Local search sites such as Google+ are a key element of modern small business Internet marketing. But you need to make sure you are taking the right steps in order to maximize your local search visibility. Here are some of the basic things you need to make sure you are doing with your local search page:

LOCATION

Physical Address: You need to let people know where your business is located but this can get tricky if your business is located just outside of a major metropolitan area that you would like to target (such as being in a suburb of a larger city). Your best bet is to create local pages on your site for that city to boost search results. Google can also see where a user is located and often will cater results to their location.

You can also add a city and state to the title tag on your main landing page and other site pages to give sites like Google a clue to your business’ true location.

Listing Citations: Citations are mentions of your business’s Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP). You want to make sure that these are always consistent from listing site to listing site. Using slightly different business names, addresses or phone numbers will hurt your rankings. This is especially true for the NAP you have listed on your local search page versus the NAP listed on your website.

You also want to make sure that you are only listed on high quality sites. Use a tool like GetListed.org to find the leading local search directories. You can also do a web search for your business category in your area to find top results or go to Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder. Locally-relevant citations like Chamber of Commerce listings are positive, as are citations from sites relevant specifically to your industry.

Phone Numbers: Always use your local area code instead of a toll-free number in a local listing.

ORGANIZATION

Domain Authority and Links: Your site will rank higher in local search results if it has a high “Domain Authority.” This metric is based on a website’s age and quality. Doing solid SEO work with local SEO services like eVisible also help. Having high quality links to your site provide a strong signal to search engines about your site. Also, make sure the link you publish on a local search site is your home page or another page with high Page Authority.

Site Verification: When you create a local listing on a site, they will typically ask you to verify it before it goes live. This could be through a link or a verification code sent via a postcard or email.

CONTENT

Business Categories: It’s critical that you take the steps to make sure your business is categorized correctly. If you are setting up a Google+ Local listing, you’ll have to give your general business type and then be able to drill down to specific subcategories.

Reviews: Having a lot of positive reviews for your business is a great thing. However, Google will be concerned if they see a high volume of reviews come in too quickly — this is a sign that the reviews are fake. Encourage customers to give positive reviews but don’t try to “buy” reviews. Having positive third-party reviews (such as from newspapers and blogs) can also improve rankings.

Business Name: If you are starting a new business, you might rank higher more quickly if you include the service you provide in your name. But don’t rename your business or use a different name online – this will only hurt your rankings.

The rules of search engine optimization have changed dramatically in the last few years. Google responded to the glut of low-quality content with Panda and Penguin, algorithm updates that placed an emphasis on quality content and organic search engine optimization rather than keyword-stuffed articles and manipulating site code.

The most important thing to think about when creating an SEO strategy for your website is the visitor experience. This wasn’t always the case; until recently, Google wasn’t concerned about the user experience when determining site rankings. This has changed, as Google is smarter about reviewing sites in a way that mimics how users interact with the site. In short, the best way to improve your link popularity is to have a website that provides useful content and information to visitors.

Adapting to the new SEO landscape means rethinking old tactics that were considered to be the industry standard just a few years ago. Here are four examples of how SEO strategies have shifted recently:

Build Blog Relationships Instead of Buying Links

While Google still places a high value on having your site linked on other sites, the concept of “buying” a high volume of  low quality links via a link network is no longer considered to be a good SEO strategy. In fact, if done incorrectly, you might get punished by Google for this. Instead, you should focus on doing outreach to blogs that are a natural fit for your site. Reach out to them and try to enter into a mutual relationship where you provide their readers with interesting content in exchange for links.

Focus on the On-Screen Design of Your Website

It’s still important to have a website that has a common sense architecture and that has a solid internal structure. But it’s now just as important to have a site that looks great and has content that flows naturally. Google’s spiders can read sites to analyze where and how content is displayed and you need to have a website design that takes advantage of this.

Expand Beyond a Limited Set of Keywords

Until recently, the prevailing method that search engine optimization consulting services used to increase a site’s page ranking was to focus on a limited amount of keywords and use them in the page content, title tags and header tags. Google is now smarter about how it evaluates keywords for rankings. It’s better to come up with keyword groups of related words and use them organically in your on-site content.

Concentrate on Branding

Google frowns on paying for anchor links on unrelated sites. Instead, it wants to see your company’s brand have strength. If this occurs, the power of your brand will give an extra boost to your related page rankings.

Doing SEO efforts, building social media platforms and other online marketing activities are useless unless you have a plan. Just like how you wouldn’t go for a hiking trip into the woods without a detailed map, you shouldn’t do online marketing tactics without establish your marketing plan first. Developing your marketing plan helps you to get the most out of your small business Internet marketing and maximize your ROI.

It takes time and effort to develop a cohesive and successful marketing plans. Here are seven steps you need to take in order for your marketing plan to have a chance at succeeding:

1. Identify Your Position in the Marketplace

Customers are drawn to businesses that they consider to be leaders within their industry. Just as importantly, if they feel that your company is made up of experts in their industry and are people who spread reliable and useful information to customer, they will be very receptive to your marketing efforts. Your marketing plan should include ways to interact with people within the industry to build your credibility.

2. Strengthen Your Brand Positioning

At its core, your brand is really a summation of the way that people feel about your company when they hear its name. Ideally, you want people to have immediate positive associations with your brand regardless of the situation. Engaging in brand reinforcing tactics such as charitable campaigns or non-product targeted advertising can give people a good feeling about your brand.

3. Build Long-Term Awareness of Your Brand

Many people ignore a company or their brand if they have no need for their services at that exact minute. But subconsciously they might remember the brand if it is reinforced. When they are suddenly in need of what your company has to offer, the building of long-term brand awareness pays off and you have a new customer.

4. Attract New Customers

Performing web analytics on your current customers is one of the best ways to develop tactics to attract new sales leads and turn them into customers. Do research to find out how customers decided to purchase your goods or services. This can be as direct as sending customer surveys or you can track the entry points that people used to get to your site and make purchases.

5. Retain Existing Customers

It’s a common mistake to get so concerned about marketing efforts designed to bring in new customers that you end up ignoring your current customer base. Remember that any place that your current customers come into contact with your brand is a marketing opportunity. This can include your website, social media sites, ads or even the packaging on your products.

6. Plan for Success

The online world is filled with companies who were so successful that they saw their sales skyrocket faster than their infrastructure could keep up. This usually leads to shipping delays, unfulfilled orders and dissatisfied customers. Your marketing plan should have plans in place for what to do if you meet — or exceed — your “best-case scenario” expectations for your marketing plan.

7.  Analyze Your Results

If you don’t know how to analyze the results of your marketing efforts, there’s no way that you can know which tactics work or why certain tactics failed. Make sure that your marketing plan has clear and quantifiable goals and has ways in place to measure the success of your tactics as you work toward your goals.

It’s a website owner’s nightmare: your page ranking suddenly drops without warning. There’s a good chance that you’ve been penalized by Google for something on your website. It might be a new SEO tactic or something you didn’t know existed in your code. Likely, it’s related to search engine algorithm changes (such as the Panda and Penguin algorithms), which are designed to increase the quality of Google’s search results.

Recovering from penalties can take time, but it can happen. Here are a few steps to take if you’ve been hit with a penalty from Google:

Link Penalties

Google has made a point of punish websites that attempt to influence their site’s ranking or PageRank by “manipulating” incoming or outgoing links. But while finding “bad links” can seem simple, Google will also penalize sites for other, more seemingly innocuous actions.

For example, your site might be penalized if you are listed in too many directories that are considered to be “low quality.” Google might also punish your site if you are making guest posts on low-quality sites that are unrelated to your industry or use links back to your site excessively in guest blog posts. The simplest way to fix this problem is to remove the offending links. You can choose a sample of links from different directories to try to determine where your bad links are coming from.

Panda-Related Penalties

Panda is designed to root out poor quality links that were previously achieving high rankings because of reasons not related to their quality. Before you post any content, ask yourself if it answers an important question in a way that isn’t already covered online. If the answer is no, Google will likely treat your content as spam.

You also might have “doorway” links on your site with minimal text that are there to entice people to purchase products. If these pages are necessary, use 301 redirects or noindex tags to avoid Google penalties.

Manual Penalties

Google will also institute manual penalties for unethical on-site practices such as cloaking, shady redirects, hidden text and keyword-stuffed pages. Chances are that you know if you are doing this practices and you can rewrite content or code to fix the problem.

Unless you have a solid SEO content strategy, all of the content that you create for your website is just guesswork. The content might do an outstanding job of increasing your search engine rankings and driving customers to your site, or it might be completely useless. Developing a strategy that matches your overall online marketing goals is critical to making your content do real work for you and actually help you meet your SEO goals. It can also help you justify your SEO activities to other people in the organization without intimate knowledge of online marketing.

Three Parts of Every Great Content Strategy

1. Set your goals for your content campaign and the tactics you’ll use to reach them.

2. Show different types of content that are verifiably proven to be successful to use as models for future content development.

3. Convince others in the organization that content is about more than keywords and that it can serve as an education resource for customers.

Three Steps to Building Your Content Strategy

Step 1: Performing content inventory

The first step to take in building SEO content strategy is to do a content inventory of the items you currently have on your site. How long this takes will depend on the number of pages and items on your current site. However, it doesn’t need to be an arduous task. You can automate much of this process instead of having to manually hunt for content on a page-by-page basis.

Chances are that your site is build around a site map that breaks your pages out by categories. You can discover these content groups by using a site crawler like Screaming Frog. Once you do this, you can review your groups by applying some common sense. Ask if the groups share common expected visitor responses and are small enough that you can reasonably work with them.

Step 2: Gathering data

Once you’ve categorized your current content, you need to analyze how it is performing. There are many factors that are overly emphasized by some SEO experts such as total page views, time spent on a page and bounce rates. You’ll get a stronger sense about the performance and potential power of your content by looking at social factors such as:

• Number of Facebook Likes, shares and comments
• Posts about the content on other social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter
• Votes and +1s on social media sites such as Reddit and Google

You can also look at the pages themselves to see if it’s received reviews or comments from outside readers. Finally, you can use a range of analytical tools to track readers’ movements after reading a piece of content to see if they directly or indirectly lead to sales and conversions.

Language data is also an important piece of the puzzle. Track certain elements of each page on content such as:

• Total words per page
• Having paragraph, title and description tags
• The reading level and ease of the content through standards such as Flesch-Kincaid
• The overall usage of headings
• OGP (Facebook) and Twitter markups

Step 3: Evaluating your conclusions

Take a hard look at the data you’ve collected. You can usually find some interesting trends based on your data that will inform your overall SEO content strategy. You might discover that certain keywords in the title generate a high number of social media shares. Or that the length of an article is related to how popular it is. Use these trends to come up with a clear content strategy that leverages these stats in order to make it easier for people without SEO knowledge to know why you are approaching content in a certain way.

Website owners and operators typically believe that having more content on your site is better for SEO purposes, as it gives you more chances to use keywords and create valuable links. But this has changed recently as Google has instituted measures to make the quality of content as important and its quality and to punish websites that have spammy, low-quality content on their site. Having large amounts of low-quality content on your site actually serves as a negative ranking signal for Google and can lead to penalties with your search ranking.

An example of this is performing content curation on your website as an SEO tactic. This can mean creating pages with resources on a category related to your business or having a blog that posts links to relevant outside news articles. On the surface, this is a way to add content to your site and help your search ranking. But the truth is that it might not help you at all.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently answered a question relating to sites that curate content or post duplicate content. The gist was that only sites that are of the highest publishing quality will get a benefit from curating content. This means sites like the New York Times’ website that have a highly recognizable brand based on their content. It’s difficult to have something published in the New York Times and the content is curated by professional editors.

In fact, if you curate content using an algorithm or other automated process, Google might actually punish you. This is because this is essentially what Google does with their search engine results, only they likely do it better. Google sees automatically-generated curated content pages as inferior forms of competition and punishes them.

Most sites will fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. This means that while you might not get punished for having curated content on your site, you likely won’t see many benefits. This can change if you do some things to make your curated content stand out and create signals to Google about the quality of your pages. Getting commentary from experts in your field and using the rel=author tag will increase your credibility in the eyes of Google. If you can pull data from sources that are not available to Google or post content quicker than Google, you also will be seen as providing something of unique value through your curated content.

When most people think about how public relations tactics can help their SEO campaigns, the first thing that comes to mind is to write press release. While it’s true that well-crafted, keyword-rich and interactive news releases crafted by press release writing services can help your SEO and your marketing efforts, press releases are far from the only public relations tactics that can boost your search engine rankings.

Some of these tactics involve establishing your company as an authoritative brand within the space; others involve marketing efforts that also benefit others. All of these tactics can help you generate publicity and help with your SEO:

Make Charitable Contributions: Being a good corporate citizen serves several purposes. A donation to a worthy charity helps people in need and can be a tool for your own promotion. Work with the charity to promote your donation. You can get creative and come up with a charity angle that is unique and will attract media attention.

Hold Unique Contests: Running a contest like a scholarship essay competition or product giveaway serve several purposes. They can generate social media links to serve as social signals; they can provide drive brand awareness; and they can provide reasons for media stories that will also boost your SEO. Making the contests unique and interesting — such as a food eating contest — helps.

Be a Guest Contributor: Pitch the executives at your company as “guest contributors” to local, national and industry media outlets and blogs. If customers read intriguing content with their names attached to it, they will think of them — and your brand — as thought leaders in the field. You can use ghostwriters for the content if needed and attach a name later.

Serve as Guest Talent: Many industries have TV or radio shows specific to their market. Get your executives to appear on these shows. It will help your brand and create links from the shows’ websites that will boost your SEO.

Speak at Industry Events: Getting your executives in front of convention attendees is a great tool for increasing visibility and creating links. You can host your own event as well.

Google recently announced the launch of a new feature that places search results for “in-depth” articles of more than 2,000 words prominently on its Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It’s the logical next step of Google’s campaign to improve the overall quality of search results. Previous updates such as Panda had punished low-quality and off-topic content. Featuring in-depth articles highly on a results page serves as the reward for people such as SEO copywriting services which produce high-quality and relevant content.

In terms of SEO, the addition of in-depth articles has the potential to be a game-changer. With these articles receiving such a prominent place on Google’s SERP, it makes sense to put significant emphasis on creating this sort of content. Whether you plan on using outside article writing services like eVisible or creating the content yourself, it’s important to know the basics of how to create the right copy and specifically why evergreen content is so important for these in-depth articles.

What is Evergreen Content?

Much like its name implies, evergreen content are articles and blog posts that are always “fresh” and never get old. This means the content isn’t related to news stories that will change over time or become irrelevant. The ideal bit of evergreen content gives readers information that will as useful to them years later as it is when it is first published.

Why is this so important? By making this content relevant over a long period of time, you will be able to see the benefits of traffic and site rankings from it for months or even years to come. Finding the right topics is often one of the most important elements in creating great evergreen content.

You can use many of the same tools that you would use for your SEO research when planning your evergreen content. Keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner will give you an idea of the types of keywords that are being searched for over long stretches of time. You can augment this research by tracking your older posts using Google Analytics to see which topics perform the best or use Google Trend to identify hot topics that may be relevant over the long haul.

Best Topics for Evergreen Content

As you read articles on the Internet, you’ll notice certain types of articles come up again and again. This is because their formats lend themselves naturally to evergreen content. When you are looking at creating in-depth articles for SEO purposes, consider some of these story ideas:

• “Best” Lists (“Best Restaurants in New York”)
• Top 5 or Top 10 Lists ( “Top 10 Tourist Attractions in London”)
• “How To” Articles (“How to Fix a Leaky Faucet”)
• Beginner’s Guides (“Beginner’s Guide to SEO”)
• Funny/Worst Compilations (“Worst Band Names”)

Writing Your Evergreen Content

The first thing to do when writing your evergreen content is to understand your audience. If it’s a technical audience, you can use more complicated and advanced terms. From there, do your research and use that as the basis for the outline to your article. With more than 2,000 words to write, it’s easy for in-depth articles to lose focus without an outline.

More than anything else, you need to make sure that your content is truly evergreen and that it’s is uniquely valuable. If it’s information that people can get somewhere else, it won’t be as valuable. Even if it’s on a topic that’s been written about before, put your own spin on it. This will increase the chances that it is shared by readers, increasing overall clicks while also sending valuable social signals to Google about the quality of the piece.