Learn Local SEO
-
What are best local SEO practices 2013 ?? to get website on top of all major keywords ???
-
Hi Mnkpso,
Marcus has done an awesome job responding to you. I will add just a few things here.
When I have clients who are completely new to Local SEO, I have them read these 2 pieces I wrote to describe both the technical and mental basics of Local SEO:
For the most complete description of the factors that make up local rankings, I point to:
Local Search Ranking Factors 2012
*Note that this last survey was conducted a year ago and that significant changes have taken place since then, but the basic factors are pretty much the same.
And, because a major key to success in Local is keeping on top of the news, I would recommend these blogs and fora in addition to the two mentioned by Marcus:
http://www.blumenthals.com/blog
http://www.ngsmarketing.com/blog/
http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/
There are other super Local SEO bloggers out there, too.
Hope these tips are helpful!
-
Hey, that is a great big question posed in a very succinct way.
As ever, there are a lot of moving parts and it depends on every keyword in every niche regarding how tough it will be to rank.
Main elements to consider are:
- Structured Address (NAP) + Consistency of Address
- Structured Citations - total number, quality
- Unstructured Citations - total number, location, relevance of citation site / page
- Optimisation of Google+ Local page (images, updates, video, completeness)
- On Page SEO for site
- Local Links & Citations
- Site Popularity (Search & possibly social)
- Reviews on Google+ Local and other popular citation sites
I wish it were just that simple though and any approach has to consider the industry and existing competition. We tend to review the competition, try to understand their strengths and weaknesses and use that to formulate a customised plan for each local / small business client.
Review the competition, find out who is where they are and how. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. Do the basics really, really well - citations, on page, Google+ Local page. Then, look at local links, general site popularity. Create review strategy and try to encourage (without cheating) mentions of your keywords and targeted location in the reviews.
Don't be tempted to cheat. Don't just buy 100 crappy citations. Do things properly, craft each mention, work on getting good reviews. Do real company shizzle #RCS. Consider each citation a possible advertisement. Love your customers, ask them to love you back.
I will stop here as this is starting to sound like Baz Luhrmann song:
"sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself."
You really have to avoid an SEO by numbers mentality though as it is easy to fall into that trap here and whilst you may see some initial flourish you won't win the race with that approach and returns will rapidly diminish and you may see a bell curve with an improvement and then a drop around low quality tactics.
One last thing, consider co occurrence, it is a hot topic but think about mentioning your keywords where you mention your brand, URL, NAP or elements of. If I was creating a citation or unstructured citation on a site then I would look at mentioning my brand, phone number, location and possibly URL - something like:"
"At Bowler Hat we concentrate on technical SEO Audits and small business SEO for companies in Birmingham. You can call us anytime for help on 0121 314 2001 or visit our site at www.BowlerHat.co.uk.".
The highlighting is mine to better illustrate the important aspects of that sentence and how it can be done cleanly and naturally without the need for crappy writing etc.
Citations often boggle people but they are just directory listings really - a little more on that here:
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/types-of-citations-for-seo/Remember that citations are abused by folks in the medical world to artificially inflate the worth of a medical paper or report so as soon as you factor money into it and add the dirty SEO word then citation abuse can and will be rampant and google knows about this and is on the lookout for it. So... play nice!
Back to the original question - where to learn?
Well, here for starters, search the blog then:
- http://www.localseoguide.com/
- http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/
- https://getlisted.org/ - will get you on the right track.
Some good tools:
Hope that helps!
Marcus
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International SEO question
We are based in the UK, if we make sure to do the following .com domain
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson
US Phone number
US currency 201
US language Content
server is CDN in the US
Language Meta Tags
Local Search Registration
geographic target via Google Webmaster Tools would the domain under a UK company registrant be an issue for google thinking we are US based and have any impact on rankings.0 -
Dodgy backlinks pointing to my website - someone trying to ruin my SEO rankings?
I just saw in 'Just discovered' section of MOZ that 2 new backlinks have appeared back to my website - www.isacleanse.com.au from spammy websites which look like they might be associated with inappropriate content. 1. http://laweba.net/opinion-y-tecnologia/css-naked-day/comment-page-53/ peepshow says: (peepshow links off to my site)07/17/2016 at 8:55 pm2. http://omfglol.org/archives/9/comment-page-196 voyeur says: (voyeur linking off to my site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
July 17, 2016 at 7:58 pm Any ideas if this is someone trying to send me negative SEO and best way to deal with it?0 -
Why does expired domains still work for SEO?
Hi everyone I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains. I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about. What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains ) This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time. There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time. Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links 🙂 So to the question: WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them? Is there any one here that know how this works technically?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sir0 -
Do rss feeds help seo in 2013?
I have seen answers for this back in 2012 but as we all now things have changed in 2013. My question is Do rss feeds help seo in 2013? Or does google see it as duplicate content (I see that the moz site has RSS ...)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero0 -
Have just submitted Disavow file to Google: Shall I wait until after they have removed bad links to start new content lead SEO campaign?
Hi guys, I am currently conducting some SEO work for a client. Their previous SEO company had built a lot of low quality/spam links to their site and as a result their rankings and traffic have dropped dramatically. I have analysed their current link profile, and have submitted the spammiest domains to Google via the Disavow tool. The question I had was.. Do I wait until Google removes the spam links that I have submitted, and then start the new content based SEO campaign. Or would it be okay to start the content based SEO campaign now, even though the current spam links havent been removed yet.. Look forward to your replies on this...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
SEO best practice: Use tags for SEO purpose? To add or not to add to Sitemap?
Hi Moz community, New to the Moz community and hopefully first post/comment of many to come. I am somewhat new to the industry and have a question that I would like to ask and get your opinions on. It is most likely something that is a very simple answer, but here goes: I have a website that is for a local moving company (so small amounts of traffic and very few pages) that was built on Wordpress... I was told when I first started that I should create tags for some of the cities serviced in the area. I did so and tagged the first blog post to each tag. Turned out to be about 12-15 tags, which in turn created 12-15 additional pages. These tags are listed in the footer area of each page. There are less than 20 pages in the website excluding the tags. Now, I know that each of these pages are showing as duplicate content. To me, this just does not seem like best practices to me. For someone quite new to the industry, what would you suggest I do in order to best deal with this situation. Should I even keep the tags? Should I keep and not index? Should I add/remove from site map? Thanks in advance for any help and I look forward to being a long time member of SEOMoz.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BWrightTLM0 -
Is my SEO strategy solid moving forward (post panda update) or am I doing risky things that might hurt my sites down the road?
Hey all, WIhen I first started doing SEO, I was encouraged by several supposed experts that it was a good idea to buy links from "respectable" sources and as well make use of SEO experimentation offered on Fiverr. I did that a lot for the clients I represented not knowing if this was going to hurt. But now after the latest Google shift, I am realizing that this was stupid and thus deserving of the ranking drops I have received. In the aftermath, I want to list out here what I am doing now to try to build better and stronger rankings for my sites using white hat techniques only... Below is a list of what I'm doing. Please let me know if any of these are bad choices and I will immediately dump them. Also, If i am not including some good options, please let me know that too. I am really embarrassed and humbled by this and could use whatever help you can offer. Thanks in advance for your help... What am I doing now? *Writing quality articles for external blogs with keyword links back to sites *Taking the above articles and spinning them at SEOLINKVINE to create several articles *Writing quality articles for every site's internal blog and using keywords to link out to other sites that are on different servers - All articles are original, varied and not duplicate content. *Writing quality, relevant articles and submitting them to places like Ezine *Signing clients up for Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, etc so they have a social presence *Working to fix mistakes with onsite issues (mirror sites, duplicate page titles, etc.) *Writing quality keyword-rich unique content on each page of each site *Submitting URL listings and descriptions to directories like JoeAnt, REALS and business.com (Any other good ones that people can recommend that give good link juice?) *Doing competitive research and going after highly authoritative links that our competitors have That is about it... HELP!!! Thanks again
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | creativeguy0 -
Is this SEO correct?
Please view website http://www.staddonsbeds.co.uk. In the footer is the keywords the client is aiming for. These pages have been created separately to the sitemap. Is this tactic and pages white hat seo or is this considered black hat seo such as gateway pages? Could you please confirm Thanks Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | paulbaguley0