Google Local is a great way for start-ups and small businesses to grab a foot hold in their industry. It allows marketers to target local customers and consumers to search for local businesses and products. Here we list our 5 keys to dominating Google Local.

5 Steps to Dominating Google Local

  1. Consistency in NAP

Consistency in branding is important. It’s even more important when it comes to your listing on Google MyBusiness (Google Local) and across the internet on local sites. If you want to crack the top 3 in map listings, your business’ info must be on point.

Make sure that your business’ name, address, and phone number is the same on all sites. This can get tricky if you are using local numbers for different offices, but if you can manage to use an 800 number as your go-to, then add the locals as secondary points of contact, that’s a safe bet.

While it may seem trivial, make sure your address is the same on all sites that list your business. Sometimes this can be daunting because dozens of new sites pop up every day, and many of them simply scrape your info and post it. They make mistakes.

  • If your office is on 100 Third street, and one of them lists it as 100 3rd street, you will run into problems.

Your business name should be consistent as well. Keep it simple! If you’re Joe’s Plumbing, don’t get cute with Joe’s Plumbing Brooklyn, Joe’s Plumbing Staten Island, Joe’s Plumbing and Hot Tubs. Pick one, and stick to it.

Google Local Guidelines

From Google’s guidelines regarding business names:

Any additional information, when relevant, can be included in other sections of your business information (e.g., “Address“, “Categories“). Adding unnecessary information to your name (e.g., “Google Inc. – Mountain View Corporate Headquarters” instead of “Google”) by including marketing taglines, store codes, special characters, hours or closed/open status, phone numbers, website URLs, service/product information, location/address or directions, or containment information (e.g. “Chase ATM in Duane Reade”) is not permitted.

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  1. Choose the Best Categories

Don’t “category stuff.” Google views this in the same way they view keyword stuffing, ie, they’ll hit you for it. Pick out the minimal number of categories that fit your business.

Content Drives Google Local

  1. Add Content

Add as much relevant, helpful info as possible on your Google+ local page. IT’s possible to add video, photos, and long-form text. It’s no secret that Google thrives on content, and rewards content marketing. If you have videos of your product or service, add them. Link to your YouTube page.

  • Have pictures of your product? Social media-driven photos of your customers? Add them.
  • Go into detail (benefit-driven detail) about your products, services, staff, awards you’ve won, and what you can do for the customer.

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  1. Cultivate Customer Reviews

This is good practice in general, as user reviews are crucial to the health of your business. Having customers review you on your Google listing is important to both your business’ reputation, and your local ranking. Well-reviewed businesses have a leg up on the competition.

  1. Build High Quality Links

Links to your business site help with SEO. The stronger your main site is, the stronger your local listing will be. Links from quality sites helps build domain authority, which in turn boosts your local ranking.

Despite the insider blogs that proclaim that SEO is Dead, the reality is that as long as Google exists and dominates the market, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will be a huge part of the success of your business. Most people cannot perform SEO elements themselves and the key decision is which SEO firm they should hire. Here Retaliate1st list the questions you should ask any SEO form you are considering hiring.

Offsite SEO Factors

Offsite SEO Factors

6 Key Questions to Ask an SEO Firm Before Hiring Them

Even those who scream that paid traffic is superior miss the fact that unless your site is optimized, you’ll pay more for clicks and lose visitors, leads, and sales because your site is confusing to use, doesn’t have good content, or is poorly written. At its base SEO is taking great copywriting and optimizing it slightly for the search engines.

It is an art and a science, and should be done by a professional. But, the SEO field is rich with scammers, fly-by-night companies, and fraudulent freelancers.

Before you make the wise decision to invest in professional services, ask the SEO firm these questions:

  1. What’s Your Method?

How an SEO firm plans to get your business to the top of the rankings heap can tell you a lot about how successful they are.

Everyone has their own methods, and some are better suited for your business than others, but some are just plain terrible.

The SEO Firm Should Have a Method

For example, link building is still a key to getting your site ranked. It’s old-school, time-consuming, and requires an investment of cash. But, it works.

However, if you do a quick search and find that most links in your industry cost between 20 and 50-dollars, and the firm is pitching you on getting 10,000 links for $19.99, you can be sure they’re involved with spam tactics.

2. How Good is Your Content?

Content --> SEO and Social Media

Content –> SEO and Social Media

Not all SEO firms will provide content, but they should. Content is the future of digital marketing. Without relevant, useful, well-written content, your site (and yoru sales) will suffer.

The easiest way tot get a handle on their skills is to ask for samples. Even if they’re new, they can mock up an article or two for you.

If the text reads like it was written by a foreigner, or by a computer program, they’re trying to scam you. Google hates garbage content and will penalize your business.

  1. Who Have Your Worked With?

It doesn’t matter if they’ve worked with Fortune 500 companies, or a mom-and-pop shoe store, everyone outside of a complete newbie will have reviews. If not, don’t be shy about asking for references from past clients.

Don’t neglect this step! It can tell you a lot about the service you’re about to invest in. Even if they’re inexperienced, every SEO expert has done some free work to build their portfolio, so they should absolutely have a handful of references and reviews.

Is Your SEO Firm Producing Results

  1. How Will I Know It’s Working?

If your business site is new, it can take a while to show up on Page 1. Sometimes you’ll see your site climb slowly, going from page 25 to 20 to 16 to 15 to 8, and so on until it reaches number one. Sometimes, it will be lost in space then suddenly pop up on the top of page 2 before climbing to the first page.

In between, there are several ways to measure progress. Ask them what analytics they’ll share with you so that you can track progress together. If they’re unwilling to share data, or give you vague answers rife with meaningless buzzwords, don’t do business with them.

  1. Which Type of SEO Do Your Perform?

SEO can be broken down into:

  • On-page – optimizing text, photos, video, landing pages, and all content for your search terms. If they provide content, this should be done along with content creation as well as helping you optimize any self-generated content.
  • Off-Page – Link building either through paid links or building links by creating articles, guest postings, and blogs. Both should be used for best results.
  • Internal – Working on coding so that Google’s bots can “Crawl” your site.

Your best bet is to hire a firm that does all three.

on-page-seo

  1. Do You Guarantee Your Work

Few SEO firms guarantee their work. IF they don’t, they’re probably not very good. Yes, SEO is mercurial, but the best firms keep in step with Google’s temeprmental changes, and keep pushing yoru site to the top no matter what updates hit.

Getting to the top of the Google rankings can be extremely difficult, especially in a competitive market. But, it is possible if you optimize your website in the right way. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is so ubiquitous at this point that it’s very meaning has become lost in the shuffle. This leads to much confusion about how a business should optimize its website.

organic traffic

This causes two problems for business owners:

  1. You either have to hire an SEO firm. Finding a good one can take a lot of expensive trial and error.
  2. You need to learn how to do SEO by yourself. This can take years, and the rules of the game constantly change. If you’re not a marketer or computer genius, mastering it alone is near impossible.

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You can make your digital marketing life much easier by knowing what to look for when hiring an SEO firm. If you’ve handed your site over to a pro, but aren’t getting results, see if they’re making any of these mistakes:

5 Common SEO Mistakes for Business Websites

  • Entering duplicate material on your site’s pages or blogs – identifying duplicate content is essential because most of the search engines do not accept duplicate material. This will crush your ranking. There are tons of solid tools and software available to check for duplicate content.
  • Using bad backlinks – links to unrelated pages or directories; or to spam websites- spam links coming into your site is a sure-fire way to kill your rankings.
  • Over-Optimization of required keywords – Although putting your target keywords as much as possible can be a good idea, blatantly over-optimizing will hurt your SEO strategy. Make sure your text sounds natural, and you aren’t stuffing in keywords to please Google. If a human would have trouble reading your text, Google will penalize you
  • Bad Page Titles – When someone searches for the target keywords, the search engine displays the title page in search results. Try to make your title page with limited characters, while hitting relevant key phrases (again, naturally)
  • Image Optimization and Poor Meta Description – A search engine can recognize images in text form only, so it’s best to optimize your image with target keywords or phrases. Imagine describing the image to a non-sighted person. Meta data may not directly help with rankings, but Google does display it on the results page, so it is useful for drawing in visitors and helping you stand out in the crowd of results.

Starting a new business? You already know that a website is essential, but how else can you promote your new business online?

The reality is, if you don’t have a huge budget for pay-per-click ads in the beginning, you’re going to need to rely on organic marketing methods. These can take time. If you work them to their full potential, you’ll gain traction and the web traffic will start to trickle in. At that point, you can use some of your profits to invest in pay-per-click advertising.

freelancers

Until then, utilize these 5 proven ways to get your new business noticed online:

  1. Make a Stand-Out Website

Just about every business has a website today. But, most of them are terrible. If you want to dominate your competitors, make sure that you build a website that helps you stand out from the crowd.

Do your market research. A site aimed a tweeners buying Bluetooth earbuds should look and function differently than one aimed at seniors looking to re-finish their bathrooms.

But, no matter who your audience is, make sure your site is clean, packed with good content, and is easy to navigate. No matter how web-savvy the user, if they can’t find your product page, you aren’t going to sell anything.

  1. Establish Your Social Media Pages

While Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest and slew of other social media sites grow in reach, Facebook is still the king of social media marketing.

Their “boosted” post feature angered a lot of small business owners who went from reaching hundreds or thousands of customers with each post, to needing to pay between $5 and $1000 per post to be seen.

But, as the program has aged, many businesses have utilized the power of boosted posts to reach deep, defined, niche audiences.

Facebook

Combined with its pay per click platform, Facebook should be our go-to early on.

Integrate Facebook with the other social media sites that fit yoru business. Early on, you’ll have very few followers. But, stay consistent, use your budget wisely, continue to crank out quality content, and soon you’ll have a solid base of followers to market to.

New Business Targeting and Content

  1. Use Local Listings

Local listing makes the search easier for your business to be found locally. Make sure you are registered with Google MyBusiness (Google Local). Then, use the same address and phone number for all local listing sites. Google likes uniformity in their local results.

  1. Generate Content

Blogging, with no followers, may seem pointless. But, learn to create, or hire quality content creators, so that your site becomes loaded with search engine optimized quality content such as articles, blogs, videos, picture, and infographics. Google loves information like this, and gives it preferential treatment in the search engine rankings.

re-purposed content 4

Write content for bigger websites. Everyone needs content. Creating great articles for bigger websites will generate links back to your site. This can help drive traffic to your site.

Don’t neglect writing for your local newspapers. Certain demographics (baby boomers, especially) still read the local paper for info. PR pieces are good, but human interest articles related to your product or service can lead to a solid flow of leads and sales because it not only exposes your business to a large pool of customers, being in the paper also lends your business a great deal of credibility.

Promoting your new business website can be a daunting task and having your product or service found by potential clients is the number one priority of new businesses. There can be no cash flow, no earnings, and no profits without customers. Getting your website listed online is key to establishing a new customer base and brining in a steady flow of leads.

website

Getting Your New Business Website Listed

Organic Search Results

Organic search simply means a website being found through a non-paid search. If you type “pizza delivery Philadelphia” into google and wait, you’ll find 7 – 10 listings. The listings are ranked by google in order of importance to the customer and need.

Dominating organic search through search engine optimization (SEO) is a huge undertaking. It works best when left to a professional. There are a number of things you can do to get the ball rolling:

  1. Index Your Website

Check whether your website domain or URLs is listed on the Google by visiting google.com/addurl. If your site’s URL is not already listed, add it to Google. Many platforms, like WordPress, do this automatically for you, but it’s best to always check. This can speed up how fast Google finds out that your business exists.

re-purposed content 3

  1. Optimize Content

The next step is adding some relevant content to your website in order to make it more search-friendly. You should add text, images and video to your site. Focus on the keywords that people might use to search your products or services. The more relevant your website content is, the higher it will be listed in search results.

Optimizing it can be tricky but to start, just provide valuable information about your product or service, as well as ways to contact your or order from your website.

Paid Search

If you want more control over how quickly your business appears on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, you utilize paid-search advertising, also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The most used is Google’s pay-per-click program that allows you to write ads that will drive customers to your website and unlike running ads in a magazine or newspaper, you only pay for these ads when someone clicks on it, taking them to your site. This can keep costs down, and allow you to keep track of what’s working, and what should get the ax.

crawling

Paid search can wreck your business’ bank account. Especially, if you aren’t’ familiar with how to do it. A professional should be utilized herald if you have the budget for it, paid ads are a great way to get people to your site from day one.

Long term, you should utilize a mix of paid and organic marketing. This way you will capture the biggest chuck of potential customers possible and maximize the return on your marketing investment.

YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine. only Google beats YouTube on the number of searches that occur on the platform each day. Many brands focus on optimizing their YouTube rankings, and the businesses that are respecting this search engine, are seeing double digit rewards. Retaliate1st has a team of video content marketers, that can help you dominate YouTube. Here are our 4 key recommendations on improving your rankings.

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4 Ways to Improve Your YouTube Rankings

  1. Upload a Lot of Great Content

This seems obvious, but the number one step to getting your videos ranked on YouTube is to post great videos. We’re not talking about going “viral.” That occurs more from luck than planning, as it’s impossible to predict what will grab the public’s attention enough to cause a video to go viral.

Instead, you should focus on putting out informative, entertaining videos that will be useful to your customers. They can be funny. They can be straight-info. They can be a combination. Just don’t make them boring, or worse, uninformative.

  1. Beef-Up Your Profile

Make sure that your YouTube profile is not an afterthought. Load it with info about your company, and most importantly, how you can help your potential customers (viewers).

You should use this area to link to your other social media platforms, your website, blogs, and anywhere else your company has a presence.

youtube-3

Load your videos, and break them down into playlists. IF you are familiar with SEO or website building, you’ll recognize the concept of creating “silos” of content. Playlists are an easy way to silo (categorize) your videos. This helps your viewers find relevant videos, and helps your page rank because it is easier for YouTube to index your content.

  1. Choose Your Keywords Carefully

It’s amazing to watch a business agonize over which keywords and key phrases to use on their website, only to see them treat the keywords of their YouTube videos as meaningless.

YouTube Keyword Optimization & Targeting

If you’ve taken the time to create a video, take the extra step and:

  • Do keyword research – treat this as you would a main page or blog on your website. Analyze your competition, check for the overall draw of the keywords, etc.
  • Perform a search – check out the competition. See how the titles and descriptions of the most-watched related videos are worded

youtube

  1. Craft Killer Titles

Your video’s title is the make-or-break moment. Even if you manage to get it ranked, a boring title will keep users from clicking through.

Treat video titles the same as you would pages on your site, the subject of one of your email marketing campaigns, or the headline of a direct mail piece. Every word you write is marketing, Your video titles, if written properly, can help propel you past your competition.

youtube-4

Try to include keywords/phrases while engaging the audience and enticing them to click. Despite current trends for adverb-drenched hyperbole, the old standby headline architypes: questions, how-to, and bold statements still rule.

On-page SEO factors are fast becoming underrated and undervalued. But, their importance is actually increasing. If you implement these three factors on your site, you’ll leapfrog your completion. Let them deplete their budget on excessive link buying and the latest fads while you strengthen your on-site SEO and dominate them.

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

How Content can be the tip of your spear, with the other points being social and SEO

3 Key On-Page SEO Ranking Factors

  1. Title Tags

All of your SEO efforts are wasted if you don’t have good title tags. If you’ve outsourced the building of your site, or its digital marketing, do a quick search of your title tags to make sure they’re strong enough to grab Google’s attention.

Do your titles sound natural?

Do they describe what your service or product is about?

If you’re a local business, do they let potential customers know where you’re located?

A huge problem with small businesses is that when they farm out the building of their sites, the SEO firms either mis-title their pages, giving them generic names, or they only put effort into the site’s homepage.

off-page-seo

Every page, every article, every blog must have a strong title if you want to rise to the top of the rankings and stay there.

A good way to start is to make sure the keyword of that page is in the title.

Selling smart phone covers in San Diego? Start with:

“Smart phone covers stores in San Diego”

In general, the closer the keyword is to the beginning of your title, the more weight it will carry. But, make it sound natural.

You can build content, and great titles, many times over by repurposing

  1. Content

Better content means better rankings. And, good content meets Google’s criteria for being:

  • Uniquely valuable (pages that would be described by 80%+ of your visitors as being useful and high quality)
  • Sharable (remarkable videos, pictures, and text aid your shareability)
  • Naturally keyword optimized

Good content provides a breeding ground for your keywords and key phrases. It allows you to optimize your site without sounding unnatural, because you’re using your key phrases as a way of informing your audience.

on-page-seo

Note for pictures and video: don’t get lazy when it comes to optimizing images and video. Alt tags are extremely important for your media. Sometimes just optimizing your images can push you over the hump, and get your site on page one.

  1. Contact Info Consistency

This is a minor factor with Google, but a major one with customers.

Make sure that a potential customer could land on any page on your site and easily find your contact info. Don’t assume that just because your phone number or email is in your header, that this will be enough. Place your contact info (forms, email link, clickable phone number) throughout your content, as appropriate.

Remember that not everyone will discover your site through your home page. Many will land on deep pages. Give them a way to contact you and you’ll pull more leads. Plus, Google does reward this practice, and specifically penalizes sites that have less than optimal contact information listed.

Content is like water, marketers need it to survive. It is the life-force of all modern marketing engines, especially those that rely on in-bound traffic. Having built many high-speed content engines, we recommend building your brand strategy, content plan and then following these tips to optimize your content.

Simple Content Strategy Flow Diagram

Simple Content Strategy Flow Diagram

2 Ways To Build Your Brand With Content

  1. Focus on the Customer

Just like in sales, if you want to gain and keep your customer’s attention, you need to focus on them. While many businesses are now utilizing content marketing, most miss the mark by using their content to talk only about themselves.

Content --> SEO and Social Media

Content –> SEO and Social Media

Yes, you can use articles, videos, podcasts, pictures, and social media to tell your customers how great you are, how many awards your business has won, and how highly rated you are. But, you have to bend that info back, and let them know how all of that will benefit them.

  1. Storytelling

Telling stories is one of the oldest ways to hold someone’s attention. In sales and business, it’s no different. In fact, good storytelling in your content marketing can build your brand and increase leads and sales.

Tying in with focus on the customer, using stories about people “just like them” helps cement your brand as a solution in their mind.

content-marketing

So, rather than simply cutting-and-pasting a review from a client, use that testimonial to create a story.

Content Options

What’s more compelling:

“This service is great. 5-Stars.” – Mrs. Jones, Westchester, NY

Or

“Water was bursting out of the pipes, the water heater was rattling, and a small flood was forming in the basement. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when Mrs. Jones called us, she was in near-tears as she watched countless memories stored in irreplaceable photo albums float away.  We were able to get to Mrs. Jones’ home within the hour, patch the leak, drain the flood, and had her waterheater up and running again by morning. Here’s what Mrs. Jones had to say about her experience with us: This service is great! 5-Stars.”

In the latter case, you’re walking the potential customer through a situation we all have been through. The testimonial is fairly weak in both cases, as many are. Most of your customers are going to give a short review. They’re busy, and most people have a tendency to “not know what to say” when faced with a blank page. So, don’t expect effusive praise from everyone. However, even small testimonials, when embedded in the story of how it happened, will implant in the mind of your future customer as the go-to solution when they have a similar problem.

No matter how small the area, how small the client base, or how small the business, before long, someone will post a negative review about you. Now, large companies expect this. Because of the sheer number of reviewers, they can withstand some a negative review. However even one negative review can sink a small, medium, new, or local business.

What’s worse, often those negatives are fake. They come not from dissatisfied customers, but from competing businesses or former employees. Sites like Yelp, despite their endless videos and text detailing their mysterious algorithm for ferreting out fakes, do little to police this problem. This means that anyone with a wi-fi connection can, in a few keystrokes, cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

Negative Reviews 2

News sites like the Huffington Post, the NY Times, The Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal have helped expose another disturbing aspect of online reviews. All have cited instances where bad reviews were posted before a business had even opened! This happens more frequently in highly competitive industries (restaurants, home improvement contractors, tech gear, etc.)

Don’t let a negative review sink your business. Here’s how you can fight back:

  1. The Pen is Mightier

Getting angry and ranting online is a big no-no. It will only make you look worse.

But, posting a sane, measured, well-written response on your website, blog, Google, Facebook, and in-response to the negative (if the review site allows replies) allows you to swing public opinion back in your favor.

Don’t be afraid to flood the few negatives with positive articles, blogs, videos, and reviews from your happy customers. This is the best, fastest, and most effective way to drown even the most virulent of phone negatives.

This Infographic Shows How Reviews Impact Your App or Business

This Infographic Shows How Reviews Impact Your App or Business

You’ll have to be consistent when doing this. It may take time, but if you continually hit back with positivity, you gain the respect of potential customers. Hiding from negatives makes you look guilt in the court of public opinion. But, respoinding rationally, with facts – even if you must state that this person was never a customer – shows that when a problem, real or fake, pops up, you deal with it head on. This will put future customers at ease, knowing you don’t duck problems.

  1. No Figting

Whatever you do, do not get angry and start a war of words. Ranting, rambling responses make you look terrible. Even if the review is clearly a fake – a personal attack, written by a non-customer, or posted by someone with an ax to grind – you should respond in a well-organized, calm manner.

This actually makes the fake review seem even more obviously phony.

  1. Spread the Positive

Want to bury negatives in positivity?

Contact your customers and ask them to review you online. You can offer an ethical bribe in exchange for a review (not for a positive review, that’s where you can get into trouble). But, if you target customers you already know are thrilled with your product or service, this is a safe play.

There are few things more powerful for fighting negative reviews (and boosting sales) than a genuine positive review from a real customer.

  1. Be Consistent

Never stop asking customers to review you online. The more positives posted, the less impact negatives have. Humans tend to be attracted to the negatives (with negative reviews being read far more than positive), but if a few bad ones are floating in a sea of good, the impact is lessened. It’s hard to argue when there are 49 Five-Star reviews and only 1 One-Star.

Which is better for small businesses, organic traffic driven by Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or pay per click advertising?

  • 70% of the time, searchers are clicking on organic links. Some surveys have shown that 70 – 80% of searchers purposely ignore the ad listings because they feel that paid ads = them being pressured to buy once they reach the site

This can be an advantage. If you are having a sale, an event, or you are running a weather or time-dependent service, then focusing on the 20 – 30% of users who happily click paid ads can eliminate most of the information seekers and tire-kickers.

organic traffic 2

Organic Traffic vs PPC

But, long term, relying solely on PPC can miss out on a huge portion of your potential customers.

  • In many businesses, the close rate for SEO traffic climbs as high as 15%, while ad-driven leads close at less than 2%.

This varies by industry, but the numbers speak overwhelmingly in favor of organic traffic. The situation can flip when it comes to “emergency” services, i.e., plumbers on sub-zero nights, roofers during heavy rain storms. In those cases, they numbers even out. But, the rest of the time, organic heavily outperforms PPC.

Want the Most Leads and Sales? Use Both PPC and SEO

While organic out performs PPC in most cases, there are times when you need PPC ads to survive. The problem usually arises when small companies treat PPC as the holy grail, throwing money at it, hoping for the best.

organic traffic 3

The truth is that pay per click ads must be:

  • Highly focused – use them during the best times, then get out of the market. If you’re having a sale, launching a new product or event, or you are offering a product or service that tie-in with the weather, time of year, or new-event, use PPC to leap-frog your competitors.
  • Well written – most PPC ads are awful; poorly written and playing follow-the-leader. Would you send out a mailer that looks exactly like your competitor’s mailing? OF course not. Don’t waste capital on PPC ads if you’re unwilling to stand out
  • Used to boost organic traffic – when you’re first starting, it can take a while to get the SEO/organic search ball rolling. PPC is very useful during this time because it brings in much needed traffic.

Combining focused, well written ads with a strong SEO platform will have your business accessing 100% of your potential customers, driving in new traffic and leads year-round.

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