Tag: local seo

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Content Marketing

Finding Your True Local Competition

Understanding exactly who the local competition is these days is harder than ever before. No longer can saying, “you’ve achieved #1 in Google for these keywords” be all you focus on. Why? Because Google alters search results for people based on their location and other factors, to create a more personalized browsing experience. Ranking tools aren’t always consistent, and what shows as competition under one search, may not be the same competition for another. That’s why it’s important to do a competitive SEO audit, as part of your overall competitive analysis to get a better look at who the real competition is.

For this example, let’s say the client is an Italian restaurant in Clemson, South Carolina and has five main keyword phrases they want to rank for.

  • Italian Restaurant
  • Italian Restaurant Clemson
  • Italian Restaurant Near Me
  • Best Italian Restaurant
  • Cheapest Italian Restaurant

Step One: Understand the Local Pack in Google

Start with the local map pack. Search the keywords the restaurant wants to rank for, and note who the three competitors are in the map pack for each. If you do not live in the same geographic area as the client, it’s ideal to walk the client through this process so they can conduct the searches from their local address. This is because Google uses the searcher’s proximity to the business as a weight in results. To emulate Google, we must pretend to be a local searcher.

Step Two: Create a Spreadsheet and Do Some Homework

In the spreadsheet, note the keyword phrases and the three competitors for each of them. Add a column for distance to the client. Note the addresses of each of the businesses in the map pack, because you’ll need them for the next step.

Step Three: Going the Distance

Next, search “directions” in Google, and you’ll be presented with a tool to get directions (and distances) from one address to another.

Enter the client’s business address, along with the address of their first competitor. Note the distance in the spreadsheet. Repeat the process for all the competitors in each of the five map packs.

Step Four: Measure

In a second column, note the greatest distance Google is going to fill out the results for each map pack. (I noted all the distances, because it was just as easy since multiple restaurants showed up in multiple map packs.)

Step Five: Identify Competitors by Strength

Rate the competitors by the number of times each one appears across all five local packs. The spreadsheet should look a little something like this:

Continuing with the example, we’ve learned:

Amici Clemson is the dominant competitor in the market, ranking in four out of five map packs. Olive Tree of Central and Tiger’s Pizza and Subs are also strong competitors because they rank in three of the five. Torado Pizza is noteworthy because it appears in two of the five. Jerry’s Pizza and Monterrey of Clemson are weak because they only appear in one. Closer inspection reveals Monterrey of Clemson isn’t an Italian restaurant at all – instead, it’s a Mexican restaurant with happy hour. That could still be considered competition, but it is indirect since they are not also an Italian restaurant.

The radius Google uses to find results varies depending on the phrase, and the more specific you get, the further out Google is willing to go. In most searches, there’s an option within a couple of miles, but in this instance, Google never goes beyond five miles.

With this information, you know who the client’s direct competitors are for their most desired searches, and how far Google is willing to go to make up a local map pack for each term. You’ve found the pattern of the most dominant competition across the top phrases your client wants to rank for, which tells you which competitors should be audited to uncover clues about the elements of their online presence that are making them strong.

Pros and Cons of This Approach

Pros

  • You’re not limited to the vision of a single local map pack with a single set of competitors. The trends and patterns of dominant market-wide competitors can help you come up with a better strategy.
  • You get to this set of competitors quickly, and know what you need to do to figure out what’s helping them, so you can ensure your client does it better.
  • You get a useful view of the client’s target market, understanding the differences between businesses that are found across multiple packs, vs those that are one-offs and could be easier to beat.
  • You may find extremely valuable intelligence for your client. For instance, if Google has to cast a net as wide as 15 miles to find an organic Italian restaurant, your client could start offering more organic items on their menu, writing about it more, and getting more reviews that mention it. This gives Google a new option to consider for the local pack that’s much closer to the searcher.
  • It’s quick and easy to do for a business with a single location.
  • Clients should be easy to convince of this because they’ve helped with the research. The spreadsheet is something they can understand immediately.

Cons

  • You’ll depend on the client for help for a bit, and some clients aren’t good at participating with you, so you’ll have to convince them the value of conducting the initial searches for you.
  • Manual work gets tedious.
  • Scaling this for use with a multi-location enterprise would be time-consuming.
  • Some of your clients are based in large cities and what to know what competitors are showing up for users across town and in different zip codes. Sometimes, it is possible to compete with competitors in other locations, but not always. This approach doesn’t cover this situation, so you’ll either be using tools that aren’t always consistent, or asking the client to go across town to search from that location, which could become a hassle.

This approach allows you to see who your competition is in the search results, so you’re not wasting time evaluating websites of other businesses that won’t provide good results.

Categories
SEO

How to Create a Global SEO Strategy

If you’re nailing your business here in the United States and feel like it’s time to expand your brand to an international market, then it’s time to create your global SEO strategy. To be successful with SEO in other countries, it takes more than translating your website and letting people select the language they prefer to read your website with.

I don’t recommend this approach for just any brand. It’s generally only worth your time and effort if your analytics data reveals you have a steady amount of traffic coming from a foreign market or a spike in customers from a particular region or country.

Global SEO vs. Local SEO vs. General SEO

International SEO focuses on optimizing your content for a number of regions across the globe. Local SEO focuses on offline businesses that have a brick-and-mortar presence in a local area that relies on general SEO and reviews, business information networks, and local directories. General SEO focuses on the basic factors that make it easy for search engines to crawl, index, and list your content. General factors include:

  • Keyword optimization
  • Site speed
  • Sitemap
  • User experience
  • Backlinks
  • Schema markup

You’ll use general SEO whether you’re focused on local or global SEO.

Let’s say you sell shoes and you have business operations in Spain, Germany, and France, but your local market is in the United States. Your international SEO optimizes for those counties, as well as the word “shoes” in their languages.

In Spain, you’d optimize for Zapatos

In Germany, you’d optimize for “Schuhe”

And in France, you’d optimize for “Des chaussures”

And of course, at home, in the United States you’d still optimize for “shoes.”

Relevance Remains Key

No matter the market, Google wants to ensure the content they serve is relevant to the user. On-page and off-page SEO, along with visitor behavior is used to determine relevance. You won’t be successful if you copy and paste content across pages and translate it according to the language. Each market has unique needs, and your site’s content needs to reflect that. What performs best in the United States may be completely irrelevant to your German market. Craft content for each region and market.

Now let’s get to the nuts and bolts of crafting your strategy.

Step One: Determine Potential in Target Countries

Estimate your international SEO potential by using tools such as Google Analytics and SEMRush Domain Analytics to determine how your website is ranked in other countries. In Google Analytics, go to Audience > Geo > Language or Location and look at the number of sessions from the countries you’re interested in targeting.

Step Two: Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Regardless of your international SEO potential, you need to know who you’re going up against in the new market. You may already know who your biggest competitors are in the country, but they may not be as successful as you think when it comes to their online presence. As such, you should focus on your organic competitors.

Step Three: International Keyword Research

After you determine who your main competitors are, determine the keywords they are indexed for, so you can choose the best ones you should use for your SEO efforts. This helps you get a bunch of keywords you can use to improve your content and gives you a decent chance at being able to compete against them. Repeat the process for a few competitors to make sure you have plenty to work with.

Step Four: Localizing Your Brand

With the international keywords in hand, it’s time to create content in each of the local languages. You shouldn’t just translate it and stuff it with keywords because of differences in market. If you’re selling fruit in a country with a cooler climate, then the content you’ve written for a warmer climate in another market wouldn’t make sense to the audience even if it was translated.

It would be worth the investment to hire a native speaker to translate content you’ve written specifically for the audience – or to write the content itself. Native speakers are more familiar with the nuances of language and idioms so you avoid issues with certain forms of “you” because you need to use the polite form when you’re speaking with someone you don’t know. Germans, in particular, and more strict with their use of the formal “you” than Italians are, for example.

Step Five: Address the Technical Aspects

Once everything else is planned, it’s time to handle the technical side of SEO, including:

Website structure: Are you targeting a language or a country? If a language, use the language targeting approach. If you’re targeting a certain country or audience, you’ll want to use country targeting. Determine whether you’ll use country code TLDs, subfolders, or subdomains.

Server location: The further your server is from the destination, the slower the site loads. You can either go with a content delivery network that has multiple markets, a single provider with multiple server locations, or by hosting on servers in key markets.

Correct hreflang implementation: When correctly done, this ensures users in each of your target countries are coming to the right country or language version of your site. If they are not done properly, it can damage your ranking and user experience, since they are meant to cross-reference pages with similar content but target different audiences.

An important thing to remember is data privacy regulations vary from one country to the next. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) got a lot of media attention, but Africa and Asia also have their own guidelines in place, known as Personal Data Protection Guidelines for Africa (PDPGA) and Asia Pacific Data Regulation and Cyber Security Guide, respectively. When you build out your global SEO strategy, make sure you’re in compliance with all data privacy regulations in the markets where you’re conducting business.

If you’re ready to go international with your business, let’s talk. I can help you develop the right strategy to expand your brand into new markets and keep your customers happy.

Categories
SEO

Local SEO vs. Enterprise SEO: What Are the Differences?

 

SEO is SEO, right? Well, not exactly…

Search engine optimization has been around for decades – it’s as old as the search engines themselves. But it hasn’t always been as highly specialized. This is especially true for businesses who use SEO to get noticed or to market products.

If you’re running a business, you’ve most likely heard the terms “local SEO” and “enterprise SEO” tossed around quite often. That’s because both stand to benefit your business in very similar ways, assuming you use each approach in the right way.

But “similar” does not mean identical; in fact, each of these approaches is unique in everything from overall goal and purpose all the way to implementation. To help you better understand these concepts, I’ll break them down into plain English below.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO (also known as local search) is a form of search optimization that specifically targets a unique geographical area. For example, if you optimized only for visitors from your city, that would be a form of local SEO.

This type of approach is popular among small business owners with a limited reach, extending only to their geographic location and surrounding zones. These businesses have a specialized service or product offered only to the local area, not to the rest of the country or the rest of the world.

Need a few examples? We’re talking local restaurants, mom and pop gift shops, small grocery stores or chains, landscaping services, plumbers, and doctors — anyone who is limited to a specific area.

Local SEO campaigns don’t necessarily need to be limited to a city or town. They can be expanded to almost any definable location. Campaign boundaries for local SEO can be defined by county, state, or even geographic region (e.g., the northwestern United States).

Larger national and international companies can (and do) use local SEO, but their approach is much different from that of a small business. Instead of focusing on one specific city or town, they use local optimization within larger campaigns that serve unique demographic groups limited to specific areas. This helps to improve targeting and prevents the corporation from wide-casting blanket messages to the global market (that might not work for every location).

What Is Enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO applies to larger brands — these are usually large corporations that have very well known brand names.

They’re visible. You know who they are. They’re so big, in fact, you almost never need to do a search for their products online.

Instead, you seek out the website, visit their social platforms, or head right to the correct aisle in your local store.

The problem with organizations like these is that at some point their marketing efforts will plateau. As their brands have gained momentum and built a steady traction, sales may ebb and flow. But new promotions just bring them back up to the same level over and over again. They can’t seem to get any higher.

Why?

They’re basically neglecting their online marketing efforts. They don’t rank well for their target keywords, sometimes even finding themselves outranked by very small, local competitors.

Somebody got lazy. Instead of capitalizing on previous momentum, the business opted to coast along and do “just okay” instead.

The good news is that in most of these cases, you can make a few simple changes to the website and content strategy and make significant gains.

Wait…What about Enterprise Local SEO?

Yes, this is a thing, too. Enterprise local SEO is for huge businesses with recognized brands that have locations spread across the country or globe (think Walmart, Kroger, or Trader Joe’s). These entities need to bridge the gap between serving local areas and serving the nation, and that’s not always an easy ask.

Enterprise local SEO experts often have to come up with hundreds or thousands of micro-campaigns to correct enterprise local SEO issues. At the same time, they may be battling data distribution issues, unruly franchise contacts, and how to scale all the listings and projects so that everyone benefits – all at the same time.

Whew!

How to Improve Local SEO

So now we’re back to the original question — SEO is SEO, right? Nope. You can’t apply the same tactics to both local and enterprise campaigns. Instead, you need to narrow it down and get a bit more specific. Here are some tips to get you started!

  • In local SEO, it is sometimes recommended that all the website URLs you put on your third-party business listings direct to your website’s home page. The homepage is often considered more important in terms of ranking, so sending all visitors to the same starting point isn’t unreasonable. They shouldn’t have a hard time clicking from there to the right landing page.
  • Make sure you claim all your local listings. If they don’t exist, create them. You should have control of any listing with your business name on it to ensure your business details are updated throughout the year. While they aren’t as heavily weighted as they once were, each listing counts as a citation when Google crawls for mentions of your website.
  • Double-check to make sure you have claimed your Google Places for Business listing (and not just an old Google+ page). A lot of businesses had Google+ pages before Google Business listings became popular. Google is phasing out the + program, so now is the right time to claim your true listing and finish the postcard verification.
  • Ask your customers for reviews — real reviews, never fake. Ask them to leave an honest review on whatever platform they are comfortable using. It’s okay if they aren’t all 5 stars; as long as the majority are positive, you’re in good shape. Make sure they know they should only write one review (not multiple), and it doesn’t have to be long. Also, don’t encourage them to cut/paste reviews all over the web.

How to Improve Enterprise SEO

Some of the same concepts that apply to local SEO also apply to enterprise SEO, but it’s not that simple or clear-cut. In some cases, you can use similar methods or strategies, but the execution needs to be completely different to work for the target audience.

  • The directory listings suggestion from above doesn’t apply well to major brands. People who find the listing for the location closest to their home don’t want to sort through a million listings to get the information they need. If you’re an enterprise brand, each directory should link directly to that location’s unique landing page.
  • Enterprise brand websites tend to have a ton of content. Backlinking to every single page isn’t necessary because the pages will naturally rank higher. Focus on getting a few pages to the front page of Google before moving on to the next set.
  • Make sure your website’s templates are up-to-date with the proper ALT tags, correct design code, and accurate data. This includes categories and subcategories that make it easy to find your dynamic content.
  • Incorporate your chosen keywords into your site’s navigation. For example, your cell phone provider might use several subcategories before you finally land on a specific product page, making for a long but successfully-optimized URL. Consider com/mobile/shop/device/galaxy-s8-plus-samsung as an example of a well-optimized URL. The company effectively incorporated terms like mobile, device, galaxy, s8, and samsung into one URL.

There are a lot of things you can do to improve both local and enterprise SEO – often at the same time and within the same campaign. The key is to remember they are completely different slices of a much larger pie. Efforts should be integrative, not singular, whenever possible.

If you’re struggling with either of these concepts, you aren’t alone. Even the experts sometimes struggle with finding the perfect balance. Partnering with someone who knows both concepts well is the best way to make progress.

Categories
SEO

Local SEO Tactics for Brick and Mortar Businesses

This post was originally published on Sachs Marketing Group.

If you’re a brick-and-mortar business that serves one or more local areas, the traditional search engine optimization (SEO) approach won’t deliver the same impactful results you’d see if you were marketing on a national level. By making use of geographical keywords, local SEO, you’re alerting search engines to the fact that your business is relevant to local results, but you’re also decreasing your overall competition, since fewer businesses are competing for the same keywords within a certain radius of your city or town.

 

Begin with Keyword Research

Think about the words and phrases your customers are using to search for you. This is the beginning of keyword research. Using a tool like Keyword Tool or Google Keyword Tool, you can start with a basic phrase like, “roofer San Diego California” and get a list search volume and similar keywords you may wish to consider using in your optimization efforts.

Now, choose the keywords you’re most interested in using, and search them in Google yourself to determine what kind of competition you’re up against. Say for example you select:

  1. San Diego roofing: 577,000 results
  2. San Diego roofing companies: 865,000 results
  3. San Diego roof repair: 928,000 results

You can clearly see which one of the phrases will be harder to rank for just because of the number of results.

If you want to take it one step further, you can take note of the top 10 to 20 organic results for each of the phrases you’re targeting, so you can analyze the competition’s backlink profile. This can help you see who’s linking to them, so you can try to get links from those sources as well, and assist you in knowing how many links you should be aiming to get to outrank them. Beyond the number of backlinks, you’ll also want to pay attention to the number of pages and the length of the content on each of those pages so you can make your website a more comprehensive resource.

 

Optimize Your Website and Content – On Page SEO

  • Site Structure: Keep your site organized in a clear, easy-to-understand hierarchy. Build out logically from your home page.
  • Home Page: This may be the only page visitors ever look at – so make it count. Include all important pages – products, services, locations, and more – are visible with easy navigation.
  • Locations: If your business has more than one location, have a dedicated page for each location. This gives you a chance to provide location-specific information searchers are looking for.
  • Content: Your content should be written for users first, and search engines second. You want to naturally weave the keywords in the content as you describe the intention of the page. If your competition doesn’t have a blog, consider adding one to your website where you can add more valuable content for your readers, and include additional relevant keywords to help increase your ranking. For instance, your blog could include topics like: “How to Choose the Right Roofing Material for Your Home”, “When is the Best Time to Re-Do Your Roof?”, and “How Much Does a New Roof Add to My Home’s Resale Value?”
  • Meta Descriptions and Title Tags: The meta description is the small space underneath your link in search results. It’s a place to advertise why users should choose to click your link compared to the others on the page. It should explain what the page is about. Both are excellent places for keywords, along with your city and state.
  • Images: Images should be optimized for quality and speed, and include a descriptive ALT tag with keywords for web accessibility.
  • Page Load Time: The faster your page loads, the better. 47% of users expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less, and 40% of people will leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load. A one-second delay in page load time could decrease conversion rates by 7%. If you sell $1,000 a day, that’s a loss of $25,000 per year. Page load time is a search ranking factor worth paying attention to. If you find that your page is loading slowly, Google Webmaster Tools has advice to help you improve it. The search console can also provide other guidelines and advice about how to ensure your website is properly optimized.
  • Mobile Responsive: In April 2015, Google added mobile-friendliness as a search ranking factor, as mobile traffic becomes increasingly more common than desktop traffic. Working mobile responsiveness into your website design is as simple as choosing a responsive WordPress theme, or adding a responsive plugin.

 

Social Media and Link Building – Off Page SEO

  • List Your Business in Google My Business: Google My Business, formerly known as Google Places, is a directory that allows you get your business hours, phone numbers, and directions on Google Search and Maps. It allows you to keep your business information accurate, and controls how you appear in the results. Pay attention to how you list your name, address, and phone number here, as you should list it the exact same way in every site for the next step.
  • Create or Claim Listings on Review Sites and in Local Directories: Think about Yelp, TripAdvisor, Bing, Yahoo, YellowPages, Angie’s List, and any other niche specific options like Porch, Houzz, and Zomato. However you listed your business with Google, should be how you list your business in all of these.
  • Ask Customers for Genuine Reviews: Never use false reviews. User-generated content like customer reviews helps build trust and credibility in the eyes of your prospective customers, and the search engines alike. 92% of customers read online reviews, so your reputation matters.
  • Optimize Your Social Media Profiles: Include your business information and a URL back to your own website on all of your social profiles, keeping them consistent from one platform to the next. Ensure your Facebook page is categorized as a local business. Encourage your patrons to check in so you increase the chance of appearing in the Facebook search results, and claim any Facebook Place pages that were created as a result of people checking it and not being able to find our business. This allows you to get credit for all the likes and check-ins.

 

Make Consistent Effort

You’re not going to jump from the bottom to the top overnight. It is only through consistent effort, and working on these tactics a little a time that you’ll see results. Watch your analytics and use SEO tools to track ranking over time.

Photo Credit: Adobe Stock

Do you have any local SEO techniques that you’ve seen work well recently?  If so, please share ’em in the comments section below.  Thanks!

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