SEO Archives

Taking Control of Your Local SEO Presence Online

by Ashley Street | Jul 19, 2013 | Google My Business, Internet Marketing, Local SEO, SEO

When most businesses think about search engine optimization, their thinking revolves around big concepts: link building, page structure, content with strong keywords. And of course, these areas of focus can lead to big gains in organic search engine rankings. But unless you’re a huge business with a national client base, organic search results shouldn’t be your only concern. You also need to think about your local SEO presence – getting noticed within your city or local area. So lets dive into learn how you can take control of your local SEO presence online.

Local SEO

So what does it mean to take control of your local SEO presence? Local SEO is similar in many ways to SEO as a whole. A good bit of it revolves around creating strong content, having a well-organized page, and getting good links from other respectable websites. But beyond that, local SEO adds several additional criteria that will get you more attention within your specific city.

A few of the most important pieces of taking control of your local SEO presence, beyond content creation and link building, are given below.

Creating a Business Listing

If your business isn’t visible on Google Maps or Bing Maps, Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, or other sites with a location-based component. You’re never going to get more visibility within your target market. Lucky for you, every business with a physical address is able to claim a free listing on Google Maps, and from there it’s a simple matter of building profiles and making sure your business information – address, phone number, website – matches across sites. This is one of the biggest and easiest step in taking control of your local SEO presence.

Get Local Citations

Once you have your business listed, you need to get it cited. A citation is kind of like a mention; it doesn’t have to be a link back to your site. Instead, it just has to include information like your business’s name and address, phone number, or other identifying details. If you can get your business listed on local directory sites like YellowPages.com or a local chamber of commerce website, those listings will count as citations that increase your overall local visibility.

Reviews, Shares, and Online Buzz

Another way you can take advantage of your Google My Business page, Yelp listing, or Bing Places for Business page is by having satisfied customers post reviews to your pages. If your customers seem reasonably happy, ask them to write a review for you when you’re near to finishing your work with them. Or for restaurants and services, place your website addresses prominently in your location, so people can log on with their phones or tablets and write a quick review as they sip their coffee.

Double-Check Your Data

Unbeknownst to many website operators, Google and other search engines actually penalize your local listing if the information on your website doesn’t match that on your local listing pages. Make sure your website has your address, phone number, city and state, and any other identifying information listed in the same format across every page (and as text, not an image file). Then, make sure that the information there is the same as it is on Google or Bing. If it doesn’t match, your rank will go down.

Post!

One of the best ways to make your local listing more visible is by actually using it. Post links to your blogs or photos, publish updates, and generally stay active with your Google My Business page and social media accounts. If you routinely post quality content, search engines will take notice and boost your rank accordingly. To learn more about Google My Business is you can click here.

How RankMonsters Can Help With Your Local SEO Presence

There are other ways to achieve local SEO success, but these methods are some of the most tested and trustworthy ways to gain exposure and take control of your local SEO presence. Of course, if you need more help getting your business noticed online, you can always talk to us at RankMonsters for advice Just give us a call at 405.605.8218.

Reputation and Brand Management – The Forgotten Side of SEO

by Ashley Street | Jul 12, 2013 | Brand Management, Reputation Management, SEO

Lets get into understanding reputation and brand management. Since long ago, one of the best drivers of new business has been the customer recommendation. Getting your customers and clients to recommend your service to one of their friends or family members is hugely effective, and can easily result in new business for you. Unfortunately, that knife has always cut both ways – if a client says something bad about you to their acquaintances, even something unfounded, you could lose business.

Word Of Mouth In The Digital Age

Word of mouth rules everything. This situation is just as true in the digital age, but with an important twist. These positive and negative recommendations don’t have to come from friends or family anymore. Instead, they can be easily found on Google, Bing, and dozens of social networks and review websites. Someone can post a positive Google review or a damning tweet on Twitter. That post will influence other people. So, how can you control the impact of negative content online? How can you ensure your brand will be seen in a positive light?

Reputation Management

The answer is reputation management – basically, PR for the Internet era. It’s becoming more and more important for brands to take a proactive role in managing their presence online, and doing so in a way that is smart and savvy. We’ve collected a few guidelines here that can help you begin to better manage your reputation online.

Drive Positive Content

Basically, this tip is: “Be the change you want to see.” In other words, you have to create the content that you want to represent you, instead of just hoping others will do it for you. If you want people to see your brand positively, you need to create positive content for them to see. This can be anything from a friendly and accessible Facebook or Twitter account, to educational videos about your products and process, to humorous advertisements on YouTube. Give your brand a personality, and let customers engage with it online.

Engage With Your Customers

Once you’ve started to create content, make sure you engage with your customers around it. Say “Thanks!” on Twitter when someone gives you a good review, and +1 Google posts that are good for your brand. On the same token, make sure you try to engage with negative comments, too – but in a positive way! If someone criticizes your brand, extend sympathy and an offer to help correct the situation. Don’t pull a Nestlé and try to silence or deride critics – your situation will only get worse.

Own Up to Mistakes

If you’re a follower of social media, you probably remember Amy and Samy Bouzaglo of Amy’s Baking Company. After a famously destructive Facebook meltdown in which the two restaurant owners defensively argued and criticized their online detractors, the Bouzaglos wrote that they “have obviously been hacked…” and “are working with the local authorities as well as the FBI computer crimes unit to ensure this does not happen again.” The problem is, this lie makes the company seem even more disingenuous, and does nothing to help repair the damage. If you are caught in a negative situation online, own up to your mistakes and do what you can to repair the damage truthfully. One thing Internet users always hate is lying, and getting caught could irreparably damage your online reputation.

Of course, this is only the beginning of a successful reputation management campaign. There is much more that you can do to keep your brand’s image positive online, but the tips above are some of the simplest and most effective things you can do.

How RankMonsters Can Help!

If you want to learn more about reputation management and how it can help your business succeed online, you can always contact us at RankMonsters. We would be happy to walk you through our reputation management process and what it could do for you.

Google’s Knowledge Graph Carousel Changes the Look of Local Search

by Ashley Street | Jun 25, 2013 | Internet Marketing, Local SEO, SEO

Last week, Google began to roll out a new feature for desktop searchers. When you search for a local business or feature, such as restaurants, bars, parks, or pools, you’ll see a “carousel” of results in a black bar at the top of the page. And while these features have been available to some mobile users since December, their presence on desktops is a much bigger deal. These results, complete with name, address, and often a picture, are poised to shake up the game of local searches for businesses everywhere. So lets learn more about how Google’s Knowledge Graph Carousel changes the look of local search.

How Does Google’s Knowledge Graph Carousel Affect My Business?

So what does this have to do with you and your business? Well, it’s pretty clear that having your business show up in the carousel results is a good promotional tool – it makes you immediately visible to a wide range of local searches, and puts your name at the top of the search results. Add in the factor of novelty – the carousel is a new and eye-catching feature, and people will pay attention to it – and you can see why being a part of those results could be a big boon to your brand.

Getting My Business On Google’s Carousel

Of course that leads to the next question – how can you ensure that your business shows up in the carousel? First off, you need to be listed in Google Places. If you don’t have a places listing, your business won’t show, no matter what. Go to the Google Places signup page to complete this step, if you haven’t already.

Is Google My Business Profile Complete?

Beyond that, you want to make sure that your Google Places profile is as complete as possible. Add photos of your business, links to your social accounts, and as much profile information as you can. Also encourage your customers to review your business online (perhaps by offering incentives for reviews!). All of these steps will help your business show up more in the carousel results.

How Is Your Site Doing?

And beside your Google account itself, you also want to make sure your website ranks high in organic search results. Managing your page well and building strong links from other local sites can help dramatically in this respect – the more reputable your site seems to Google, the better your rank results will be. You can also help this along by updating your site regularly with strong, quality content. A strong local SEO strategy will work wonders here, especially backed by a good showing on Google Places.

How Can RankMonsters Help?

Hopefully you now understand how Google’s Knowledge Graph Carousel changes local search results. Google’s local carousel could be a huge asset to your business, but only if you take advantage of it. Of course, if you want a hand with managing your online presence, you can always contact us at RankMonsters – we’re experts in boosting your local search ranking, and we would be glad to help get your business to the top. Contact us today for more information.

Google’s Penguin Changes SEO – Again

by Ashley Street | Jun 13, 2013 | Internet Marketing, SEO, Website Design

SEO is a constantly changing game whether its google updates or keeping up with mobile use. Google, Bing, and other search engines are always updating the way they find and rank search results, which means that keeping a website consistently ranked high is a never-ending challenge. A perfect example of this is the recent change Google implemented in their search algorithm, Penguin 2.0. Lets see how Google’s Penguin Changes SEO- again.

What Is Google Penguin?

For those unaware, the original Google Penguin was launched in April of 2012. Google Penguin was aimed at reducing the search engine rank of websites that used so-called “black hat” link building techniques like link spamming and keyword stuffing. Today these techniques add no value to a website’s SEO campaign. Spamming and keyword stuffing can easily result in your page being banned from Google’s search results entirely.

How Does Google Penguin 2.0 Change SEO

Penguin 2.0 goes even deer into targeting these black-hat techniques, and many sites have seen resulting dips in their search rankings and traffic. A number of the companies being affected heavily are older web properties with outdated links still pointing to their pages. However, companies with a wide range of “clustered” pages have also seen reduced rankings, as Penguin 2.0 has also reduced the search visibility of clustered URLs.

Content Creation

What does this mean for you, the page owner? In short, quality content creation is more important than ever. Google’s algorithm is doing its best to rank a variety of different websites that it feels have high-quality, user-friendly content. This is great news for the consumers, but it could be difficult for businesses that have websites without much content.

The New SEO Strategy

The best strategy here is to start building out your content pages and making them worth reading. It’s important to have a cohesive content strategy that positions your site as an authority in the field. To create content that is designed around providing a good user experience. Also, if you have a lot of older, unnatural link assets that point back to your website, even deep content pages. It’s worth working to manually remove and/or disavow those links.

How RankMonsters Can Help

At RankMonsters, we’re dedicated to improving your website’s SEO and page rank. Our monsters work as an extension of your team to provide you with high-quality content for your own website and a diverse and healthy link building profile. If you want to know more about what we can do for your website, contact us today.

Mobile Web Use: More Important than Ever

by Ashley Street | Jun 10, 2013 | Mobile Web, SEO

Smartphones and mobile internet are one of the biggest forces online today. According to a report by Marketing Land. This report states that almost 40% of all time spent on the internet is spent on a mobile device. Which means that optimizing your site for mobile web use is more important than ever.

What The Data Shows

The report goes on to detail several categories where mobile use is most prevalent. The biggest, unsurprisingly, are maps and weather, 84% and 60% respectively of all time spent on these sites is on mobile devices. Also of note is that, for time spent on retail and shopping sites, 38% of it is from mobile devices.

What Does This Mean For You?

It means that, unless your site is optimized for mobile visitors, you’re giving up conversions and sales. If a mobile user visits your site and has a difficult or frustrating experience, they likely won’t visit you again. Creating a positive experience for visitors on all platforms. This means their phones, tablets, and or computers.

So What Can You Do?

It’s important to have a mobile site ready to go at launch, alongside your regular web-page. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it should be attractive and simple. Mobile users don’t like to be loaded down with graphics and heavy design. Since it can be clunky and take a long time to load on a mobile data connection. Try to keep your mobile site lean and easy to use on a small touchscreen.

How Can I Get My Site Optimized For Mobile Web Use?

Of course, it’s also important to make sure your mobile site is optimized for searching by Google and other search engines, just like your main site is. For that, RankMonsters can help you out. We’re SEO professionals, and we can help you make sure your site ranks well both on desktop and for mobile web use. If you want to learn more about the ways RankMonsters can help you, contact us today.

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