seo

Posted by JamesAgate

Many of you may have seen Skyrocket SEO’s Link Building Survey results that we published here on Moz around this same time last year. The reception was fantastic, so we decided to push ahead with turning this into an annual series to see how this strand of the industry is developing and evolving over time.

Firstly, “link building”…

Yep, we’ve not changed the name to a “content marketing survey” or “inbound link acquisition survey;” we still feel link building is a vital part of an SEOs arsenal of tactics, and therefore it deserves its own survey.

As a company we’re investing just as much in link building for our clients (granted, we’ve adapted what we are doing), but the fact remains that if you want to score big with decent organic search visibility then you need links.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to the details:

Who took the survey?

A massive thank you to the 315 or so people who took the survey. That number is slightly down from last yeah, which I feel is partly due to fewer people considering link building to be a part of their day-to-day roles. I’d argue that’s a missed opportunity, and this year we had a few duplicate entries and submissions that needed a bit of tidying up, so we trimmed it back to these 315 submissions.

The makeup of the respondents was broadly similar to last year, as expected, although based on user feedback from our inaugural survey, we added a few more categories for respondents to self-classify�so it is hard to make specific comparisons.

How much does your company spend on link building per month?

In the 2013 survey, 10% of respondents said their company spent $50k+ per month on link building, so it appears that the upper limit to link building spend may have decreased slightly across the industry.

That being said, there now appears to be a much larger number of companies in the $10-$50k per month bracket when you compare this year’s 37% with last year’s 11%.

I would attribute the changes year-on-year to two factors;

• Reclassification of the term “link building:” Many companies have shifted budget that they would previously classified as link building budget into content projects that more than likely still have an impact on link building efforts.
• Recognition of opportunity: Based on our own experiences we see a number of website owners and businesses pushing harder with their content promotion and link building as they recognise an opportunity to invest when their competitors are running scared.

Warren Buffett once said “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” Based on conversations alone that I’ve had with a wide range of businesses, many are now fearful when it comes to building links. In fact, we gathered some data later in the survey that revealed that one of the biggest challenges people face is not knowing which links will help and which will harm them. Google’s widespread action against websites (and dare I say it webmaster propaganda) has had a dramatic impact on some people to the point of paralysis.

There are clear opportunities that, with a sound strategy, can be seized in today’s market.

You can build links like it’s 1999 for a microsite or second level property, keep it super-clean and identify link opportunities that would be valuable irrespective of Google, or somewhere in between those extremes. The fact is the links still form the backbone of the internet and of Google’s algorithm and that isn’t going to change for a very long time.

What percentage of your overall SEO budget is allocated toward building links?

Thanks to John-Henry Scherck for this one as he made the suggestion following the 2013 survey that having data on the percentage would be really interesting. Looking back we don’t have a point of comparison but not of course moving forward we will have so we should get a clearer picture of whether online marketing budgets are just increasing in general (and therefore link building gets allocated the same percentage but of a bigger pie) or whether folks are seeing the value from building links and therefore allocating a larger percentage of the same sized pie to link building activities.

Would you say you’ve increased or decreased your spend on link building over the past 12 months?

This aligns with our data on more people entering the $10-$50k per month investment bracket this year:

Why the increase/decrease in spending?

We asked people why they decided to increase or decrease their spending on link building over the past 12 months.

Responses could be categorized into the following areas:

Common reason for increases:

• Increased costs related to moving away from older style and often “cheaper” link building
• Increased costs related to production/creativity
• Good links are just as important as ever; links still move the needle in terms of search engine visibility and performance therefore it makes sense to increase investment in this area.

Common reasons for decreases:

• Moving link building budget into content marketing projects (to be fair, this budget will probably indirectly fund link acquisition of some kind even if it is seen as a secondary goal for the content campaign.)
• We wanted to scale back and assess the impact that Google’s manual actions etc have on our website.

In the next 12 months, will you look to increase or decrease your spend on link building?

Why the planned increase/decrease in spending?

• Link building continues to get more expensive
• To raise the bar on existing efforts, and to beat competitors with increasingly sophisticated content assets
• Unsure where to invest/which links are working so concentrating budget into other activities.

Which link building tactics do you utilise most often?

(Numbers listed are votes rather than percentages)

When we compare with responses from the 2013 survey, there is a clear shift towards content-led initiatives and a reduction in some tactics for example close to 50% said in 2013 that guest blogging was their staple tactic, in 2014 fewer than 15% listed it as one of their staple activities.

Another interesting bit of data is the fact that paid links have seen somewhat of a resurgence in popularity, presumably as companies look for tactics where they can maintain greater control. In 2013, just 5% listed paid links as their staple linking tactic whereas in 2014 over 13% reported paid linking and blog networks as one of their main link building tactics.

What is currently your biggest link building challenge?

• Getting links to pages that aren’t particularly linkworthy (money pages)
• Lack of scalability (time, process, training, spreading time between clients)
• Avoiding Google penalties

These are similar challenges to those reported in 2013 in the sense that there is still concern over which links are helping and harming organic search performance as well as difficulties relating to processes and the lack of scalability.

The interesting thing is that SEO is full of challenges so as soon as one is overcome, the next appears. In 2013, 28% of respondents said that “finding link prospects” was a key challenge but this year not a mention of link prospects being an issue. This arguably suggests that we as an industry were adjusting to the “new world” back in 2013 and that now we have advanced our capabilities enough for this to now longer be the primary challenge in our day to day work. Now the main problem doesn’t seem to be getting links as such but more about getting links into the pages that we all need to rank to stay in business � the money pages.

Which link building tactics do you believe to be most effective?

(numbers below are “votes” rather than percentages)

Which link building tactics do you believe to be least effective?

(numbers below are “votes” rather than percentages)

Which link building tactics do you consider to be harmful to a site?

(numbers below are “votes” rather than percentages)

See the complete visual below:

Thank you for everyone who took part in the survey! See you all again next year.

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Posted by Isla_McKetta

Write it and they will come. That’s the drum we’ve been beating for a long time now. We optimize our pages and our content to please search engines and cross our fingers and hope that customers will convert.

We can do better.

But to do it, we have to think beyond Google. Yes, you still need to check all your standard SEO boxes to make your site crawl friendly. Then it’s time to stop catering to the bots and start catering to the users instead.

That means we have to�no, we get to�think bigger when we think of SEO. As Rand said in his Whiteboard Friday last week, “SEO is really any input that engines use to rank pages.” That’s why we have to reexamine the way we design, the way we create, and the way we optimize. Most importantly, we’re going to have to reconsider the underlying logic we use to approach all three of those activities as we learn to think of the user first and the bots second.

This idea of blending search and user optimization isn’t new. But when Gianluca Fiorelli called for a shift from semantic to semiotic thinking on State of Digital, he got me thinking about whether semiotics are the next step in earning the audience you want.

What the heck is semiotics?

Semiotics is the study of the creation of meaning. Semioticians look at everything�words, images, traffic lights, kinship structures�and study what those signifiers (signs or anything that signifies anything) mean and how people create meaning from those signs.

Semiotics is composed of three parts: syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. When we’re approaching user optimization from a semiotic point of view, we’re shifting from a focus on semantics to an incorporation of all three elements.

Let’s get to know them.

Syntactics (form)

Syntactics (more commonly called “syntax”) is the study of the formal relationship between signs. Think of syntax as dealing with grammatical rules, form, and spatial order. Syntax is why you place “inurl:” before the url in a query instead of after. Syntax can be as arbitrary as the order of lights in a traffic light, but it is unchanging.

In grammar, syntax is why you say “oranges are good” but Yoda says “good are oranges.”

Syntax is so embedded in search these days that we don’t even talk about it, and as long as your code is in the right order and the content on your pages is written for users who aren’t Yoda, you’ve mastered syntax. Hooray!

Semantics (meaning)

Semantics is the study of conventional meaning. Let’s take the word “orange.” It can mean either the fruit or the color.

Whether or not you use semantic markup, search engines are usually capable of reading the context on a page and returning a result for either the fruit or the color, depending on the parameters you entered. Crawlers have been using things like context, synonyms, taxonomy, and information architecture to determine the relevance of search results for a very long time. When Hummingbird came along, the semantic nature of search became more obvious because we could see that Google is looking at queries and not just keywords.

If you’re keeping score, we’re already thinking about and optimizing for two elements of semiotic thinking. And we’ve caught up with the latest algorithm updates. But syntax and semantics aren’t the whole story when it comes to how humans create and understand information.

Enter pragmatics.

Pragmatics (use)

You (and your customers) bring a whole life’s experiences into any interaction whether it’s reading a website or chatting someone up at a cocktail party. Those experiences shape the way you interpret images and words.

For example, if you’re a soccer fan, the way you fell about the word “orange” could be affected by how much you like or hate the Dutch national team whose nickname is “Oranje.”

And if you’re color blind, “orange” could mean any of these colors depending on the exact type of color blindness you have:

“Orange” also has political connotations:

Photo of Orange Revolution courtesy of Wikipedia user Irpen. 

The point is that search engines know the dictionary definition of a word. They can even learn about the associations you have by the search terms you enter. But they do not inherently understand (yet) the richness of your personal relationship with a word and the myriad other factors that go into creating meaning for you.

Pragmatics is your opportunity to create a site that engages with all of those connotations in order to create a stronger bond with your customers.

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Banana.
Banana who?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn’t say “banana?”

Pragmatics in action

Pragmatics is also a way of describing how complicated our relationship with information inputs is.

Say you see something crazy in your Facebook feed like an article claiming, “Solar Panels Drain the Sun’s Energy, Experts Say.” Your job is to decide whether to share, comment on, or ignore that link. First you have to understand what it means, which in this case is figuring out if it’s good science, bad science, or satire.

Here is the process a human might go through as you use pragmatic interpretations to figure out how not to sound like a dope when replying to this post.

1. Consider the source

The article is from the National Report, which is not a household name. If it was from The New York Times,  it might be time to panic, but in this case, you’ll want to dig a little deeper.

2. Evaluate the content

Human thought is remarkably complex and here are just a few of the signs you might consider while trying to make sense of this article:

3. Check the internet

It seems like this article is probably satirical, but to be safe, you can do what a lot of us do�Google “National Report” (and no, the irony of using to a search engine to prove that human users can make better connections than search engines is not lost on me). And then ask Wikipedia.

You could have made a decision about this article on a syntactic level (the sentences made sense even though the content seemed farfetched). You could even have interpreted it on a semantic level (both Googling the article and the Wikipedia search).

But what many readers need to fully understand this article is the pragmatics of assessing the signs.

So that’s a pretty deep dive just to decide to ignore a Facebook post. But the point is that your customers do this all the time, and the huge number of factors that go into showing us whether we should engage with your site and its content are more than search engines can currently look at. 

That’s semiotics. The whole bundle of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. And we’re doing pretty well with two parts of it, but there’s still a lot of opportunity in pragmatics.

Incorporating semiotic thinking into your web design and content

To recap: search engines aren’t sophisticated enough to know what pragmatic associations your customers bring into a search, but your customers are naturally bringing in layers of context, preferences, and life experience. Which means there are many layers on which you can engage with a customer that search engines can’t yet understand.

Here are some examples of ways to use pragmatics to connect with your audience.

1. Use satire or other humor

As with the solar panels article, some stuff on the internet seems too crazy and stilted to believe until you put it in context. The Onion has mastered this (and they have the engagement to show it). Robots don’t get humor, but humans do, and being funny (when appropriate) makes your site memorable.

2. Build a lexicon for your content

Use a lexicon (a list of commonly used words, slang and/or jargon specific to your audience) to understand the (rapidly evolving) way that your customers speak and communicate with them in their own language. Think about your users and what the words you’re using signify for them. Are they hearing the same things you are saying? If not, fix it.

3. Consider culture in your design

Connect with your audience by designing a site that speaks to their ideas of beauty and the way they process information. See how the US version of Shu Uemura’s site is clean and spare like many American sites (or, for that matter, Wyoming)? 

Meanwhile the Japanese version showcases more information in a compact space (kind of like downtown Tokyo).

What I love about this example is that the brand aesthetic carries across cultures�only the way that brand is interpreted that changes. Cultural considerations can include anything from views on gender to perceptions of color. For example, in parts of Asia, purple is associated with luxury, while in the US it’s associated with low prices. Check out this excellent slide deck by Smith Prasadh to learn more about how differently humans can see the world (and how you can use that to connect with your audience).

4. Capture tangential relationships

Engagement doesn’t have to be about your product. Just take a look at what Emirates, a major sponsor of the World Cup, did in customizing their hero image for each target market. The global English version is pretty straightforward.

Things get more personal for Chilean visitors as Emirates tailors not just the flag, but also the copy (using the English version for consistency).

But the best, most customized version of this campaign is the one created for Brazilians. It’s so tailored, in fact, that I had to look up a couple of things. The stripes on the flight attendant’s cheeks are not the Brazilian flag, but instead represent the colors of the Brazilian team. And “Little Canary” is a nickname for the team.

I’ll bet that Google doesn’t care one single bit about these customizations. Even if they can read the text on the images. But my guess is that Emirates has scored a major goal in terms of customer “team” feeling with this campaign which should increase their direct traffic.

5. Incorporate metaphor into your design

Tired of the same old templates and stock photos? Your customers are too. Use images to evoke metaphor like Austin-based Write Bloody Publishing does here to capitalize on the do-it-yourself feeling of the Wild West.

Think about what makes your company unique and own that story with your design. It will make you stand out from the crowd.

Another way to do this is to reconsider your site nav with an eye toward metaphor. Maybe you’re a game company like 2K Games and you want your customers to feel like they are already immersed in your game, say BioShock, as they interact with your site. The first step would be to build a navigation that encourages that kind of feeling. Have your user enter the site as they would enter Rapture�through the bathysphere. Showcase game add-ons as plasmids. And use cutscenes to hint toward exciting features on the site just as you would in the game.

As long as you don’t throw your SEO training out the window, it’s okay to try something new and see if it speaks to your customers. If it doesn’t, try something else. As Lindsay Wassell said yesterday at MozCon, “The internet rewards innovation. Search engines reward innovation.” Be that innovator.

Those are just a few examples. The opportunity in thinking semiotically as you design, create, and optimize is to engage with your customers on a human level. This naturally builds your brand affinity, which should increase your traffic.

I’d love to hear about how you’re using pragmatics to build nuanced relationships with your customers.

Your mission

Let loose your creative team. No one wants to be an SEO copywriter or an SEO designer. When you’re optimizing a site in any way, think first about the user�the one with the most sophisticated relationship�then make sure that your standard SEO boxes are checked. Anything less is like dumbing down a parallax experience to a simple sketch to make sure Google fully understands it fully.

Now go off and use pragmatics to relate to your customers in such a way that so many customers come to your site and engage in such great numbers that the search engines chase you trying to figure out how you did it. You’ll be prepared if Google’s algorithm ever learns how to account for pragmatics, and it beats you chasing rankings any day.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Kristina Kledzik

As a human being currently using the internet, you have opinions about online user experience. The problem is, everyone’s experience is going to be different based on their expectations. So although you, as a Moz blog reader and probably an internet connoisseur, may have some very good ideas about making your company’s or client’s site easier to use for the majority of visitors, there’s a good chance that your boss or client will disagree with you. 

If you’re like me and aren’t a user experience expert, it’s going to be hard to argue with them on gut instinct alone. Rather than debate in circles, spend the time to validate your argument:

1. Prove there is a problem. This is a good idea even if you and your boss (or client) wholeheartedly agree that the site is less than optimal. Get feedback from visitors who aren’t working on the site and see if their feedback lines up with your assumptions. 
2. Propose a solution. Based on the feedback, propose a solution. It’s best to do this visually with a page mockup. 
3. Test that solution. See how visitors respond better to your new design than they did to the old design.

By going through these steps, you can build a strong case for implementing your recommendations.

How to prove there is a problem

My favorite:

Qualaroo

Qualaroo is a simple yet effective way to collect feedback. You just put a small piece of JavaScript code on your site, allowing Qualaroo to load a question in the lower right hand corner of a page. You can: 

• Place the question on any page or group of pages
• Write your own questions or use their helpful library of examples
• Set a time for when the box shows up (e.g., on page load, after 15 seconds, or when the visitor moves their cursor up to the URL bar on their browser, indicating they might leave)

Example use: One of my clients runs seminars. They can host them in a number of places, but if the seminar is hosted in their primary building, they don’t explicitly say where the seminar is held. I theorized that this is causing confusion for visitors and that adding the address to the seminar page would make visitors’ decisions easier.

I didn’t want to ask a leading question, though, so I just added a question to every seminar page, “Is there any other information you need to make a decision today?” Once I had collected a few hundred responses, I exported the feedback to an Excel file and started sorting ideas. I was right: a good proportion of people were interested in the location. The exercise also taught me that a lot of visitors wanted a sample schedule of the program. 

Cheap feedback without access to the code of your site:

Feedback Army/Mechanical Turk

While I recommend Qualaroo, I realize that many of you may not be able to convince your boss or client to install JavaScript and potentially distract visitors with your UX questions. If that’s the case, you can use  Mechanical Turk, or Feedback Army, which is a guy using Mechanical Turk for you, because mTurk’s interface is pretty clunky.

Mechanical Turk allows you to submit questions to millions of online workers from across the world (about 30% are American), so you can use the same questions as you would with Qualaroo. You have to lead them to the right page to review as well, but that should be easy enough.

More expensive feedback without access to the code of your site:

UserTesting.com

If you’d like a more robust user experience test, try out UserTesting.com. Testers are paid $35/test, so they’re going to give you a much more in-depth, thoughtful review than Mechanical Turk. With a higher price tag comes a lot more information, though: you give testers a task and ask them for feedback along the way. This may be excessive if your idea was about tweaking one piece of one page, but it’s great for information architecture/site navigation issues.

Bonus: Running tests like these without access to the code of the site means that you can run tests on your competitors, too! Use either Feedback Army or UserTesting.com to learn what people like about your competitors’ sites and what frustrates them. It’ll tell you what you’re up against, and pieces that testers praise may be worth imitating on your own site.

Quantitative feedback:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics won’t give you the opinions of visitors, but sometimes actions speak louder than words. If your theory is that:

• Calls to action aren’t really…calling people to action
• Visitors don’t know how to navigate to the page they’re looking for
• Readers don’t scroll all the way to the bottom of the page

Then you can look at:

• What proportion of visitors clicked on that call to action (if there are multiple CTAs to the same location on a page, you may have to set up Event Tracking to be sure which CTA was clicked)
• How visitors move through your site with the Visitor Flow report, and how many visitors clicked around before using site search with the Site Search report
• How far visitors scrolled down a page, by setting up Events at certain break points

How to propose a solution

Proving that there is a problem gets your boss or client to the table. The next step is proposing a solution and proposing it well.

The most effective way I’ve found to pitch a design change is to actually mock up your solution. If you have access to design tools, definitely use those. I don’t, though, so I either modify the HTML with Chrome’s Inspect Element feature or use a combination of the Windows Snipping Tool and Paint.

Snipping Tool & MS Paint

I know, no one gets design cred from using MS Paint. But I’m a child of the ’90s, and Paint was my first introduction to design software, so it’s easy for me to use. The point here isn’t to use Paint necessarily, but to use whichever program you have access to and is easy to use. Don’t stop yourself from creating designs just because you don’t own a copy of Dreamweaver or Photoshop.

When I want to mock up a dramatically different version of a page, I use the Snipping Tool to take a picture of the webpage as it currently is, then modify the parts that I want to. The selector makes it easy to move elements around. If Paint doesn’t have an option I need, I just use other Office products:

• For text overlays and adding a variety of shapes, I’ll often use Word, since it has a lot of text box options
• For color changes and setting a transparent color, I use PowerPoint, because as far as I know it’s the only Office product that has that option
• For text changes, I’ll modify the HTML in Chrome (see section below), then copy that over to my Paint design

Is this hack-y? Yes. Is it impressive? No. But it gets the job done. All you need at the end is a design good enough to communicate your idea. Once you get sign-off, actual designers will make sure that the details turn out right.

Rewriting the HTML

As I mentioned above, this works best if what you’re doing is modifying the existing text or images. You can either download the HTML of a page, modify it, and share that, or you can use Chrome’s Inspect Element to quickly modify text and take a picture of the result. It took me 15 seconds to change the text on Moz’ homepage:

Just right click wherever you want to edit on your page while in Chrome and click “Inspect Element.” If you want to make color changes or image changes, it’ll be a little more complicated, but still doable. 

You can do this in Firefox as well with Firefox’s add-on, Firebug.

Once you’ve got a mock up, save it and send it on to your boss/client with your description of the changes you’ve made, the stats from your tests, and why your solution is solving those problems. (Just don’t mention how you made that mock up.)

How to test your solution

Even if your proposed solution is a big hit and everyone wants to implement it right away, it’s better to test to make sure that it’s actually going to work before making a permanent change to your site. I’ve had a lot of clients tell me that it’s too hard to test changes, but it’s actually fairly easy with the right tools.

If you or a dev can build you variation pages:

Google Experiments

Image from Marketing Engine Land, which includes more details on Google Experiments.

If you’ve got a developer who can build out your suggested change,  Google Experiments is a free, reliable, and easy to use tool to track results. It’s integrated into Google Analytics, so it uses the conversion metrics you already have set up (this may mean you’ll have to set up a new goal to cover your test’s desired outcome). 

If dev resources are limited:

Optimizely

Optimizely does need a bit of dev work to install a JavaScript code onto your site, but once it’s there, you can edit the HTML for tests with their web interface, without talking to a developer. You can edit with their editor or use actual HTML, meaning the tool doesn’t require HTML skills, but still allows those able to write HTML the extra precision they can get from making changes to the code directly. 

As a consultant, I love working with clients who have Optimizely installed, because I can take a test from start to finish. I prove the problem, propose a solution, set up the test, and present results, all without my point of contact having to take time out of his or her busy schedule to make any changes. And, once you have numeric results, it’s easy to prove the value of your suggested change and get it into the dev queue. 

Make a solid argument for change

Assuming that each step supported your initial ideas, you now have more than enough data to strongly support making the change you suggested. When you make your recommendation, take the time to tell the story of what you went through�getting user feedback, coming up with a solution, and proving the solution works. Clients and bosses feel a lot more comfortable with your conclusions if they see how thoroughly you researched the issue.

Has anyone else gone through a similar process? Any tools you prefer, or tips you’d like to add? Share in the comments below!

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Posted by randfish

We all know that keywords and links alone no longer cut it as a holistic SEO strategy. But there’s still plenty outside our field who try to “boil SEO down” to a naively simplistic practice – one that isn’t representative of what SEOs need to do to succeed. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand champions the art and science of SEO and offers insight into how very broad the field really is.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Greg_Gifford

If you work in the SEO industry, you need to understand how to do Local SEO. Seriously.. I’m not kidding here… If you’re sitting there thinking “Um, no… not really” – then you’re exactly the person I’m writing this post for.

If you haven’t already, I can pretty much guarantee you that at some point in your SEO career, you’re going to do some SEO for a business that has a physical storefront. BOOM – that means Local SEO. Sure, you’ve still got to do all the traditional SEO things that you do every day for all your clients, but when you’re talking about a physical location, Local SEO is absolutely necessary.

If you’re thinking “But Greg – If I do all the SEO stuff I’m supposed to do, I’ll still get the site to rank organically…” – you still aren’t getting it. If you add some Local SEO to the mix, you can show up in organic results AND the map pack (clients love that, so you should too). Plus, showing up in the map pack or the Local Carousel is incredibly important when a business is trying to pull in customers from the immediate area. Also, the map pack results show up ABOVE the organic results on mobile, and we all know that mobile is blowing up.

So if you’ve never paid any attention to Local SEO, it’s time to start lifting, bro. I’m going to give you a simple workout plan to help you beef up your Local SEO muscles, and with a little practice, you’ll be playing with the big boys in no time.

You should already know how to optimize a website, and if you don’t, there are a ton of awesome posts here on Moz. When you’re working on your optimizations, there are some important elements that you need to concentrate on for Local SEO. These elements are extremely important on your landing pages for your Google Plus Local listings (more commonly known now as “Google My Business Places Plus Local For Business”). If your business has multiple locations, you should have a unique location landing page for each Google Plus Local listing. you’re dealing with a single location, then we’re talking about your home page – but these elements should also be locally optimized on product and services pages. 

1. City and state in the title tag. Arguably one of the most important places to include city/state information. We’ve seen many small businesses jump up in local rankings from this alone.
2. City and state in H1 heading. Hold on, don’t interrupt. I know it doesn’t HAVE to be an H1 heading… So whatever heading you’ve got on the page, it’s important to also have your city/state info included.
3. City and state in URL. Obviously, this can’t happen on your home page, but on other pages, including the city/state info in the URL can be a powerful signal of local relevance.
4. City and state in content. Clearly, it’s important to include your city/state info in your content.
5. City and state in alt tags. We see far too many local business sites that don’t even use alt text on their images. Make sure you’ve got alt text on all your images, and make sure that you’re including city/state info in your alt text.
6. City and state in meta description. Yes, we all know that the meta description doesn’t play into the ranking algorithm… but including city/state info can really boost clickthrough rate for local search results.
7. Include an embedded Google Map. Including an embedded Google Map is important too, but PLEASE make sure you do it correctly. You don’t want to just embed a map that points to your address… You want to embed a map that points to your actual Google Plus Local listing.

Most of the Local SEOs who really live and breathe local agree that citations aren’t the amazing powerful weapon that they used to be… but that doesn’t mean they’re not still incredibly important. If you don’t know what a citation is, it’s commonly referred to as NAP information in Local SEO circles – Name, Address, and Phone number. Google expects local businesses to have their NAP information on certain other websites (Yelp, social media sites, etc.), so if you don’t have citations on the important sites, or your citation information is incorrect, it can really hurt how your business is ranking.

While they’re not the silver bullet for rankings that they used to be, they’re still an important signal for local relevancy. Here’s may favorite example… We were hired to do the SEO for a car dealership just outside of New Orleans last fall. The dealer spent tons of money on radio and TV ads and was very well known in the local area, but he didn’t understand why he wasn’t showing up in local searches.

Within about 30 seconds of looking at his site, we knew exactly what the problem was. The correct spelling of his dealership name is “Deal’N Doug’s Autoplex” – but he had his own business name misspelled five different ways on his home page alone:

• Dean’N Dougs Autoplex
• Deal’ N Doug’s Autoplex
• Deal’N Doug’s Auto Plex
• Dealn Dougs Autoplex
• Deal n Dougs Autoplex

We did a quick citation evaluation, and sure enough, he had all of those misspelled names floating around in different citations. He also had several citations for “Dealin’ Doug’s Autoplex” – which is grammatically how you’d expect it to be spelled.

We figured that we had the perfect opportunity for a citation experiment. All we did during the first month of work was NAP cleanup. We corrected the business name everywhere on his site, and we made sure to manually update all of the citations that were misspelled.

In just a few weeks, he went from not ranking at all to ranking in the top spot in the map pack. When the local algorithm went through the big shakeup last October, he retained the #1 map ranking and also gained a #2 organic spot. Yes, we did a lot more optimization for him after that first month, but cleaning up the name information was enough to get him to rank #1 in his city.

Working on citations can be tedious, but it’s well worth the effort. There are tons of submission services out there, but we prefer to do everything manually, so we know 100% for sure that things are done correctly. Here’s our citation campaign workflow:

1. Run an initial check with Moz Local. No, I wasn’t paid to say that (but if Moz wants to hook me up with some extra bacon at MozCon to thank me, I wouldn’t turn it down… cough, cough). We start with a quick check on Moz Local to see the current status of a client’s citations. It’s a great way to see a brief overview of how their NAP information is distributed online.
2. Fix any issues found in Moz Local. It’s got all those handy links, why not use them? If there are missing citations, go get them. If you’ve got incomplete listings, follow the tips to update them.
3. Run a citation search with Whitespark. Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder is awesome (it’s our favorite citation tool). You need to run two reports: one to check your current citations, and another to find citation opportunities. Whitespark is simply the best around for finding citation opportunities.
4. Set up a campaign in BrightLocal. Yes, it’s a bit redundant to use BrightLocal and Whitespark at the same time… but we really love their interface. You get 3 tabs of info: active citations, pending citations, and potential citations. On each citation, you can enter specific notes, which really helps you keep track of your efforts over time. When you add in new citations from your Whitespark list, you can add them in to your “pending citations” tab. When you re-run the report later, any pending citations that have become active will move over into the active list.
5. Keep pumping reps. Over time, you’ll add more citations, but you should always use Whitespark to check for new opportunities AND any incorrect NAP info that might appear. Keep your notes in BrightLocal so you can keep everything straight.

Reviews are an integral part of Local SEO, but they’re also vital for local clickthroughs. Now that Google displays reviews in an isolated popup (instead of taking you to the locations Google Plus Local page), users will read your reviews before they see any other information about your business.

Our process is simple, but it works well. Here’s how to get more positive reviews for any business:

1. Set up a review page on your site. We always set up a page at domain.com/reviews for every client. It’s easy for any employees to remember, and it’s a simple URL to tell customers about. You don’t want to ask for reviews and then expect that your customers will be able to search for you on Google, navigate to your Google Plus Local page, and find the right link to click to leave a review.
   
   Include simple instructions for leaving a review on the page, along with a direct link to the location’s Google Plus Local page. It’s also helpful to let customers know that they’ll need a Google account to leave a review (and instructions for setting up a Google account if they don’t have one). You should always focus on Google reviews until a business gets at least 10 reviews. Once you’ve got 10 reviews on Google, you can offer other options and let customers choose the review site that they’re most comfortable with.
   
   PRO TIP: For Google reviews, include this string at the end of your Google Plus Local link:  ?hl=en&review=1
   Now, when customers click the link, the review window will automatically pop up when they land on your Google Plus Local page (so they don’t have to find the link!).

2. Create a review handout. There are several review handout generators out there online, but in our experience, most of them are a bit too complicated. Instead of showing a flowchart on the handout or giving customers several options for review sites, our review handouts simply point customers to the domain.com/reviews page that we set up. 
   
   This allows us to create a really nice branded postcard to hand out, and regardless of our review strategy, the card never changes. 
3. Hand the card to every customer and ASK. You can’t just hand the card over, you have to ask your customers to leave reviews. We encourage our clients to hand over the card at the last possible moment of customer interaction, so the request and the card are fresh on a customer’s mind when they leave. Don’t offer an incentives to leave reviews, just be honest and let your customers know that you’d truly like to hear their honest opinion about their experience

Even if your client has a ton of customers, make sure they understand that they won’t get a lot of reviews. We tell our clients that 1 review a month is a perfectly acceptable pace. A steady stream of reviews over time is much more important than a quick influx.

There you have it! If you follow these simply Local SEO workout tips, you’ll build your Local SEO muscle in no time. You’ll be able to provide better results to your clients, which means they’ll be happier… and happier clients means more long-term business. Everyone wins!

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