To stay on top of search engine ranking is an ever evolving and time consuming process. Local businesses invest heavily in digital marketing to improve their local ranking as they know it is a great way to excel in the local competition.
Local businesses are constantly on the lookout for the ways to improve their ranking in search engine results. Though there is plenty of information on how to improve search engine rankings, local marketers faces the complex issue of getting the right local SEO strategies to get an edge over their competitors. Even after investing a large part of their capital in local marketing, the results are hard to come by. If this is the case with you, go through the list of the best and worst ways to Influence your local SEO rankings can be extremely helpful.
What you should do?
There are several ways that training institutes suggest to improve your local search engine results. Some of them are:
• Placing page signals: Page signals that include placing keywords in the business titles and placing Google place listings in optimized categories help in bringing local traffic.
• Placing on-page signals: On-page signals include personal information of the business like name, address and contact number in addition to the domain name improve the performance of the business.
• External signals: Getting the business registered in other local business like Yellow pages and Yelp also favor the business.
• Social signals: Social signals include Facebook likes and comments, twitter followers and Google + are also important in determining SEO of a business.
• Review Signals: The velocity, diversity and quality of online reviews and rankings affect the local search engine ranking.
What not to do?
A number of negative SEO factors can be responsible for harming your local marketing effort. Some of the practices that you should avoid are:
1. Providing a false location address: A false location address is the worst thing for your business. This gives the customers an impression that the business is not legitimate.
2. Keyword stuffing: As with everything, using excessive keywords is bad for your business. Try to stick to most preferred keywords for your business else you will lose a lot of traffic.
3. Creating multiple identities: Creating multiple identities and addresses for your business will create suspicion in the minds of the customers and your credibility will suffer. Make sure that the location information on all signals is same and accurate.
4. Wrong category: Make sure that you list your business in the category that is meant or you. Putting it across wrong categories will produce negative search results.
5. Multiple Landing Pages on Google Places: Having a single Google Places landing page will ensure that all the customers looking for you, directly land at a single place.
6. Absence of contact information on your website: It is a must to have contact information on your website. You will not only lose search traffic but you will also end up losing potential customers who have a little doubt about your services.
7. Violating Google’s policies: Google has a strict framework for working of its search engine. Any false reviews of the website or any task that violates the terms of Goggle will not only result in monetary penalties but a lot of SEO loss too.
This guide lists down the best and worst is sure to help the businesses make most of their online presence locally and drive more traffic and sales.