Local Search Engine Optimization for Small Business
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Deck I used at the Mid-Hudson Valley Digital Marketers event to discuss how a small business should approach optimizing their website, content and how to compete in the local search space.
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Local Search Engine Optimization for Small Business
- 1. Big Time SEO on a Small Business Budget
- 2. Who is Jason White?
- 4. I Hustle so My Clients Earn Traffic
- 5. & Make Them Money
- 6. Search Engines Aren’t Magic • Fancy Math Equation • There are no Shortcuts • Incredibly Rational
- 7. Math. Simplified. Search Engines want the best answer to a user’s query.
- 8. Be Real. Be You. Search Engines trust established brands because users do. Search Engines are leery of brands that don’t seem credible. Focus on your customer. Let your passion permeate.
- 10. I’m a Weirdo SEO I don’t care about optimization. I am who I am and that’s all that I am. I let my passion ooze out.
- 11. Rankings Are Garbage Success Metric
- 12. Focus on what you Control
- 13. Feed the Search Engine Earn Reviews Earn Press Go Slow
- 14. Get Local and Build Reviews
- 15. Google Plus, Google Maps & Google Local
- 16. Google Maps
- 17. Google Local
- 18. Yelp! SERP
- 20. Your NAP!
- 21. Name, Address, Phone Number
- 24. Earn Reviews & Listen to your Customers
- 25. Don’t Fake It
- 26. The Other Guys – Building Profiles by Niche
- 27. Don’t think Links, Think Visibility Become a web citizen. Frequent the publications that you want to profile you or your business. Comment and Share. Focus on earning visibility because the Links and Citations follow.
- 28. Get to Know Who Matters Local Journalists Local Bloggers Local Luminaries
- 29. Tell Them a Story
- 31. Bloggers Need Content Too
- 32. Give Before You Ask Follow them on Social Media. Find common interests. Share and comment on their content.
- 33. The People in this Room Matter
- 34. Shoot! There’s a Lot to Do… Digital Marketing is a long term game. It doesn’t Happen Overnight. Make changes little by little. Measure what happens & make more improvements as necessary.
- 35. Search Engines are Rational Hypothesize, imple ment, analyze & Do it again. The Internet is dynamic . Your Business is dynamic.
- 36. Thank You Let’s Connect: Twitter: @Sonray LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaylwhite/ SlideShare: www.slideshare.net/JasonWhite18 jason@dragonsearch.net Singing Telegrams Accepted
Editor's Notes
- I’m a NASCARdriver…been touring and playing my guitar in a little band called Greenday…I also won the Heisman in 2000 while playing Quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners.
- But really, I’m involved in a little startup as husband & dad; On the weekends I like to don a superman suit and chase other dudes around in a circle atop a bicycle and I work at a bomber agency you might I have heard of. I’m a Senior SEO Strategist at DragonSearch. I got started in digital marketing working in a bike shop. The winters are slow and involve a lot of sweeping an endless refilling of tires so I created my own my own responsibility and took to the internet. I started out slinging bikes on Ebay and then moved on to Local search
- I like to earn traffic. I improve websites. I like eating the competitors cheese no matter who the competitor is and I like to win. Everything.
- I picture my clients doing the backstroke through the piles of money their website earns them; Scrooge McDuck style…I’ve always been this way; I find it enjoyable to make other people money and I’ve always competed to sell the most no matter what it is. When I started out, I had no idea there was an industry name associated with what I was doing. I was just hitting buttons and seeing what would happen. I learned via trial & error and The Google. By the end of the winter I was starting to see that my efforts to avoid work were actually kind of cool and paying off.
- Search engines are incredibly rational to me. The people who don’t take shortcuts and instead, do superb work, win. The people who take shortcuts get burned in the long run. Whenever something breaks at home, I always take it apart to figure out why it broke and if I can fix it, even if I have no clue how to do so. If the item is already broken, I can’t do much more damage by taking a look but I can gain a lot of knowledge about how something works that might benefit me in the future. With Search Engines being a fancy math equation, they function in the same way. If something breaks, you figure out how to fix it and then make it better so it doesn’t break again. Don’t have fear in the search engine just because you don’t understand all of the moving parts; embrace it because your competitors are fearing it just as much as you are. Their fears are your opportunities. While they seem complex from the outside, Search Engines seek to solve one simple thing…
- Search Engines want the best answer to a user’s query. Plain and simple. If you are the best answer – whether it’s the best resource or highest rated business – your site wins. There are some simple principals to follow in this game
- Search engines want to mimic user behavior. They want to think and make judgments just like a user does. This is good for small business owners because small business owners are passionate about their business. They care about their customers and they care about the products and services they produce. Harness this as the Beastie Boys say: Let it flow, let yourself go. Let that passion permeate through everything that you do. People don’t want to be sold to but they’ll react to emotional connections; Allowing your emotion to show in everything that you do will win with your business, your website and digital marketing. Focus on the user and the search engine will follow. It’s brand building at its best. It’s natural and real.
- Because Search Engines want the best answer, credibility matters in everything that we do. When a brand practices values that don’t connect with their clients, it can have a lasting effect. On the flipside of that, when a brand does something that resonates with users and truly connects with them, it can have the same lasting impact. Once something is on the internet, it’s really hard to control what happens with it. Negative things can hurt for a really long time. So it’s important to question everything in this light – is this content the best forward face I can put on my Business? Will it resonate with my customers and help me build credibility?
- Ilike to think of myself and my style of marketing as bleeding edge – I’m doing things that are ahead of the curve, I’ve already jumped the adoption chasm. My industry peers might consider me a black sheep because of my views and my style. I don’t care about this. When a digital marketer optimizes a blog post, page of copy or a website there are a set of best practices which should be followed. When I first got into this game, I would do keyword research very rigidly; I’d make sure that I was using keywords in the most important parts of the pages and I would fret about where to place links and images. I would market to the search engine. I don’t do that anymore. As an SEO, when I’m done optimizing a page, I don’t want it to look like I touched it; it shouldn’t tell the user that a marketer was behind it. My content doesn’t always focus on the best practices. Optimization be damned, I would rather the end result be the best it possibly can because that is what is going to win today, tomorrow and beyond. My passion for a subject should be reflected in the quality of the work that I produce not in how much keyword research I did. I want the reader to feel emotion and move on whatever action I’m trying to nudge them into. There are super technical aspects to what SEOs do. We need to understand how googlebot crawls a website and how to maximize the crawl budget. We need to know how to pass equity from one page to another. But you don’t. Focus on the message and creating the best product you can.
- I have a lot of clients that worry about rankings. They want to rank #1 for whatever money phrase their industry has. Agencies have latched on to this and have been guaranteeing a #1 ranking in Google for whatever phrase you want. These people are snake oil salesmen. They can often do what they claim but the tactics that they use are focused on short term gains which work for the first three to six months and then leave the website with a penalty. The modern algorithm has caught up making rankings irrelevant. Personalized search serves you answers based on your search history, what accounts you’re logged into, your geographic location and other factors. The “rankings” I see on my computer are vastly different than what you will see on your computer. Rankings are a garbage success metric; they have too many variables which are easily manipulated.I can’t take rankings to the bank and make a deposit. A #1 ranking won’t pay my bills. Users however, will; driving traffic to a website will impact the bottom line. Increasing the amount of traffic to a website can’t be manipulated.
- I can’t control where or how a website ranks. I can control other aspects of a campaign. I can control the quality of a message. I can control where the message is broadcast and how. I can make changes and decisions based on the data the campaign collects. I can put my energy into initiating change instead of fearing what I don’t know. Focus on earning traffic from places you can control and play an active roll with these websites, communities and networks. Focusing on just the search engine will lead to a campaign that is of singular focus. As a result, traffic will come from this one source putting all of your eggs in that basket. If an algorithm is updated or a social network makes a change, it can harm your business if that change isn’t positive. Diversity in where you earn traffic and visitors from will prevent you from putting all of your eggs all in one basket.
- Everythingyou do online can be considered a signal. Signals are picked up by social networks, search engines and even other users; diversity in where these signals are coming from shows that your business is real and produces a quality product. This is what is important to the modern Search Engine. So where do you start? Having a website is great but there are opportunities to be found else where. Taking advantage of these opportunities will send the right signals that will strengthen your website.
- The local search eco system is a more-level playing field. There is less competition and most of the competition isn’t taking advantage of the resources that are available to them. Which present you easy wins to eat their cheese and send signals into the digital solar system. The local space creates off-site resources that you can control, manage and build up that will create lasting value to your website and online marketing efforts.Create profiles on Yelp and Google Local. If you already have profiles, claim these profiles and clean them up.
- Google Local will give you multiple ways to be found. This is a standard search engine results page (SERP) but is displaying what we call a ‘three pack’. It has the carousel at the top, map results to the left and the regular results. Because of my query, Google doesn’t know if I want to learn about Burritos (Wikipedia), get recipes for Burritos (All Recipes) or eat Burritos (The Burrito Stand Facebook result) so it’s giving me many options to refine my query and give me what I’m looking for. With the Carousel at the top, we can see how important the profile image can be in catching the users eye; two images are of the buildings, one is of a burrito and the one that stands out is the unique and colorful skull from Mole Mole
- If I were to search on Google Maps for Burritos, the results would look like this.
- When I click through from the image carousel or the map result, I’m taken to the Google Local page of that business. I can read reviews, get directions, look at pictures or follow them on Google +
- This is what the Yelp! Results look like for the same query. Pretty similar but they allow you to refine your search a little more so completing your profile is super important. Think of Yelp! as it’s own search ecosystem so each classification that you’re able to complete will enable you to be found within the ecosystem with greater ease.
- Armadillo does a great job of this by providing the user as much useful information as they can. One of the most important pieces of information…
- Is Your NAP
- In all seriousness, your NAP is Name, Address and Phone Number. If we’re sending signals into the digital universe, we want those signals to be as clean and consistent as they can be. Consistency makes sure that those signals aren’t getting crossed or misinterpreted. Make sure that the NAP matches your website and social channels.While I was putting this deck together I came across an “expert” who claimed that 75% of websites don’t have a telephone number listed! In college I can a friend who theorized that 75% of backrubs lead to relations…I don’t think either statistic is that high but I have seen numerous companies make a huge mess of their NAP and consistency with their contact information. Take your time and focus on consistency.
- Take advantage of every last inch of real estate you’re given and fully complete your profiles to the best of your abilities. List the type of restaurant you are, hours of operation, add photos and humanize your profile as much as you can.
- Yelp! Offers more robust information that is useful. What can I wear? Do they take reservations? Will my kids like it? Will I be able to get a strong drink? Completing this information makes your profile useful for users – it’s answers their query.
- Earn reviews from producing a superb product; popularity in the real world is often replicated online and this shows real credibility. A lot of the businesses I work with are afraid of reviews because they don’t want negative reviews. Negative reviews are good, they show that the business is real; it’s impossible to please everyone and people understand that. It’s been my experience that when an organization ignores their online reputation, the few individuals that have had a bad experience are given a larger platform in which to voice their displeasure – there aren’t good opinions to balance out the bad.Reviews are also a fantastic opportunity to listen to your customers and engage with them! Feedback is an opportunity to improve yourself and your business. Don’t take bad reviews personally; instead, analyze what they are saying and decide if there is something you can do. Respond to them to show that you care, even when they are unfounded.
- Earning reviews takes time. But that’s ok. Earning 10 reviews one month, none for two months and then 15 all at once again is a red flag; it shows manipulation. Don’t write fake reviews for yourself. It’s tempting but people will see right through it. The NY State Attorney General recently levied fines for 9 businesses totaling $350,000. Just don’t play that game. Sometimes, you just need to ask your customers to review you and let them know how important it is for your business. Your customers care about you just as you care for them.
- There is way more out there than just Goolge and Yelp. It can be a never ending process. If you feel like you have a solid foundation and want to take your efforts to the next level, GetListed.org is a wonderful resource for building out niche profiles that could earn additional links and citations. Links are a vote on the internet – one website vets another site – so they are an indicator to search engines on a website’s popularity. Citations are a mention of you business name with another piece of identifying business information such as the NAP – citations are similarly important. Building out profiles by niche helps build your relevancy. GetListed.org weights profiles by perceived importance so you’re spending time building profiles where it matters. There are a lot of resources for local optimization beyond profiles so it’s worth a browse.
- Yes, links are important but don’t get links for the sake of getting links. Focus on getting visibility. Focus on getting your unique story out there. Focus on being found within the local ecosystem around you. Getting your story out there will create signals but they will naturally create links and citations too
- Who is going to help you accomplish your goals? Who writes about your industry?
- Tell these people your story. People don’t want to be sold to. People don’t like being marketed to. People like hearing stories. People like hearing about unique experiences and perspectives. Give them something to talk about; a reason to write about you and all the great things you’re doing.
- Use social media to get to know the writers of these publications. Interact with them. Share their stories. Build a relationship.
- Bloggers are always looking for something new. Don’t overlook the niche communities on Facebook – HV Weather, HV Traveler, My Brother Bobby’s Salsa, Catskill Mountain Velo Club – whatever is relevant to your industry and location. Be a giving member.
- Love on them 3 to 5 times before you pitch them. Offer to take them out for a coffee, or invite them to experience what you offer. Ask them how you can help them. You are an expert at something that might provide value to what they’re doing. It’s as much about giving as it is about receiving.
- The people that are at this event are going to be your best resources. Meet the person to your left and right. Exchange business cards and interact with what they’re doing. People laugh at how incredibly simple this is but it’s a room full of like-minded individuals; it’s the easiest sell you’ve got. Some of my strongest links and relationships have come from interacting with people at conferences and events. Listening to what they have to say and helping them with their problems.
- Sisyphus is my favorite Greek myth. Sisypus believed that he was more clever than Zeus and partook in quite a bit of trickery which eventually caught up with him. His punishment was to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill but before he could reach the top, the massive stone would always roll back down forcing him to begin again.Digital marketing is similar to pushing a rock up hill only to have it roll back down. You’re never done; there is always more to do. I say this not to scare you or demoralize before you’ve even started. It’s a long term game and won’t happen overnight even when your throw everything you have into it. Make changes little by little and measure what happens. Make more improvements as necessary but never stop tinkering.
- Things change often and frequently so chipping away at the work that should be done over time will insure that you don’t set it and forget it.