Local SEO tips

[neooptic]

Hi! I'm working on http://www.hgsplumbingandheating.co.uk/ at the moment, and it's going pretty well for local terms such as 'Norwich plumber' etc.

Has anyone got any tips though on how it can be improved, especially with regard to getting the homepage ranking above the Places listings?

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Neoptic,

Keri asked me to stop by to take a look at your question. I believe what you are asking is how to get your homepage ranked above the local pack of listings. Is that correct? If so:

• If you are already in the local pack for a given keyword phrase, you are unlikely to also gain an organic ranking on the same page. Since the Venice update last year, it has become quite uncommon for any local business to have more than one spot on the first page of results, except in industries or geographies that are sparsely populated or poorly documented.

• If you are not in the local pack for a given keyword phrase, perhaps because you are lacking a physical location in the target city and are having to rely on organic SEO for service radius cities where you lack a physical location, then having city landing pages for each of your service cities is the typical marketing strategy. For example, an SAB (service area business) may be physically located in San Francisco, CA., but may serve San Jose, Berkeley and Oakland. This business model can pursue high local rankings for San Francisco-related searches, but must typically purse organic rankings for any other service city. He can create city landing pages to help him go after these secondary organic rankings. If this concept is new to you, let me point you to a recent article of mine that I've been told has been really helpful to many Local SEOs and local business owners:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

• If you already know about city landing pages and are experiencing a scenario in which your SAB is already ranking organically  (not locally) on page one for a given keyword phrase but is simply ranking below rather than above the local pack of results, then your ability to influence this may be limited. Google has several different displays. In some, there are a couple of organic results above the local pack. If a business is strong enough (SEO-wise) it could appear in those couple of top organic results, or, it may find itself just below the local pack in the handful of results that appear there. Very often, what I see in the US is those top spots being occupied by giants like Yelp, but not always. I think it would be quite difficult/impossible to outrank something like Yelp, but if I saw a result in which the top couple of organic results were other direct competitors of my client, then there would be a chance that some strong organic efforts might succeed in allowing them to break in there. This would likely involve both content development and linkbuilding and possibly other things.

I hope one of the three scenarios I've described matches yours. If not, please provide a more detailed description of your scenario and goals. Thanks!

[KeriMorgret]

Actually, Google has not used the meta keywords tag in years, and Bing generally doesn't use it in a favorable manner.

I'm asking our expert on local search to step in and offer some advice on this question.

[TGOOSE]

Hi, i am describing you about page rank not for the keyword ranking. Try to improve the factors like Domain Authority,Page Rank and Alexa rank etc..

Page Rank: Usually Google will give us "0 to 10" as page rank, in this case your page rank of your website is "0". If a website is having a page rank of   7 out of 10 then it is a good page rank, means that much of visibility your site is having in your country.

Keyword Ranking: Whenever a user fired a search query related to your website terms like 'Norwich plumber' at this point in the given Google organic search result in which position it is showing your website to that particular term, it is called keyword ranking.

Thank you.

[neooptic]

Hi. The site is actually ranking in the top 5 for numerous terms in Google UK. The keywords tag has been pretty much discredited too. The sitemap oint may be good though.

[TGOOSE]

Hi,

Just now i gone through your site. Your website is ranking "0" in major search engines like Google,Yahoo,Bing etc.

In order to get the visitors first you have to make your website as Search Engine Friendly as well as User Friendly.

Search Engine Friendly: It includes many terms like using the targeted keywords into your main as well as inner pages.

If we observe Meta tag's like Title, Description, Keywords in all these three your main page is having only description. Try to put targeted keywords like "Norwich plumber" into this

name="keywords" content="" />

This above thing will be applicable to all pages in your website.

Your site navigation is not good.

You submitted sitemap as Sitemap.aspx, its better to submit as .xml or .html.or .ror (search engines prefer these formats to submit a sitemap).

After all this it is better to do On-Page optimization to your website.

Thank you.

If you have any queries let me know.