Improve Your Website’s SEO Visibility
Opening up a business and competing with big name stores and brands in 2017 can seem like a daunting task, especially when it comes to SEO Visibility in your local marketing space.
Local SEO has continued to gain in importance as with Google’s “Pigeon” update, small businesses are looking to their digital marketing strategy to increase their SEO Visibility but also keep up with the “Jones“.
One of the easiest ways to increase your SEO footprint online in 2017 is to add your business to Google Maps and verify your business with a Google My Business listing. Google will send you a postcard with a pin code that will establish your place of business within Google’s “Eyes“.
It is important that you verify your GMG Listing as it will open your website to Google’s world of organic rankings and more customer sales!
Your Google My Business listing plays a unique role as searchers who know your brand and type it in will come up with your local business information.
Click here and type in your business name.
This is what a brand name search for SM Digital Partners Google organic results looks like:
On the right part of our search results, you can see our Google My Business listing information. This will help your customers (new and current) with knowing key information about your business:
- What is your address
- What is your phone number
- What hours are you open
- What kind of services do you offer
- Pictures of your business
- Virtual tour
- Business description
- Your website
If you look at the Top 10 rankings for SMDigital’s brand name it will show:
- SM Digital Partners – Our website has enabled sitelinks – An example of what a Sitelink looks like is where it says beneath our website, ” Content, Who We Are, Careers, SMDigital Partners Blog”.
- Facebook Business Page (2x) -Facebook is a very powerful digital marketing channel as you can see on the image that our Facebook page takes two spots in our brand names top 10 ranking. Facebook is a great tool to market to current customers and the number of people who live near your city.
- Better Business Bureau (BBB) – The 4th organic spot that Google shows for our brand name. You can pay $50 or so dollars per month to earn the link or can figure out a way to get the listing for free 🙂
- FourSquare – Regardless of what the SEO experts say about FourSquare not having an active community, the real SEO experts understand that FourSquare is important in a few ways. Some of them include being an online review data aggregator, a source for other websites to use their FourSquare data, and the last being the localization integration with Pinterest. Don’t sleep on Foursquare, it’s a $20 verification fee which is as simple as answering a phone call and entering a pin code.
- Yellow Pages – Before the Internet; the Yellow Pages was the original business listing directory – just printed and delivered to your house every 6 months or so. Fast forward to 2017 and their online business directory is still relevant and packs a strong domain authority. Make sure to claim and fill out your business information on your profile and upload as many images that have SEO.
- LinkedIn – Your LinkedIn business profile can be used to publish content and build authority by establishing yourself in niche groups.
- MapQuest – Why would a map company be ranked for our brand name? Simple – MapQuest at one time was the #1 online maps website. What you have to factor in is that MapQuest is over 20 years old! In web years that is ancient! So getting your business listed on this powerful, aged domain will help your overall SEO visibility. Also, it’s important to make sure your Yelp page is claimed and verified and populated with your business info and images. Yelp also distributes their information to other websites like MapQuest and Yahoo. You can try to get your business listed for free on MapQuest through this link. They may / will try to push you on purchasing their maps via Yext.
As we had mentioned before, one of the easiest and best ways to increase your SEO Visibility is to have your Google Maps and Google My Business listings setup with all the right information along with as many images that portray your business.
We recommend using high-quality images along with images taken from your smartphone at your physical location and uploaded through the Google My Business “management” app.
Google will know that your image was taken at that physical location and will help your overall local visibility.
One thing we get asked a lot here at SM Digital Partners is, “How do we increase the online SEO visibility of a Google My Business or Google Maps business listing“, will depend on a few different factors:
- Relevance: Is your business category relevant to and end users search?
- Prominence: Do you get a lot of traffic to your business listing?
- Distance: Is the end user searching near the location of your business?
- Search history: Is your business listing getting clicked on by users searching for your keywords?
These four factors are governed by a Google algorithmic system that helps to define local search results (no one knows Google’s secret SEO sauce). For a small business to achieve success online and locally, SM Digital Partners suggests the following best practices which should help your listing to appear in a better position.
Best Practices for Local SEO Visibility in 2017
1. Select the perfect business category: Probably the most important factor when ranking your Google Local Business page is selecting the right Google business category. By making sure your business is in the right Google category that best describes your business it will help your business rank locally as well as organically.
Selecting the right business category will offer the right and specific business info/services that residents are looking for in your city. You are also able to use more than 1 category.
2. Your best marketers are your customers: One of the easiest ways to increase your SEO visibility locally and organically is through the use of “Google Reviews” and other review channels such as Yelp, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. Reviews are your “Digital Proof” that your business is good or bad.
The online opinions of your customers and strangers alike can highly influence how you are ranked in the local 3 pack but also in the eyes of your competitor’s customers. With consistent and positive reviews, your place of business can help potential customers choose your business vs your competitors.
3. Social Signals: These days consumers are skipping the search engines and looking for business information and services through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and beyond.
Have you made sure your business listings have been claimed, verified, and are all using the same NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number of Your Business)?
Your consumers will mostly follow your social media listings to get up to date updates about what your business is up to. Content is king through social media so it is important to post business updates almost daily. You can post updates for engagement that include text, photos, videos, specials, links, events and now Facebook offers Live Video!
Call for a Free Website Audit
For more information on how SM Digital Partners can help your business achieve more SEO Visibility online through “Local SEO” in 2017, please call 561.404.9787.
SM Digital Partners
601 N. Congress Ave Suite 430
Delray Beach, FL 33445
561-404-9787
