So What Can You Do?
Make sure your website or blog is optimized for local search results. Focus on the terms that people will use when they search for you locally, broad and general terms will likely leave you ont he 90th page. Use the local area you are in, whether it is SOHO in New York City or the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. That is your Ace in the Hole.
Content Creation. You may think that it is obvious since you are a restaurant located in a particular town that you are catering to them. But to Google it is not obvious unless you spell it out. So when you are crafting your messages that means you are writing to both the reader and to Google. Mention your location. One of my restaurants, Evenfall, does a lot of private functions like rehearsal dinner and such. So we strive to be a top result in our area by targeting search terms like Rehearsal Dinners Haverhill, Rehearsal Dinners Merrimack Valley, as you can see we fuse the service with the location in the search terms.
Take Advantage of the HTML Code that Google Checks. Each page should have focus keywords that it is designed to be found for. Each page should also have a carefully considered title as it is a major part of the indexing process and then it is what the searcher will see when he/she comes across you in google search results. Finally the Meta description should be a clear and concise summary of what the page contains as that will be the text that is weighted heavily in search rankings and the text that will be displayed in results.
Submit Your Site to Google via SiteMaps and URL Submissions. Your website should have a sitemap to take advantage of the XML Sitemaps protocol, which will allow you to submit every page in your site to Google and Bing. Google also just realeased a URL submission tool that you can submit URLs to get crawled. It is a good idea to do both.
What do I do for Clients?
I talk to them about their business, and ask them which terms they would love to get to the top in. Then I take the time to make sure everything above is taken advantage of, and I try to create content for them that will be ranked the highest in their niche for those terms.
I also try and think like a customer, easier for me then someone running the business, and work to create keywords that i beleive would be searched for. I create content that will be found for those keywords too.
Then using Google analytics I track the ‘Organic Traffic’ generated from search engines and look at the best performing keywords. Those are the ones that generate the most traffic that leads to a conversion page (point of purchase, Email list sign up, etc). Those become the focus of a second round of content creation that is aimed at bolstering the site’s results for those keywords and the conversion rates that we are after.
If you are interested in talking about your business, seeing what i would do for your site, or just getting more info don’t hesitate to comment here, on twitter @spirocks, Google+ top right, or call my office (617) 379-2430. I am always happy to talk about these things whether you want to hire me or not.
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Comments
6 responses to “Local Business and Google Search Ranking”
Very cool post – It’s sooo still important. Glad you got juiced to do a post about this. Lots of folks still think SEO is dying, or dead because of social. Far from the truth! Certainly social plays a role, but links will always be king and this kind of on-site optimization, is GOD! Well written, super informative post, Spiro.
Thanks Ryan,
With social and all its bells an whistles it is easy for business people or social fanatics to trumpet the idea that social is killing search. I believe it is quite the contrary, Social is making Search better.
With the advent of Google+ and its record setting growth google now has a plethora of social data which is increasing daily. That data allows their algorithms to define results with more points of differentiation and with social it allows for google to ‘outsource’ a job than they could never afford to do. Social data points are the result of Human Curation of information, each time something is shared by a human on social networks its importance increases. Pairing this human curation with the web crawlers, and back links (another form of human curation google ways heavily) adds to the relevancy of search.
Businesses who understand how customers are finding them would never discount the value of ranking high in google. It is quite simply one of the most valuable places to be.
Thanks for reading and getting me thinking this Am.
-Spiro
Wow man – I never thought about that before.. the whole algorithmic enhancement from the data they’re collecting from G+.
I agree man, social’s making search better and SEO is not dead, in fact, very alive.
I am glad you just commented on this again, in rereading our conversation I found a very lame mis-spelling in my previous reply.
If I told you had six dead windows desktops, do you think I could get one working one out of them?
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Thanks! Glad to have you, and look forward to conversations.