Local SEO: Rank Multiple Locations 2018 (One Address)
Rank Multiple Locations (One address)
How to Rank Multiple Locations is a common question we get local SEO agencies get.
People want to Rank Multiple locations of the city that their brick-and-mortar is in but they have challenges ranking in the surrounding cities.
We actually got a question from Louise in New York and she asks”Is it possible to rank outside the city my business is located in” For example “my dry-cleaning company is in New York City, but we service Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens but can’t seem to rank there.”
This is very common question that we get from potential clients and from existing client regarding local SEO.
We should mention that this does not pertain to local businesses with multiple locations, this pertains to when you want to rank in a city beyond the city where your your brick-and-mortar is located.
Multiple Locations Google User Experience
The first thing to understand is that, Google is very focused on user experience. When you are trying to rank outside your city, you have to understand that if somebody in Brooklyn is searching for a “dry cleaner near me” or “dry cleaner in Brooklyn”, Google does not want to present them with results in New York City.
Because they’re not gonna want to drive there or they’re not gonna want to take a train there or whatnot so they want to present searches that are local, that pertain to a local business and that has to do with proximity.
So that is a user experience factor that Google takes into account, which is why it is so hard to rank in a city that you’re not in for a local business.
Most the time people when they ask this question, their goal is to rank Google’s map pack.
They want to rank in the map for a city that they’re not in, to showcase that they service the the search query.
If somebody’s in Brooklyn and there’s a great dry cleaner in New York City, they want to show up there they’d want to show up for that search because they think they deserve it. because maybe they already have clients in that location.
There are some ways to do that and we can go over them now.
Organic Listings Multiple Locations
One strategy that tends to work the best is to shoot for organic listings, rather than the map pack.
You can do this by creating unique service pages for all those places for all the cities that you want to rank in.
If you are that “New York City dry cleaner” and you service the surrounding cities, you would actually create a dry cleaning service page for that city as well, for ie:
- Dry Cleaners Manhattan
- Dry cleaning Brooklyn
- Dry Cleaning Queens
Create pages for all of the surrounding cities that you wanted to rank in.
Service Areas Multiple locations
The second thing that you want to do along with this organic strategy is actually put a “areas we service” item in your top menu. On the header have a drop-down or have that page lists out all the cities you service and actually link to those individual pages.
You’ll want to link to those individual pages from other pages on your site, to spread the authority and to increase increase the ranking potential of those other City searches as well.
When you do this rather than maybe hide that on the footer, as you see a lot of sites that will hide the areas they serve in the footer to try to rank like that.
They don’t actually show it forward-facing to consumers on their website, they put it in their sitemap only or they put it in their footer links.
What you really should do is, put it in the areas you surf section right in your top menu and build internal links to it.
That should really service that aspect of ranking organically, it can still be challenging to outrank your competitors like that.
But if you do all the other SEO stuff right and you have good domain authority then you have you stand a strong chance of coming up in other searches that are outside your city.
The other thing you can do that’s outside of organic SEO is of course do pay-per-click advertising using Google Adwords. We like to use ad extensions, there’s a newer feature for our clients to try to rank outside the cities that they’re in. Hopefully that helped clear up some of the air on how to rank outside your city, if you have any other questions please send them in comments or email us through the site
Social Media Marketing: FaceBook Pixel Remarketing 2018
Social Media Marketing: FaceBook Pixel Remarketing 2018
Have you heard of the rule of seven in which people see your name, your company brand, your product or service seven times and then they’re much more likely to buy?
Well, that is really the case, and that rule exists because Social Media Marketers all over the world have noticed that the more people see your product or brand, the more likely they are to convert and buy.
Today I’m going to teach you what re-targeting is and how you can leverage it. When someone first comes to your website, they’re probably not going to buy.
On the high-end, you’re lucky if five out of a hundred people come to your website and actually buy.
Realistically, one to three out of a hundred are going to buy, the rest aren’t.
What retargeting or remarketing … it’s the same word, they’re interchangeable, is is when someone comes to your website, you can
Pixel them.
There’s a few ad companies that do re-targeting and the main ones are Facebook Ads, and the second one is Google Ad Words.
And what they do is they say, hey, when someone comes to your website, you put this pixel, and then when they go all over the web, no matter what site they’re on, we can show them ads related to your company.
In other words, you’re following them around. It’s a friendly way of stalking on the web. I know that sounds bad, but that really is what re-targeting is.
Don’t worry, you’re not collecting sensitive information on your customers.
These ad companies are pretty smart and sophisticated in which they’re protecting people’s privacy,and what you’re doing is you’re following them around and showing them your product or service and trying to get them back to your website to buy.
A great example of this is Overstock.com.
I once was looking for a mattress when I bought a new home.
So, I’m frugal, I don’t like wasting money.
I go online, I see Overstock has a offer for a mattress, and I went there and I’m like, “$1,000 for a bed mattress. That’s a lot of money.”
What I ended up doing was I decided not to buy. Sleeping on the ground was good enough for me and I did that for a month or so.
But as I was browsing around the web, like I was reading TechCrunch.com and other sites, I continually saw ads for Overstock.com.
They’re re-targeting me.
What they did was they would show that mattress in the banner ad and they’ll show the price of roughly $1,000.
As I kept browsing round the web, I wouldn’t click on it.
They took that ad and then they reduced the price of the mattress and they dropped off another $100. I notice it.
I was about to click over and buy, but because I’m a frugal person, I was hoping that they would drop it another $100 and then I would buy.
I didn’t, but that’s a concept of re-marketing and it works exceptionally well.
Just to give you idea, let’s say right now I’m spending roughly $200,000 a month on paid advertising for my personal blog, and out of that $200,000 budget, roughly $40,000 of it is going towards re-targeting.
It’s that effective.
Give us a call for a strategic campaign of your business, Contact us now.
Local SEO Guide: Higher Google Rankings in 2018
Local SEO Guide: Higher Google Rankings in 2018
AS a leading Local SEO company in New York I’m gonna show you how to get higher Google rankings fast.
In fact, one of my readers recently used the checklist from this article & upped his organic traffic by 88.3%.
In this article, you’re gonna see the checklist that I use for all of my Local SEO clients. You’ll also learn why you might want to delete,
yes delete, half the pages on your website. And a simple trick you can use to improve your Google rankings fast. Keep reading.
A few months ago, I sent out a newsletter to my email subscribers. This email listed out some of my all-time favorite traffic hacks.
Out of the blue, Sean Falconer, a successful business owner, replied to that email. He said, “Dude, I’ve tried all of these techniques before, “and they helped us get more traffic.”
When I looked at Sean’s site, I saw that he was doinga solid job with his content marketing and SEO.
But, I also noticed a few mistakes that were holding him back from Google’s first page. That’s when I sent him this message. A few hours later, Sean got back to me.
After executing the checklist that I’m about to show you, Sean’s organic traffic shot up by nearly 50% in 21 days. And once the checklist had time to kick in, Proven’s traffic increased by a whopping 88.3% three weeks after that.
Let’s dive in to the checklist that Sean used to get higher Google rankings.
Zombie pages provide no helpful content for Local SEO Services
Your first step is to find and eliminate what I call zombie pages.
I used to think that Google rewarded sites that publish lots and lots of unique content. But I was wrong. Today, I know the truth.
The truth is that Google doesn’t want you to publish content just for the sake of publishing content.
In fact, a Google employee recently stated that they prefer websites that publish fewer high quality pages.
This quality over quantity approach is one of the secrets behind my blog’s and local seo success.
Unlike most blogs, I only publish every four to six weeks. But when I do, I make sure each and every post is awesome, Really beefy and really helpful content but that much work is not needed for local SEO.
Fortunately, Sean only published high quality content on his blog. So, that wasn’t an issue. The problem was his site had lots of zombie pages.
So, what are zombie pages?
Zombie pages are pages on your site that don’t provide any value.
For example, zombie pages are pages like old and outdated blog posts and press releases, category and tag pages, search results pages, eCommerce product pages that don’t get any sales, thin content pages, and pages with duplicate content.
In theory, a local Business directory website shouldn’t have a ton of pages. After all, Proven is an online job board where job postings come and go.
Despite that, they had nearly 50,000 pages indexed in Google. That’s a lot. As it turned out, Proven didn’t automatically delete
their old job postings. So, these pages stuck around even though the job had been filled years ago. To make matters worse, Google was indexing their search result pages which are classic zombie pages.
So, I recommended that they delete their old job postings and add the no index tag to their search results for better local seo results.
Sean quickly took action. Thanks to these changes, Proven now only has around 4,000 pages indexed. Which is 40,000 less than they had before.
Technical Local SEO Issues
Step number two is to fix any technical SEO issues There are literally hundreds of technical problems that can impact your SEO.
Fixing them is one of the fastest ways to get higher Google rankings. That said, here are some of the most common technical issues that I see during SEO site audits.
How can you find these technical SEO issues on your site? I recommend using the Raven tool Site Auditor or SEMrush’s Site Audit tool.
They’ll crawl your site and let you know bout technical problems that might be hurting your site’s Local SEO.
Fortunately, Proven didn’t have too many technical SEO issues.
That’s mostly due to the fact that we deleted so many zombie pages. Fewer pages equals fewer problems.
The only problems I could find were some missing ALT text on images and a handful of duplicate titles. Not a big deal but worth fixing. As expected Sean quickly took care of all these technical SEO problems.
Now that we’ve fixed Proven.com’s technical problems, it was time to optimize their content.
Optimized Content for Local SEO
I probably don’t need to tell you that on-page SEO can make or break your site’s rankings. That’s why I dedicate an entire step of my SEO checklist to on-page SEO.
Because Proven had thousands of pages, I knew I couldn’t optimize every single one. So, Sean sent me his top 10 most important pages.
Now, some of Sean’s most important pages were blog posts and others were commercial pages that sold his services.
So, let’s look at a quick example of a page that I optimized for Sean. A blog post called Best Questions to Ask References, The Complete List. Sean’s target keyword for this post was questions to ask references.
I added that keyword to the top of the page. Why?
Because Google puts more weight on words that appear in the beginning of your content. It’s important that your keyword shows up there.
I also sprinkled in a few LSI keywords like business tips. LSI keywords are terms that are closely related to your target keyword.
When you include these LSI keywords in your content, you’llget a rankings boost.
In fact, my recent analysis of one million Google search results found that LSI keyword-rich content tended to outrank content that didn’t contain LSI keywords.
So, how can you use LSI keywords to get higher local seo rankings? Well, let’s say you just wrote an article about coffee.
LSI keywords for coffee would be things like mug, caffeine, and Starbucks. So, you want to make sure that you include those terms in your content.
Optimize your title and description tag for SEO
Our fourth step is to optimize your title and description tag for click-through rate.
You probably already know that CTR is a huge ranking factor right now.
Think about it, if people searching for a keyword click on your result more than others, it tells Google that you’re the best result for that keyword and you’ll rank higher in Google.
In fact, a recently published Google research paper states that, “Click-through read data has proven “to be a critical resource for improving “search ranking quality.”
So, it’s clear that CTR is an important ranking signal. The question is, how can you optimize for it?
Let me walk you through a real life example.
One of Sean’s best blog posts was a huge list of job boards.
Considering how epic this content was, it should’ve been ranking in the top three.
But, Sean’s page was stuck in the fifth spot. And I had a feeling that the page’s title and description was hurting it’s CTR and rankings.
Here’s what I did to turn things around. First, I looked at the ad words ad that showed up when I searched for best job boards and other related keywords.
I noticed that almost every ad used a specific number. And none of the ads used the term niche talent. So, I changed Sean’s title tag to this and his description tag to this.
These changes boosted that pages organic click-through rate by 64.1% And Sean currently ranks in the top three for his target keyword.
Now that I improved Sean’s click-through rate, it was time to optimize his site around another important ranking factor, dwell time. That’s what step number five is all about.
Increase Dwell Time ( Apposite of ‘Bounce Rate)
So, what is dwell time?
And how can you optimize for it? When someone searches for a keyword and clicks in a result, two things can happen.
They can stay in your site for a long time or they quickly click away.
The amount of time someone spends on your site is known as dwell time.
As you might expect, the longer your dwell time, in general, the higher your page will rank in Google Local SEO.
Here’s what I did to quickly improve Sean’s dwell time.
First, I moved Sean’s content up so it appeared at the top of the page. You see, Proven used to have huge gaps that pushed their content
below the fold like this.
So, I cut this gap down by about 50%. Sean’s post also had giant images that pushed their content down even more.
I made these images smaller so they took up less room. Next, I made Sean’s introductions more sticky.
Here’s the deal.
When someone comes to your site from Google, your intro makes them stick around or click away.
In fact, intros are so important that I spend more time on my intros than my headlines.
In Sean’s case, I noticed that his introductions weren’t formatted in a reader-friendly way.
See how all that text is squished together? That’s really hard to read. So I formatted his intro so there was only one sentence per paragraph.
I also cut out a few lines of text that weren’t compelling or interesting.
Overall, these tweaks boosted that page’s dwell time by 12.23%. Not too shabby.
Websites loading speed.
Okay, so our second to last step is to improve your site’s loading speed.
Can making your site faster really improve your Google rankings? Definitely.
In fact, our search engine ranking factor study found that faster loading pages tended to outrank slow pages.
Here’s how to quickly evaluate and improve your site’s loading speed.
First, head over to Google PageSpeed Insights.
Just enter your site into the tool and fix the problems that it tells you about.
Next, check out GTMetrix. Just like Google’s tool, GTMetrix will show you potential issues with your pages code.
But, it also let’s you know about server hosting problems that can slow down your site.
For example, in Sean’s case, his images weren’t compressed. So, they took forever to load. And this single fix made a huge impact on his loading speed.
Now that Sean’s site was optimized, error-free, and fast, i was time for the last step.
Content Skyscraper Technique
Which is to publish a piece of content using the skyscraper technique.
You probably already heard about the skyscraper technique. If you haven’t, here’s the deal.
The skyscraper technique is where you find the best content in your industry and then create something way better.
So, I sent an email to Sean and asked him,
“Have you noticed any content that’s ranking
“in Google, but isn’t even that good?”
He said, “Actually, everything I’ve seen written about job
descriptions is pretty weak.” Sean was right.
Most of the content out there about job descriptions were simple lists of links to different examples of job descriptions.
For whatever reason, they all used the same lame stock photos. So, I worked with Sean to create something way better than what was out there. How?
First, instead of a list to links to other pages, we listed each job description on a single page.
Next, Sean added helpful information about each job like the average salary and education requirements.
Finally, he used quality images instead of lame stock photos.
Sean’s post did great. It got a short-term surge in traffic after it went live.
Today, Sean’s skyscraper content currently ranks in the top five for his target keyword. And thanks to this content and the other techniques from this checklist, Sean’s organic traffic increased by 88.39%.
There you have it, my seven step checklist to improve your Google rankings in local SEO.
