local-seo-guide_jessica-stradley

Intro
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your business’s website is
vital for bringing in customers. Seem complicated and
overwhelming? Don’t worry! We’re here to break it down and
make the subject a little comfier for you.
SEO, you say. It’s the process of optimizing your website in order to rank higher in a search
engine’s (like Google’s and Bing’s) organic results. But we’re here to teach a short course in
Local SEO.
Class is in session.
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Local SEO Guide

What you need to know
Local SEO. It’s a subset of your overall
SEO marketing program. If you’ve
already optimized your site for search
engines, you might find yourself thinking
that you’re done with SEO. Before you
get too comfortable, you should know
that if your business has a physical
location, additional optimization for local
search is more than worthwhile. In fact,
it’s actually an integral part of your SEO
planning. And even if you haven't
tackled SEO at all, local SEO is a great
place to start.
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Local SEO Guide
There are 7 billion local searches in the
US each month. That’s more than seven
million local searches, or about 235,000
each day, in each of the nearly thousand
metropolitan areas in the US. No matter
how you cut it, that’s a number you just
can’t ignore. Google tells us that local
optimization accounts for around 18% of
Google’s ranking factors, and it’s
rumored that this will increase in
importance with upcoming changes.

Why is it so important? Gone are the
days when consumers sit at their kitchen
tables flipping open a 25-pound copy of
the Yellow Pages, skimming through a
bunch of listings to find local businesses.
The first thing one of those 125 million
US consumers with smartphones does
when they want a smoothie, massage, or
guitar lesson is to whip out their
smartphone, open their favorite browser,
and search to find the nearest, best, or
generally most appealing business to
satisfy their need.
According to a recent study, 78% of local
searches on mobile and 61% of local
searches on laptops result in offline
purchases. And that’s out of the
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whopping 7 billion monthly unique local
searches.
Just think back to the last time you were
craving a strawberry-banana smoothie.
Did you type “smoothie” into the search
bar? Probably not. Most people include
their physical location in the search as
well—“smoothie seattle.” And that’s
exactly why local SEO is important. As a
business owner, you want to make sure
your business shows up when potential
customers perform those local searches.
Local SEO Guide

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To pursue higher exposure in Local Organic Results
To get listed in the Local 3-Pack Results
To have your business’s Pin featured on the Google and Bing Maps
To have your own Local Knowledge Panel
Why else should you optimize for local?
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Local SEO Guide

What’s typically searched for “locally”? If
any of the following items are things
your customers might be searching for
in relation to your business, you need to
optimize your local search.
To locate an address
To search for a business with certain
product or service
To find a phone number
To discover hours of operation
To get driving directions
To find coupons and special offers
To read ratings and reviews
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What you need to know
The first step in any local SEO strategy
is getting citations in local directories.
Here's a little more that you need to
know, and then we promise—you can
start doing!
Citations or local directories. A local
citation is a mention of your business on
any webpage other than your own.
Citations include your business name
followed by your address, phone
number, or both, and don’t have to be
linked to your website.
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Local SEO Guide

NAP: Common acronym used when
talking about citations: Name, Address,
Phone number.
Important: Your NAP needs to be listed
the same way everywhere! This means
every little thing in your business name
and address. If your business is at 123
Fun Street on your G+ profile, it better
not be 123 Fun St. on your Yelp profile.
Details really count in local SEO.
Keep these four main
factors in mind when
creating your listings:
Business name. Your business
name, or business title, is probably
the most crucial factor when it
comes to ranking well in local search
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engine results. Your business title
needs to be the same across the
board—meaning that every single
data source must list your name the
exact same way. This helps to
establish Google’s and Bing’s trust
of your location and existence.
Google provides these Quality
Guidelines to explain further:
Your title should reflect your
business’s real-world title.
Marketing taglines, phone
numbers, store codes, and
URLs aren’t valid descriptors.
In addition to your business’s
real-world title, you may include
a single descriptor that helps
customers locate your business.
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Local SEO Guide

Examples of acceptable titles with
descriptors are "Starbucks
Downtown" or "Joe’s Pizza
Restaurant."
Examples that would not be
accepted would be "#1 Seattle
Plumbing," "Joe’s Pizza Best
Delivery," or "Joe’s Pizza
Restaurant Dallas."
Physical address. Again, the most
important thing is to be consistent.
For example:
Your actual NAP: Mary’s Music
School, 123 Fun Street, Seattle,
WA, 98122
Your Google Places account:
Mary’s Music School, 123 Fun St.,
Seattle, WA, 98122
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Your Yellow Pages listing: Mary’s
Music School, 123 Fun, Seattle,
WA, 98122
The slight variation in street address
might not seem like a big deal but
search engines are extremely fussy
about details so these addresses will be
seen as three separate businesses, and
they’d lower the search engine’s overall
confidence in your business and, as a
result, lower your rankings.
Phone number. Not to sound like a
broken record, but focus on
consistency! If multiple phone
numbers are attached to your
business name it will trigger Google
and Bing algorithm alarms and your
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Local SEO Guide

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alarms and your site rankings will suffer
as a result.
Proper categorization. In search
engines, when you create a local
listing for your business, you’ll be
asked to pick 2–10 categories that
best fit your business. The engines
will use these categories when
giving search results for related
keywords. Your rankings will be
DESTROYED (what? too dramatic?!) if
your categories are incorrect or
nonexistent, so make sure you
choose wisely. Wondering which are
the best categories for your
business? Here are 13 best practices
to help you make the best decisions
on choosing categories.
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Local SEO Guide

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What you need to do
As promised, it’s time to create citations
(or local listings) for your business
Where should you be listed?
Local search engines. Make sure
you’ve covered all your bases.
Google Places
Bing Places
Yahoo Local
Yelp
YellowPages
Foursquare
Social media sites. Set up all the
social media profiles that you think
you need (Facebook, Twitter,
Google+, Instagram). Remember,
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consistently and correctly list your
NAP on all profiles
Tip Want to see if someone is using
your brand name? KnowEm can check
and help you secure your name on
500+ social media sites.
Local blogs. Reach out to local
bloggers! Ask if they’ll feature you in
a post or review your business in
exchange for a free service. How to
be featured in local blogs? You’re
gonna have to get your hands dirty.
You can find local bloggers by
searching “[your city] blog.”
Contact every publication on the
first page of search
Local SEO Guide

results-they’re the ones that
show up the best Google and
Bing results.
If you’re looking for something
more specific, you can also try
searching “[your city] [your
industry] blog.
Reach out! Keep in mind that these
bloggers and sites probably get a lot of
outreach from businesses asking for
links and coverage. Check out these tips
for gaining blogger respect and forging
solid partnerships.
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Example If you happen to be a yoga
studio in LA, http://layoga.com/ is a
perfect online publication for you to go
after.
Local SEO Guide
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Data aggregators. Pull out the big
guns. Give a data aggregator your
business's listing information (and
some $$$), and it will automatically
create 100s of listings for your
business—cutting out hours of
tedious busy work on your end. Here
are a few data aggregator
companies you can use:
Acxiom
Infogroup
Neustar Localeze
Factual
Local directories and newspapers.
Go back to basics—break out the
papers.
Switch up your terms a little from
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your blog search. Search for “[your
city] business listings” or “[your city]
directory” to find even more places
to list your local business.
Don’t forget to get listed on your
city’s Chamber of Commerce
website.
What you need to do
Now that you’re armed with all this
information, it’s time to figure out how to
start and avoid being overwhelmed.
Depending on many factors (like your
budget and the size of your business),
there are three main ways you can go
about implementing and managing your
local SEO strategy.
Local SEO Guide
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Do-It-Yourself
Get yourself prepared before starting
Moz put together this handy Local
Citation Building Template that provides
a way to track all of your citation sites as
well as a storing place for the most
common information required on the
sites.
Use roboform to autofill signup forms on
many sites. Even though you need to be
sure to review each site, it’s definitely a
worthwhile timesaver. Plus it gives you
the ability to share across your team
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With those two tools in place, you’re
fully prepared to dive in. Here’s the
game plan:
Check to see if your business
already exists on the listing. If it
does, make sure it’s accurate. If it
doesn’t, add it! Be sure to keep
your template updated as you
go.
Hit all the top sources that we
already mentioned? Don’t
reinvent the wheel. Look for
where your competition is listed.
You can use Whitespark or just
search for your competitors’
NAPs!
Local SEO Guide
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Example If you’re a gym owner in
Seattle, Mode of Fitness might be a
competitor. You find their NAP, search for
it on Google and Bing, and, without
doing any of the heavy lifting, find pages
of different sites your competitor is listed
on (in other words, a bunch of sites to
consider listing your business on).
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Local SEO Guide

Use software. Here are a few tools to
help you get listed consistently in
multiple directories. While that can be a
great option, depending on your
situation, make sure you know what you
are getting into.
Moz Local. A tool that creates
your business listings and
maintains their accuracy,
consistency, and visibility across
the web.
Yext. A service that easily
publishes to dozens of
directories. Some will start
showing instantly, and some will
come up within a few days with
very little work. But think twice
about it—it’s over $475 a year
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for the retail version.
UBL. Universal Business Listing
is another option you have
when wanting to create and
maintain all your business
listings across the web.
Hire out. If you don’t have the
manpower (or willpower) and you have
the budget, an agency or consultant
might be a good idea. If you want an
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idea of how much you’d be looking to
pay if you went in this direction, check
out this survey by Moz.
So now that you know what review
sites you should be listed on, it’s time
to start racking up those reviews.
How to get reviews
The best way to get clients to review
you? Just ask! But wait—don’t send that
blast “review request” email quite yet.
Each review site has different policies
around reviews. Yelp, for example, is
strict when it comes to businesses
soliciting reviews, and if they notice any
funny business they’re not afraid to act.
On the other hand, many other sites go
so far as to recommend that you ask
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your client base directly for reviews.
Remember to familiarize yourself with
their review policies before
campaigning!
Note: No matter what review site you're
dealing with, it’s never a good plan to
pay for or unfairly reward positive
reviews over negative reviews. Reviews
are a learning process for you, too, and
a great way to gather feedback that
helps you improve your business.
Local SEO Guide

What you need to do
Let’s recruit some reviews. Here are
some easy ways to get started.
Coach your staff to ask for referrals,
especially if an interaction goes well.
Create handouts highlighting the
sites where customers can review
you.
This Review Handout Generator will
give you a template to create a PDF
to send to your clients with simple
instructions on how to give you a
review on Google.
Add badges to your website that link
to your review profiles. You can also
include links in any “thank you”
emails your customers receive when
they interact with your business.
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Managing reviews.
All right, you’ve found the best review
sites for your business, you’ve got
yourself some reviews...but, good or
bad, how do you keep track of and
handle all the feedback?
Be proactive! A good first step is to set
up Google Alerts so that you’ll receive
an email each time your business name
is mentioned online.
Your first negative review might be hard
to handle, but it’s on a public forum so
bring your blood pressure back down
and deal with it rationally. Your plan of
attack should be to diffuse the situation
and appease the customer. Offering a
Local SEO Guide
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a discount or something to make up for
the issue is never a bad idea. In the end
you should make yourself look as good
as possible and can even refer the angry
customer to good reviews.
Not only are negative reviews a place
for you to make an angered client
happy, they also bring attention to an
area of your business that not might be
as good as it could be. This gives you
the opportunity to fix something that you
may not have realized needed fixing.
What else you need to do
Optimize your pages: Even if you’ve
already optimized your website for
search engines (or even if you haven’t),
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you need to be sure to cover your local
SEO bases too.
KW title tags. Keywords are very
important, but you don’t want them to
seem forced or spammy—it’s not good
for anyone. For SEO beginners and
experts alike, it’s always a good idea to
freshen up and expand your keyword
list. If you’ve done SEO previously, you’ll
have a good head start on your
keywords, but you still need to revamp
your list to focus on local SEO. The best
way to go about this is to decide your #1
keyword based on what your business
does and then add your location. For
example, Vinyasa Flow Yoga in Stockton
has done a good job.
Local SEO Guide

NAP in HTML. As we said before but
can’t stress enough, having a consistent
NAP (name, address, and phone
number) is vital. Make sure that this info
is included in the HTML of your website.
Note It might look like you have your
NAP in the HTML, but it might only be an
image, which Google and Bing don’t
recognize. Check this by pointing your
mouse at your address—if you can
highlight individual characters, it’s text,
in the HTML of your website, and you’re
in the clear.
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If you can’t select the text, that means
it’s actually an image, and search
engines can’t read it. Get that sucker in
the HTML! If you create your website
yourself, that just means you have to
make sure your address is typed out in
the source and not inserted as an
image. And if you have a designer,
make sure they know to write out your
content.
Local website content. Having site
content that is specialized to your city is
a great way to appeal to local searches.
Local SEO Guide

This is usually done through a blog.
Don’t be intimidated! You don’t have to
update it everyday, and it will definitely
prove to be time well spent. Need some
inspiration? Here are some topics to get
you going:
Write about what your customers
are interested in. A fitness busi-
ness? Outline some tips on
post-work recovery. Music
school? How about an article on
tuning your guitar?
Write about your story—how
your business came to be, your
founder’s story, introduce the
team, and give the history of what
ever it is you sell.
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Partner with other local busi-
nesses that your customers
would be interested in to do
guest posts on one another's
blogs/sites. Everyone wins with
this strategy. Your customers and
readers get more helpful con-
tent, you and the partner get
more links and mentions, and all
the while you're building com-
munity partnerships
Write about any upcoming
events and how your business is
taking part.
Leverage common local search-
es terms. Say you’re a yoga
studio in New York City. You can
host a yoga session in Central
Local SEO Guide
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Park and then blog about it!
Imagine the SEO on that one.
Write up a spotlight on a current
customer or client. Maybe you
interview long-time clients, new
clients, interesting clients—you
get the idea. Not only will you get
great blog content, but you’ll also
increase client retention!
What more you can do
You have a great action plan for nailing
local SEO, so here’s a bonus tip. Come
back to it after you’ve mastered the
basics.
Schema. Not to throw something com-
pletely new into the mix, but this is im-
portant! Schema, man.
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What’s schema? Schema markup is the
code that you put in your website to tell
the search engine what your data (or
HTML markup) means in order to
provide more informative results for
users. Schema.org explains how
important Schema is to search
optimization:
Local SEO Guide
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HTML tags tell the browser how to
display the information included in the
tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells
the browser to display the text string
“Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However,
the HTML tag doesn’t give any
information about what that text string
means — “Avatar” could refer to the
hugely successful 3D movie, or it could
refer to a type of profile picture—and
this can make it more difficult for search
engines to intelligently display relevant
content to a user.
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Why should you pay attention to
schema?
When you do schema markup correctly,
your business will show up with these
awesome details in Google and Bing.
Where can you add schema markup on
your site?
Reviews
Services or products for sale
Events
Name, address, and phone
Local SEO Guide
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Hours of operation
Now that you got a quick overview of
Schema markup and why it’s important,
it’s time to put it into action! Here are
two tools that you can use to automati-
cally generate markup to embed in your
website:
Schema Creator
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Now that you’ve learned the basics of
local SEO, how to get citations, listing
yourself on review sites, and tips for
optimizing your site, you can go forth
and conquer the local search rankings.
We’ll see you at the top of the Google
results.
Class dismissed.
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Local SEO Guide
Learn more about how you can grow your business.
Give Front Desk a call. 855.417.7108

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