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According to a research study by DFW based Joe Youngblood SEO & Digital Marketing Consulting, SEO is still the number one way businesses can achieve success with digital marketing. With more and more competition in SEO, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to rank in the coveted top positions where most consumers will click to visit your website.
Here are 5 ways you can outdo your competition, increase your rankings, and gain more traffic and sales from search engines like Google and Bing.
1. Local Citation Data – Google’s local pack (also known as the map pack or map listings) has been only showing 3 listings since 2015 instead of 7 as had been the norm for nearly a decade prior. When this happened many businesses who were getting phone calls and website clicks at a level they were content with were cut off entirely and left reeling. Today most industries are still filled with local businesses that don’t pay attention to the #1 ranking factor in Google Local, which is the quality of Local Citation Data. Fort Worth business are no exception. Try using Advice Local, Fix My Business Listings, Moz Local, or even Yext to clean up what SEO’s refer to as the NAP Listings (Name, Address, Phone Number) and you should notice a rise in traffic to your website and calls over the next few months.
2. Create Local Organic Service Pages For Areas or Regions You Service – If you operate in more than one city or neighborhood you should create Local Organic Service Pages. Local Organic Service Pages are designed to highlight the services you provide in a single market. For example if you’re a home remodeling contractor the work you complete in one city is different than the work in another city. Building Local Organic Service pages allows you to highlight the work completed in that area showcasing the work you’ve done locally that your prospective clients might have already seen. These pages also allow your website to rank on a large volume of local organic queries. Building these types of pages requires good SEO knowledge and some finese to make them useful and within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. As an example we created this page for a client with locations throughout the metroplex including Weatherford. You’ll notice we added locally relevant content that their audience might find useful, making this page unique compared to others. Another example is the Plano SEO page on JoeYoungblood.com.
3. Get More Reviews in More Places – Consumers love reviews and Google loves them too. Try and gain reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, Yellow Pages, and on your own website. If you are using a WordPress based website there are great plugins like the Rich Reviews plugin to help you gather reviews. This is what the Rich Reviews plugin looks like on a local business website. You can use a service like GetFiveStars or Grade.us to gather more reviews for your business on local business websites and niche directories like Avvo or GetCredo.
4. Gain Locally Relevant Links – The core of Google’s algorithm always has been and always will be links from one website to another. Find ways to get local websites to link to you, but without violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. Some examples of ways to do this are creating locally relevant unique content, doing interviews on local podcasts, or offering your services to help others. Here’s an example of local content created for a DFW area client that gained new links (and business) for them.
5. Remove the Web Designer’s Link in Your Footer – As stated in #4 above links are still a major part of Google’s algorithm (and other search engines as well). Links spread value from page to page, document to document, and website to website. Most local businesses, even the bigger one’s, have modest amounts of link value on their webpages. Many web designers link to their website from the footer of their clients in hopes of artificially inflating their rankings in Google. This practice was devalued by the Google search team for a very long time, but has recently made a big come back. Often times we’re seeing designers be sneaky and link using only their brand name in tiny text or by using their logo. In rare occasions they’ll add the “rel=nofollow” attribute to the link. None of this is ok as the link being present in the footer reduces the value of each page on the website which has a cascading exponential downward impact on the ability of all pages on your website to rank in a search engine which is further compounded by the low link values local business websites have. If you really like the work your web designer or others have done on your website we recommend creating a ‘credits’ page and linking to that page from your About Us page. Here you can link to other websites as a thank you, if you so desire, without suffering the negative impact of a link to another website on every single page of your website, essentially acting as a marketing tool for the designer that built your website. In Local SEO this can often times be the single most valuable change a website can make to see quick gains in traffic from search engines.
Need help with your Local SEO? JoeYoungblood SEO & Digital Marketing Consulting is one of the highest rated and most trusted SEO agencies in the Dallas – Fort Worth area. We love helping our small business clients succeed locally, regionally, and nationally. They have a sharp focus on performing SEO tactics that work and are within Google’s guidelines and provide incredible levels of transparency into all of the work they perform. The company was founded by Joe Youngblood, a sought after national speaker and thought leader on SEO, Social Media, and SEO with over 2 decades of experience.
Give them a call today: (469) 607-8460
Read reviews: On Google
Contact them via their website: https://www.joeyoungblood.com/contact/
Featured Photo by Tim Bogdanov on Unsplash
