SEO News

What is local SEO?

Local SEO has grown significantly over the last few years, particularly given the rise of smartphone usage and better connectivity while out and about. Although it has a lot of similarities with organic SEO, it’s ultimately very different.

Local SEO is focused on providing results that are relevant to a searcher based on their current location. If I search for ‘best steak restaurant’ on my desktop right now, Google would provide me with results that are nearest to me.

Similar results are delivered if I search on my smartphone.

In 2011, it was revealed that over 40% of mobile queries have local intent. According to Fresh Egg in 2013, four out of five people use smartphones to look up local information. Two in three people take direct action as a result and one in three people went on to make a purchase.

Google has also recently indicated that one in three US mobile queries is now ‘local’ and 87% of people use their phone when on the go. Google also found that 95% of mobile users look up local information on their phones and the primary functions are calling or visiting a business.

In order for Google and other search engines to serve users with the most relevant information using the vast amount of data they have on us, local based results will become more and more prevalent.

What can you do to optimise for local search?

Here are a few tips to make your website more local friendly.

Google Places for Business

This is the very first thing you should do. 

Claim your Google Places for Business page and make sure your contact information, opening hours, address and contact details are complete. In fact make sure the entire profile is fully complete. 

Providing category information about your site gives Google a better understanding of the topic of your business and creates a signal that you are related to any localised searches about what your business does.

This will be the easiest way for your business to show up in search and maps.

Google+ Local

You will then need to link your Google Places page to a Google+ Local page. This page is more focused on social interaction. It can feature reviews, information about the restaurant, images and posts, plus users will be able to access images, videos and comments. 

Google Local results dominate so much that you have to scroll a long way down to find any others. If customers search directly through maps, the Local listings are even more dominant. 

When creating a Google+ Local page ensure you do the following:

1. Optimise the information copy about the business by referencing keywords

The page’s title should include the brand name, the keyword being targeted and the location. This should be possible to achieve without making either page or meta description come across as unnatural, as the objective remains to optimise for both users and search engines.

2. Reference your keywords in the title 

Don’t forget to include ‘restaurant’ if that is indeed your business. 

3. Make sure that you associate your listing with the right category

‘Chinese restaurants’ could be the most relevant category, rather than just ‘restaurants’. 

4. Schema markup

Add rich media to provide a more enticing proposition to potential customers. 

Here’s a detailed guide on how to use Schema markup. 

5. Add your address in a consistent format with wherever else you’ve mentioned it 

NAP (name, address, phone number) citations are a key ranking factor in local SEO. NAP citations from relevant and authoritative websites provide more value, just like with links.

Clearly stating NAP information will work as a significant signal that you are a business related to a location, which will improve your visibility.

6. Encourage customers to leave reviews

Reviews are arguably the biggest local SEO ranking factor and are often compared to links in organic SEO. 

Listings with reviews also stand out, so encouraging your customers to leave their opinions will increase your chances of success – if those opinions are positive, of course. SEO can’t help you if your food sucks.

7. Create a listing for each of your physical locations

This will ensure that people have the correct details for the nearest branch when searching locally and will give businesses more opportunities to increase rankings. 

You can also optimise the pages on your website to appear more visible in local search…

On-page local SEO


When you’re optimising local pages on your website, it’s important to include the address (in a consistent format) on the page and also the location within the content as well as the page’s title tag. 


The page’s title tag should feature the brand name, the keyword being targeted and the location. You should also think about this with the meta description of the page. 

If you only have one address, you could also include it within your footer as an additional reference. 

Embedding a map on your ‘contact us’ page or local place pages can help local SEO rankings too, as it further illustrates where the business is located.

For more on local SEO from the blog check out these posts from Graham Charlton: Local SEO tips on improving visibility and best practice dos and don’ts.

Posted by Aleyda

One of the most important activities for any SEO process is the initial competitive analysis. This process should correctly identify your SEO targets and provide fundamental input to establish your overall strategy.

Depending on the type, industry, and scope of the SEO process, this analysis can become quite complex, as there are many factors to take into consideration—more now than ever before.

In order to facilitate this process (and make it easy to replicate, control, and document), I’ve created a
step-by-step workflow with the different activities and factors to take into consideration, including identifying SEO competitors, gathering the potential keywords to target, assessing their level of difficulty, and selecting them based on defined criteria:

If you prefer, you can also grab a
higher resolution version of the workflow from here.

The four analysis phases

As you can see, the SEO analysis workflow is divided into four phases:

1. Identify your potential SEO competitors

This initial phase is especially helpful if you’re starting with an SEO process for a new client or industry that you don’t know anything about, and you need to start from scratch to identify all of the potentially relevant competitors.

It’s important to note that these are not necessarily limited to companies or websites that offer the same type of content, services, or products that you do, but can be any website that competes with you in the search results for your target keywords.

2. Validate your SEO competitors

Once you have the potential competitors that you have gathered from different relevant sources it’s time to validate them, by analyzing and filtering which of those are really already ranking, and to which degree, for the same keywords that you’re targeting.

Additionally, at this stage you’ll also expand your list of potential target keywords by performing keyword research. This should use sources beyond the ones that you had already identified coming from your competitors and your current organic search data—sources for which your competitors or yourself are still not ranking, that might represent new opportunities.

3. Compare with your SEO competitors

Now that you have your SEO competitors and potential target keywords, you can gather, list, and compare your site to your competitors, using all of the relevant data to select and prioritize those keywords. This will likely include keyword relevance, current rankings, search volume, ranked pages, as well as domains’ link popularity, content optimization, and page results characteristics, among others.

4. Select your target keywords

It’s finally time to analyze the previously gathered data for your own site and your competitors, using the specified criteria to select the best keyword to target for your own situation in the short-, mid-, and long-term during your SEO process: Those with the highest relevance, search volume, and profitability. The best starting point is in rankings where you are competitive from a popularity and content standpoint.

Tools & data sources

The data sources and tools—besides the traditional ones from search engines, like their keyword or webmaster tools—that can help you to implement the process (some of them mentioned in the workflow) are:

• To identify competitors: Alexa Top Sites, SimilarWeb Websites Ranking & Sites Profile.
• To identify keywords: SEMRush for keyword data, SuggestMtrx (you can also use Ubersuggest or SEOchat Suggestion Keyword Finder) to gather Google suggestions for your keywords.
• To identify rankings: Authority labs, Positionly, Advanced Web Ranking, among others.
• To identify popularity: The Moz SEO Toolbar SERP overlay view, OpenSiteExplorer, CognitiveSEO Backlink Explorer and MajesticSEO for link related data and easy to develop popularity analysis.
• To identify page optimization: Moz On-Page Grader, SEOchat’s Page Comparison tool and Web page SEO analysis tool for a quick on page content optimization analysis.
• To semi-automatize the process: There are tools that have already automatized some of the phases in the process that can help you to advance faster: Moz Keyword Difficulty and SERPs analysis tool, SERPIQ, SEMRush Keyword Difficulty Tool.

Hopefully with these resources you’ll be able to develop more and better SEO competitive analysis!

What other aspects do you take into consideration and which other tools do you? I look forward to hear about them in the comments.

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What is SEO?

SEO is the acronym for search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is the process of optimising your website and its content so that it can easily be indexed by search engines. 

Using this indexed information about your website, search engines can provide searchers with the most relevant results based on their search terms. These listings are known as organic search results.

The results above these and to the right are paid-for ads. For this article we’ll be talking about your web page’s appearance in organic listings, however paid search is a fundamental part of search marketing and can be used in combination with SEO. For more info check out What is paid search (PPC) and why do you need it?

Making your web page more visible to search engines

The following on-page techniques can help make your web pages more accessible to search engines and rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Further down we’ll discuss off-page SEO, the content itself and improving click-through-rates.

On-page SEO

These are all the elements on your web page that you can control in order to make it visible to search engines. For instance: the use of a search engine friendly URL with relevancy to the content, good internal linking, fast loading pages, logical and clear navigation and the use of Sitemaps.

Here’s some basics for improving your website’s visibility using on-page SEO.

Internal linking

Linking to content within your own site is a great indicator to search engines that your site has value. 

Google sends out Googlebots (or Spiders) to fetch information on new and updated web pages. This is known as crawling and will lead to your website’s inclusion in search results. Internal links are a great way to help Googlebots search and index your site. 

Internal links help you to rank for certain keywords and helps to distribute ‘link equity’ across your site. Some pages on your site may have more link equity than others, so it’s important to pass some of that equity onto pages you’d like to improve rankings for, or pages that are more likely to convert visitors.  

Internal links help reduce bounce rates. If people arrive at an article and you give them some related content and somewhere else to go once they have read it, then it gives them a reason to stay on the site a little longer.

Try to avoid over-stuffing paragraphs with internal links, as readers will either consciously or subconsciously assume the piece is a mere ‘link-building exercise’ and trust the content less. Search engines will make a similar assumption.

Two or three good quality internal links to relevant content, using accurate anchor text, spread throughout the article is best.

Anchor text

Concise yet descriptive anchor text helps search engines better understand your content. This is also very useful for users. When you add a link to a piece of text, make sure the text is completely relevant to the link and avoid phrases like ‘click here’.

Some SEO experts also advise that anchor text should be varied as many pages linking to one page using the same anchor text may look suspicious to search engines.

Headlines, titles and title tags

Keep them as concise as possible sticking to the 65 character rule, although not to the point of making them too obscure or meaningless.

“A beginner’s guide to SEO best practice for bloggers” is descriptive and accurate. However, to benefit your readers and because search engines tend to give keywords at the beginning of a headline the most attention it might be best to rework it.

“SEO best practice: a beginner’s guide” may be better as the most important words are at the front.

Search engines regard metadata and meta keywords as less important than they used to, thanks to years of black hat misuse, however the title of your page and its relevancy to the content will always be a highly important factor in SEO.

Choose a title that accurately reflects the topic of the page’s content. Create a unique tag for each page on your site. Avoid using extremely lengthy titles and stuffing irrelevant keywords in your title tags.

XML Sitemap

This is a document hosted on your website’s server that lists every page on your website. It’s a way for webmasters to inform search engines when new pages have been added or updated.

This is particularly useful if your site has pages that aren’t easily discoverable by Google, such as pages with few links or pages with dynamic content such as Flash.

If you have a WordPress site, you don’t need to do a thing as a Sitemap is automatically generated and regularly submitted to search engines for you. If you need to make your own, here are some formats and guidelines that will help you.

Navigation

Create a naturally flowing hierarchy. Make it easy for users to journey from general site information to more specific information. Provide breadcrumbs so users can easily navigate back and forth, and so users know where they are in the general layout of your website if they’ve arrived on page via other means.

Make sure you use text links to for navigation rather than animation or images. Search engine crawlers find text links easier to understand, as do users.

Comments

Prevent and remove spam from the comments sections of your site.

Ensure that ‘nofollow’ is implemented within your comments, so crawlers won’t assume that spam comments with links to erroneous or harmful websites are validated by your otherwise ethical site.

The controversy of how beneficial the practice of nofollow really is can be debated until your throat is sore or until Twitter has exceeded its capacity, however it’s what Google says is best practice and this section is all about playing by the rules.

Here’s Chris Lake on why Econsultancy has implemented nofollow for guest blogging.

Content

We can take it as read that the quality of your content is the most important ranking signal for all search engine algorithms. 

If you’re not producing good, relevant, entertaining, helpful content at a regular rate, then all of the SEO practices in the world won’t help you in the long run.

Google has an algorithm that’s complicated, ever-changing and impossible to second-guess. All you can guarantee is that no matter what Google and other search engines are looking for in terms of ranking, the value of your content will always be the top priority.

Write for human readers not search engines. That way your content is more likely to be read and shared, helping to drive more traffic to your site and your audience will grow.

Regularity

Producing content, regularly and as often as you can is also a must for appearing in SERPs. When it comes to my own personal blog, I have a policy of publishing at least one article a day during the week. 

Write as regularly as you can, and you’ll soon see that within a few months you’ll start to appear in SERPs and therefore pick up some organic traffic. If you don’t update regularly, search engines will view your site as irrelevant over time and rank you lower.

Length

Don’t be too concerned with the word-count. Whether you’ve been recommended that a post should be at least 300 words long, or 500-1,000 words if your blog is new, try to resist padding it out with waffle. 

Be as concise as possible. A reader would rather read a shorter article that gets to the point then a long-winded epic.

That being said, if you’ve written a 1,000 word masterpiece stuffed with fascinating, completely relevant and helpful content, where you’ve been as tightly controlled and clear with your prose as possible, search engines will prefer this to one that’s half the length on the same subject.

The likelihood of you being penalised for writing a 290 word post instead of keeping to the often recommended 300 word optimal length is very low.

Improving click-through rates

There are many ways to make your search result appear more appealing to searchers. Here are some of the key recommended ones.

Meta description

The meta description is the snippet of descriptive text that appears beneath the URL in SERPs and also when sharing the link on social media channels such as Facebook.

This is what searchers will read and their decision to click-through to your site will largely be determined by how relevant and readable this description us. You want this to be less than 150 characters long, with your keywords as near to the front as possible, but still make sense as a readable sentence.

Search engines will not raise you higher in the rankings because of the quality of the excerpt, but it will increase the likelihood that someone will click-through to your article based on how interesting, relevant or entertaining the excerpt is.

Authorship

Although there is no evidence to suggest that authorship helps your result rank higher, it certainly creates a more appealing and trustworthy listing that stands out from the other purely text based results, which can lead to higher CTR.

If you want your smiley little face to appear next to your content in search results like mine does…

All you need is a Google+ profile, a recognisable headshot and then follow these simple steps from Google.

Schema markup

Pages with Schema markup rank four positions higher in search results than pages without. 

Schema markup gives webmasters all kinds of options to make their site’s listing on a SERP look all snazzy and relevant to your business or service.

It’s the difference between this…

and this…

Schema is basically a type of ‘rich snippet’, a HTML markup that adds extra detail to the text underneath the URL in a search result. 

As you can see from above, if you’ve searched for ‘tiramisu recipe’ you are far more likely to click on the result that includes an image, a starred rating, a calorie count and various other bits of information that a webmaster can provide to make a result look more appealing.

Rich snippets are a way for you to tell search engines directly who you are, what you do and and to give precise information as to the product, service or content you’re providing. 

For more detail on how to implement Schema mark up, read What is Schema markup and why should you be using it.

Images

Image search is an important driver of traffic, but often images themselves are not optimised to their fullest potential.

Use brief but descriptive file names for your images, rather than ‘image0057’. 

Always fill in the ‘Alt’ attribute. Search engines can’t see your images, but they can read the ‘Alt’ text. It’s important to describe your image as accurately as possible as this may not only improve your ranking in image search but also improve the accessibility for those using ‘image reader’ software.

You need to complete the Title, Alt Tags and Description fields when uploading an image for full optimisation. This won’t ‘do’:

Off-page SEO

These are methods that you can use to raise the ranking of a website through off-site, promotional means beyond its code or design. For instance…

Natural link building

Google treats a link from another website to your site as a vote of confidence. Google will therefore rank you higher based on that vote. Therefore the more links the better. 

These links should be relevant though and of an organic quality. Not paid-for or gained through artificial, unrelated means. 

Social media

It’s vital that any content that you create is pushed out through your social media channels. For many companies, businesses and publishers it’s one of the key drivers of traffic to their sites.

As personalisation and relevancy play increasingly important roles in governing exactly what a searcher sees in their search results, it’s crucial that all of your social channels are optimised to include all of the relevant keywords, contact information and a clear description of what you do. 

In turn, all of your social channels should be clearly accessible from your website along with the ability to share your content with relevant share buttons.

Nearly every article we read is connected with an author, whose face, profile and social handles are visible for all. You can be sure that this personalisation facilitated by social will continue to factor highly in all current and future SEO activity. The importance of Google+ to Google SERPs can’t be underestimated. I’ll assume that you already have a Google+ Business page, right?

For much more in-depth information on SEO, download our latest 400 page SEO Best Practice Guide.