimately the most important question that you can ask of yourself when developing a content marketing plan. Content marketing can help you attract the attention of new visitors while creating bonds with existing customers. However, if you don’t have larger plans for what to do with these potential or current customers, your content marketing work is wasted.

Where Can You Reach Your Audience?

By understanding who your customers are, you can also understand the best ways to reach them. Different customers will interact to certain types of content more strongly than others. For example, YouTube is a great option for customers interested in watching product videos, while Tumblr is an outstanding platform for visual content such as infographics.

When Should Your Content Be Published?

Along with how to reach your audience, you also need to understand when they are most likely to be online so that you can deliver them fresh content when they are ready to see it. You can leverage research from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to see when certain demographic segments are most likely to be active on their sites and use this as a guideline for when to post your content.

What Do You Want Readers To Do?

The point of marketing is to entice a reaction from the person receiving your marketing message. This can mean many different things: signing up for more information, asking for a phone call or purchasing a product directly from you. The type of content that you create will be partially determined by the action that you want your potential customers to take after viewing your content.

Determining your plan for content is only part of the equation. It’s important to be just as focused when creating and distributing your materials. Make sure you are working with the right content creators and know the right places for the content to live. Figure out which rich media sources are right for specific types of content. Once you’ve created your content, have a structure in place for marketing it and tracking its success so you know what is working and what needs to be tweaked.

There is perhaps no piece of meta data on a web page that is more important that a title tag. This is the short description that tells both users and search engines what a web page’s content is about. One bit of evidence highlighting the importance of title tags comes from Kristine Schachinger of Search Engine World, who wrote that title tags are “like the title of the chapter of a book” and “the most important single tag on your page.”

It’s impossible to do effective search engine optimization without paying close attention to your title tags. This is particularly true with Google’s recent modifications to its results page layout, which places additional emphasis on title tags. With this in mind, what are some of the ways that you can leverage title tags to your advantage? Here are 10 of the hottest tips:

Grab Attention With Your Title Tag From the Beginning: Much like with a headline, you want to grab people’s attention from the start of your title tag. Use a strong, declarative statement to catch the eye of a reader.

Make Title Tags Long Enough to Explain the Page: Even if the description is too long to fully display on the search engine results page (SERP), Google may still be using all of it to determine the topic of your page.

Short Title Tags Are Wasted Opportunities: When you have a short title tag, you lose the chance to fully explain your page. You also run the risk of Google “filling in the blank” with extra content.

Be Bold: Having part of your title tag in bold will catch the reader’s eye. You can do this by including phrases that customers are likely to search for in your tag. Google will automatically bold the phrase that is searched for in the result.

Leverage Thematic Search Results: Google now can tell what you are searching for and delivers results based on this — not necessarily just based on your keywords. Using this information can help you to craft a broad title tag that can return many Google results.

Include a Call to Action in Your Title Tag: Just asking people to “click here” isn’t enough; you need to let people know what they expect to get out of clicking on your link. Tell them what the end result of their click will be ahead of time.

Do What Your Competitors Aren’t: In order to stand out from the competition, sometimes you need to take an approach that stands out from them. Review your competition’s title tags and try to approach yours from a different angle.

Give Specific, Real-Time Data in Your Title Tag: You can program title tags to include dynamic content related to searches. This might include information on how much of a certain product is available in a local area.

Don’t Forget About Your Brand: Even when you are posting links to products, it’s important to include your brand name. This helps to ensure that you rank for your brand and that you avoid possible SEO headaches.

This All Might Not Matter: Google will give results based on what it thinks that users are looking for, which can mean that it will give your homepage title tag over your individual page’s title tag in the SERP for any number of reasons. You’ll need to experiment to see which strategies avoid this happening to your pages.

Title tags are just one of the many ways you can improve your search engine rankings through meta content. Find out more about how eVisible integrates meta content into our SEO services for clients by viewing our approach to SEO success. Have more questions about best SEO practices? Find out answers by reading our FAQ on SEO.