Summary: Here are some SEO tips that local business owners should consider. Do You Know These Local Business SEO Ranking Factors? Traffic Feb-4-2013 // In this episode: 00:09 - Put a page for your location 00:23 - Include the address when using locals for testimonials 00:39 - Use a map and name pictures from your local area 01:07 - Have a system for continually adding reviews 01:42 - Do guest posts on other local businesses 02:17 - YouTube have a new policy Get high quality online content for your website here Expert SEO services that could help you rank higher Boost your online reputation Get your promotional videos on the right marketing channels James Schramko here with a SEO news update. How To Promote Your Local Business Area So how do you optimize for local businesses? If you have a business and you’re in a suburb, remember that one in three searches has a location in it so put a page for your location. Make sure that you mention your address. And also, if you have testimonials, put the address of the person who is doing the testimonial so that it’s a local person. It helps Google get a picture of who your business area serves and it will help them rank for the local area. You could also put a map and you can also put pictures and remember to name your pictures with things that are related to that local area. So if I was a CBD Sydney local area customer, I might have a picture of The Opera House or the Sydney Harbor Bridge and I would describe it – Sydney Harbor Bridge, CBD Sydney, and I would put that on the page too. So using local things, this is really good if you have a business that serves a particular area. Photo credit Gather Reviews From Different Sources In Your Location Another thing you want to do is have all of the customers that you serve leave a review but you don’t want to have it in-store, it’s very bad to have them all coming from the same IP address. You want to have a regular system for continually adding reviews but these reviews should be happening in the local area, but not from the same place. There are some industries where they are particularly filtered and manually checked and there are other industries that are wide open; but you want to have this continually going. There aren’t many businesses that have more than a dozen reviews so if you can have just a few, you could be miles ahead of your competition. Guest Posts Can Be A Source Of Really Good Traffic Another cool thing that you can do is have guest posts on other local business. So if you have a related industry or a local newspaper and you could put guest content, you might get a big fat link back to your site from another site that is also GEO-specific, so another local business. If you’re an acting school, you might do a guest post on the local video store site. If you could submit a guest post to the local newspaper or the local magazine, they might also publish it because they usually publish an online version as well as a print media. Noticed Any Changes On Your YouTube Channel Lately? Now let’s talk YouTube for a second. If you’ve noticed your YouTube views have changed recently, that’s because YouTube have a new policy. Now, they’re only going to show the number of views for the videos that are currently on your channel and that are able to be viewed by a person. If you had deleted videos or if you’ve made some of your videos private, they will take away those views and they’ll just show the views for the videos that someone could actually find right now. So if you did have a little change, that’s probably what happened. Well I hope you’ve enjoyed this little SEO news update. I’m James Schramko and be sure to ask our team if you need help getting SEO or traffic to your website. Head along to SEOPartner.com, fill out the website check and we’ll tell you which one of our programs can help you get more traffic, more customers and build your business for the long term.
