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Maintain Consistency: If you have out-of-date or incorrect business information on a local search site listing, you are confusing your customers.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.

Keeping up-to-date with the latest changes to Google’s algorithms is critical if you want to run an effective search engine optimization campaign. Google recently announced a major algorithm update that can potentially have a major impact on your SEO – especially when it comes to local SEO. Here’s a look at some of the key elements of the update (which has been dubbed “Pigeon” by some in the media):

Local Listing Packs appear to be going away. A glance at recent queries shows that far fewer SERPs than before include a local listing pack. Also sometimes known as a “Google Seven Pack,” these are the seven local businesses with contact information and a map showing a location that come up as part of the first page of a search. According to MOZ Cast’s SERP feature graph, the number of local listing packs fell from 12.1 percent of queries on July 23 to 3.3 percent just four days later. If you rely on local results to drive customers from their search results to your business, this could mean a short-term loss of business.

Traditional website ranking signals mean more for local results. While standard “SEO” elements have always played a role in forming local results, there was previously a certain separation between what impacted local SERPs and general SERPs. Not anymore. The Pigeon update appears to place a greater emphasis on SEO factors including backlinks and domain authority in determining local rankings.

Local directory sites are ranking higher. Sites such as Yelp have seen a significant boost in their rankings with the algorithm update. In fact, some search results have nothing but local directory listings on the first page. Make sure that your business is listed with the top directories in your industry and that the listings are complete.

Local carousel placements are untouched. Having a high-quality photo on your Google+ profile can help you to attract customers.

Working with the experts at eVisible can help you deal with Google’s algorithms changes. Contact us today and we can provide you with a consultation based on your unique situation and come up with a search engine optimization strategy that fits your needs.

The world of SEO is changing. Changes in the algorithms used by major search engines such as Google have redefined how a business can improve its page rankings. It’s no longer enough to have a standalone SEO campaign; today, you need to integrate your SEO tactics with other aspects of your online marketing if you want to find success and your social media presence is a big part of this.

The reality is that SEO by itself simply doesn’t work anymore. Combining your social media and SEO tactics is not just a good idea — it’s something that’s a must. A strong social media presence won’t directly increase your page rankings for your main site. However, it can help to spread the word about your brand and links to your site. If other people share these links, that will only help your overall SEO. This is the type of effective link building that works in the new world of SEO.

Small businesses also need to refine their focus on their target audience in order to succeed. More specifically, businesses need to understand the type of online content that customers are looking for in order to deliver this content to them. High quality content not only helps to attract customers but will help with Google rankings.

One way that businesses can help to improve their SEO presence is by utilizing the small business SEO services offered by eVisible. Our site has several free and premium tools available that let small business owners to do some basic but critical SEO work themselves. This can include keyword research, tracking social media involvement and monitoring the readability of content on a site.

Doing this kind of basic SEO work on your own can be extremely valuable for a small business. However, there are still likely to be many aspects of SEO that a business owner won’t be able to do on their own.  One of the most common SEO questions for small local businesses is how they can fit SEO into their (likely very limited) budget. The good news is that eVisible can help businesses of any size improve their online marketing with tactics that include search engine optimization. For a relatively small expenditure, a small business can positively impact their online presence.

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.

Why has local business marketing become such a driving force in search engine optimization? One of the big reasons is the rise of smartphones and tablets. People no longer have to print out information about a business or look things up in a phone book. Addresses, phone numbers, website and customer reviews are all available in a convenient, handheld format. When you include the rise of Twitter and Facebook and the resulting wave of social media marketing, it’s easy to see why local SEO is so critical to a site’s success.

If you have a local business and are looking to increase your visibility, local search engine marketing is one great way to do it. Several companies offer local search engine marketing and can handle every aspect, from getting your business listed with the appropriate local online directories to building your website. However, you can also do many the steps yourself. Here are a few things you should definitely consider doing immediately if you are doing your own local search engine marketing:

Perform basic SEO: Simply put, you can’t have local SEO unless you have your traditional SEO house in order. This means having a well-constructed, informative website with plenty of useful content and intelligently linked keywords. You’ll want to strengthen this with other SEO practices such as purchasing in-bound links.

Create and update your business listings: As a small business, you need to make sure that your company is listed with all of the standard business listing sites. One of the first steps in this is to make sure that you have a Dun & Bradstreet number. Another step is to update your contact information with InfoUSA. Once you have done this, the information will gradually start feeding to places like the Yellow Pages and other online business directories.

Claim your online presence: This means going out to sites like Google+, Bing, Yahoo and Yelp and taking control of your company’s pages. You’ll want to make sure that the name, address and phone number are consistent and match what is on your website. Add photos and descriptions and encourage your customers to add positive reviews.

President Obama has declared June 16-22 as “Small Business Week” in America. It’s a way to recognize the small businesses that drive the American economy. This isn’t the first Small Business Week – it goes back to 1963 – but this one is particularly important because of the impact the recent economic downturn has had on small businesses. In the current economy, small businesses need to use every tool necessary to stay ahead of larger competitors.

If you are a small business owner, one of the ways you can do this is to leverage the Internet. Small business Internet marketing can help your small business reach customers throughout the world. However, if you are in a competitive market, you’ll need help to make sure that people can find your website. eVisible specializes in helping small businesses gain visibility online by using a variety of proven of tactics including:

SEO: Getting your website to rank highly for specific keywords is about more than just luck. You need to research which keywords will be the most effective to target and have a dedicated game plan for how to increase your page rankings. By doing search engine optimization correctly, your site can rank higher than larger competitors and get more clicks from curious customers.

Social Media: Establishing a strong social media presence is a highly effective online marketing tool for small businesses. By leveraging outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, you can make a personal connection with potential customers that makes you stand out from larger competitors. A strong social media campaign lets happy customers spread the word about your company to their friends, one of the most powerful forms of marketing.

Directory Submissions: Local directory submissions help to ensure that potential customers have all the information they need to choose your business for their needs. Customers want to know as much as they can about any small business, including positive reviews, pictures and contact information.

eVisible wants to help take your small business to the next level. Find out more about our small business services <https://www.evisible.co/small-business-solutions/> and contact us today for a free consultation.