Local seo

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A Guide to Local SEOand How to Optimize Good SEO with Virtual Phone Numbers.

Walter Blake Knoblock Digital Marketing, HostedNumbers.com

A GUIDE TO LOCAL SEO 1

Local SEOLocal SEO is a sticky subject. Relatively new on the SEO scene (compared to the days of keywords and meta tags, at least), local search results are a new and important way for both local and national businesses to reach extremely localized markets. And for good reason: according to a report by BIA Kelsey, in 2015 there will be over 110 billion local searches on mobile devices alone. Pair that with the 2013 Google blog post claiming that 70% of mobile searches call a business directly from search results and we’re looking at a 77-billion-part pie waiting to be divvied up. If you can capitalize on good (nay, GREAT) local SEO, you can see a substantial increase in not only your online tra�c but, as a result of your optimization, also a substantial increase in the number of calls that come to your web-site.

Let’s entertain a hypothetical. Let’s say I’m a single guy living in Tallahassee and, because of my perennial bachelorhood, have never learned how to clean carpet and rugs despite my almost inces-sant propensity to create stains on the various textile surfaces that adorn the ground of my home. Furthermore, let’s say that I was eating a bag of Cheetos last night and accidentally spilled them out onto the ground and then also accidentally stepped on them, grinding neon orange dust into the deep recesses of the fancy Berber rug I bought on eBay last year when I went through the three day phase where I decided I needed to project the idea (via furniture) that I’ve got my life together. Any-ways, not that this happened, but it totally may have and when it hypothetically did, I needed to find somebody in Tallahassee to clean it. Enter these two very di�erent local search results:

LOCALSEO

Interesting, huh? When inputting a fairly vague yet also direct search, I get two very di�erent sets of local search results highlighting 14 di�erent potential clicks and 10 di�erent companies. Seven of these companies have Google reviews (hint: those are the ones I’ll check out first) and only three of them have star ratings. What I’m getting at is that if your business is in any sort of similar environ-ment to these businesses, you could take sometime to invest in your local SEO and KILL IT the next time somebody is local is trying to purchase a service you specialize in. It’s also important to note that both local and national companies showed up in this search result. Although you might not be the owner of Stanley Steemer, if you (or the company you’re working for) have a regional presence in several cities, this guide to local SEO and its optimization through virtual phone numbers is still going to be extremely valuable.


“Okay, great,” you say. “I get that I need local SEO for my rug cleaning company and all of its branches in the 5 surrounding cities we service – now what?” Now you need to begin the process of making sure that each corresponding web page for your respective businesses is going to have the correct formatting to ensure that Google knows it is, in fact, the best local rug cleaning company that exists. (Yup, consider buying www.[yourbusiness][yourCity].com for every municipality you do business in right now.)

Make Sure Your Business Name is ConsistentYou’re going to be making a Google+ profile for your business, claiming your various review pages (google places, yelp, etc…), writing content on those pages, and updating various local and regional directories all pertaining to your business. You’d better make sure that you use the same name. If there is evidence that Blake’s Carpet and Rug Service and Blake’s Rugs are two di�erent businesses, the cumulative SEO e�orts are nil. Besides this being branding 101, it is extremely important to lay a consistent foundation for the work that will follow. It should also be noted that, when you make your business name consistent, I don’t mean across all branches – just across all profiles. So when you begin to take ownership over digital space for Blake’s Rug Service Tallahassee and Blake’s Carpet and Rug Service Pensacola, you’ll use the same name in every occurrence for those respective busi-nesses when creating the various profiles that will help boost their local SEO.

Use the Right TagsWebsites are an organized hierarchy of HTML markup. Inside this HTML markup exists tags. When creating the tags for your website, you are going to need to stress the locality of your business in every one. This is how search engines will crawl through your website and understand that Blake’s Rug Service Tallahassee is indeed a rug service in Tallahassee. Here are examples of each tag and how they will look in your HTML file.

Title TagThe title tag is the single most important aspect of your online presence. When you see your company show up in a search engine listing, what they’re reading as the headline is the title you’ve saved. So when I type in

<title>Blake’s Carpet and Rug Service: Best in Tallahassee, FL!</title>


1

2

3

Title Link Description1 2 3


<h1> <a>

You’ve got 55 characters to make an impact, so make sure you include everything you do as well as your location. To test out potential titles, you can use this useful emulator.

City and State in H1H1 tags are the header for your pages. While you’re going to want to avoid cramming your H1 headers full of unnatural keywords, it is important to make it known where you’re doing business. It will look like this:

<h1>Blake’s Rug and Carpet Service in Tallahassee, FL!</h1>

And then show up on your page like:Blake’s Rug and Carpet Service in Tallahassee, FL!

Don’t use more than one of these per page and make sure that they convey only the most top-level information. You’re going to want to use your H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 tags for lower level information.

City in URLRemember how I said you’re going to need to buy new URLs for each of your branches? If you’ve only got one location, this doesn’t really pertain to you (unless the currently URL doesn’t include the city you’re located in) but if you’ve got a business or you’re working for a business which needs to project a local presence in many areas, putting the city name in your URL is extremely important. This means that as Blake’s Carpet and Rug Service expands, we’re going to want to be using the URLs:

www.BlakesCarpetandRugServiceTallahassee.comwww.BlakesCarpetandRugServicePensacola.comwww.BlakesCarpetandRunServiceGainsville.comwww.BlakesCarpetandRugServiceJacksonville.com

This is going to boost our search ranking in local listings much faster than if we were still using the singular www.BlakesCarpetandRugService.com. We can still use that and it might show up higher in searches if we ever decide to start selling rug-cleaning products in an eCommerce setting, but for the time being, the main drivers of leads will be the city-specific domains.

SEO

links to social profiles, but if you’re really trying to capitalize on the billions of people who are using local search, you’re going to need to invest in specialized and pertinent content based on the service and unique location.

City and State in Alt TagsAlt tags are the alternative descriptions you give to images that are uploaded onto your website. While they are not as important as they used to be in hard search ranking, they are still very useful when using image search. Your alt tag should describe the image, not merely be a cluster of semi-re-lated keywords. This, inturn, demands that your images on your website are strong and depict action. An example of this would then be a picture of one of your employees doing their job with the alt tag explaining what they’re doing.

<img src=http://example.com/example.png alt=”Cleaning a Customer’s Rugs in Tallahassee, FL”>

This would dictate all the pertinent information to search engines, not only increasing your local SEO rank, but also increasing your image search rank.

Embed a Google MapGoogle Maps are a great way to exactly let your customers know where you are. By embedding a map with your exact location onto your page, it not only drives leads to your website, but also acts as more information that search engines can draw from to create a better user experience (i.e., putting your well-crafted business at the top of the results list). If you are unfamiliar with how to embed a Google map, they o�er a great tutorial on their blog.

Get Citations From Relevant SourcesWhen trying to understand how to garner a higher search placement for your local business, consider that each city has a certain amount of juice. This juice is distributed amongst the channels that be and then redistributed again (and again, and again, if need be). It is your job to get as much of this juice as you can.


Category citations are an awesome way of doing this. Moz put together a great list of all many citation sources based on industry but there are many more opportunities for you go get listed on sites, including local chamber of commerces (here’s a free template for an email you can use to get on their website), radio stations that advertise deals your company may be o�ering, local economic develop-ment groups, and any meetup websites that sponsor events similar to your industry. While there might not be a meetup group specifically targeted towards carpet cleaners, Blake’s Carpet and Rug Service would be wise to sponsor the local Moroccan Rug Society’s Tallahassee Chapter.

Claim Review ProfilesIncluding directory citations, you’re also going to want to claim your place on the all the reviews sites that are used by your potential customers. If you look at the search results posted above and look at which businesses focus on getting positive reviews, you’ll notice a definite correlation between who is getting the most clicks and who takes the time to drive reviews. Here are a list of some of the most popular websites and apps that post reviews. Generally claiming your location is extremely easy; each of these sites only requires a phone call, email from a verified email address, or code being input from a postcard you will have received from the organizing website.

Yelp.com

TripAdvisor.com

CitySearch.com

Google.com/Business

Foursquare.com

AngiesList.com

Facebook.com

Manta.com

Local.Yahoo

Local.com

BBB.org

UrbanSpoon.com

YellowPages.com


SEO

REVIEWS

Make Sure You’ve Got a Local Area Code!You can put all the e�ort in the world into optimizing your local page but if you don’t have a local area code, the e�ort is all for naught. One of the biggest indicators search engines use when deciding if a business is indeed a local business is checking the area code of the business versus the area code of the city in question.

Mobile SearchThe days of needing a laptop or desktop to look for local businesses are gone– an April 2012 Pew study found that 57% of Americans own a smart phone. They project 400 billion dollars in revenue associated with smartphone marketing by the year 2015, and that 94% of smartphone owners look for local information while using their phone to browse the Internet. The obvious (and important) reason behind this is that a mobile search is infinitely easier and more convenient than having to be where ever your laptop or desktop is, but with that added ease comes with a cost– that being the smaller user interface that the internet flows through. If you want to further optimize your local search results, here are a few things you need to take into account:

Click To CallClick to call is exactly what it sounds like, your customers see your listing on Google or go to your Facebook or Yelp or whatever social listing they prefer and then click on a little phone icon (or maybe just text) and then they call you. It’s simple and having it available will exponentially increase your rate of conversion. According to Televox, 70 percent of searchers connect with a local business after they seek information online and an additional 70% of mobile searches for products of services will result in a sale in the near future. Not taking advantage of that is leaving some serious cash on the table.

Where is Mobile Search?Short answer: Everywhere. Besides the basic scenario where someone decides to use their phone as opposed to a desktop, there are tons of other reasons that a business should focus on optimizing their mobile search rank. According to Google – Mobile in Store, searchers are 55 % more likely to notice an ad for a store when they are in that store. This might not seem like an occurrence that hap-pens a lot until you consider how often customers go into a store and then check out competitors pric-ing on their phone, a practice informally known as “showrooming”. Search pages can become your new salesmen, make sure that not only are they present when a customer makes a search, but the copy on them is compelling as well.


Optimizing for MobileLocal Mobile and Local Desktop SEO are generally the same, with a few exceptions. As usual, content is king– and without compelling copy on the page, nobody is going to go to your mobile site no matter how good it looks, but once the content is created there are a few things that you can do to make sure that they’re looking the best they can on mobile devicesResponsive DesignThe di�erence between the width of your desktop and the width of a mobile device can be as much as 1000 pixels. You need to take that into account. Responsive design is dictation in your markup that signals the page to break down or display di�erently at certain pixel widths. On the your HTML page source, it will look like this:

@Media only screen and (max-width: 640px)

Using directions like this to ensure that your content fits onto the page, does not take time with super-fluous redirects to a special mobile site, saves resources for both your site and Google crawlers, and will help it rank higher as well as be more easily understood and digested.

Make Sure your Videos WorkNot all phones are capable of playing videos that would normally play on a desktop. Make sure that the videos on your site will not only be able to be viewed on a computer, but also on a mobile device or tablet. Flash is an example of a video format that wont work on several mobile devices. If you want to totally circumvent this issue, considering hosting your video on YouTube as their videos will always work on mobile devices.


Allow for People Website as DesktopOne of the issues with responsive design is that, as your page breaks down to fit smaller screens, inevitably, there will be things that need to be omitted. Create a button at the bottom of the screen that lets users view the website in its desktop version on their mobile device, overriding any respon-sive setting you have in place. This might seem counterintuitive based on the previous tip to avoid redirects, but having it as a secondary option shouldn’t hurt your SEO while still o�ering your customers more options to create the online mobile experience they’re looking for.

Virtual Phone NumbersThis might seem like an issue if you’re unfamiliar with virtual phone numbers. Where as before, you were bound to the area code which you inhabited, now a business who only has one main o�ce in a central city but services other areas can purchase several virtual phone numbers (all specifically with area codes of the cities you’re looking to do business in) and then allocate these distinct phone numbers to each area in which they do business.

With certain providers, you can also forward these phone numbers to one main number. This means that you could potentially have a locally optimized presence over a vast area while still only having to focus on managing one o�ce. Each phone call harvested from a local search result would be pushed to the central hub. That customer could then be processed and the order (a carpet cleaning, for example) could be pushed out to the field agent in that customer’s city and *BOOM*, you’ve just performed marketing genius.


Taking SEO a step further with Virtual Phone NumbersVirtual phone numbers don’t just allow for a more e�cient customer acquisition/allocation process; they can also help you di�erentiate how e�ective your local SEO is. Because many hosted numbers providers include analytics for the calls you receive, you are now able to understand what percent of your calls come from online campaigns versus which calls come from o�ine campaigns. Although not all companies need to understand where the most revenue is coming from, all those who plan on growing do.

Here’s an example of what a graph looks like that compares calls received from an online source vs calls received from an o�ine source.

As you can see, it shows that the more reliable daily driver of calls in this case is the internet; logic then dictates that it makes more sense to invest in expanding your web presence. .


Other Features of Virtual Phone NumbersCall Forwarding

One of the biggest issues local businesses face when trying to assert themselves into a new mar-keting niche with a di�erent area code is creating campaigns that invite potential customers to call. If you see two billboards advertising the same product, and one has a long distance phone number while the other has a local number, you’ll be more apt to call the local phone number. This holds true for online search engine results and advertisements as well. If you want to target people in area code 313 but you’re in area code 540, consider getting a virtual phone number in area code 313 which forwards all calls to the 540 phone number you’ve got in your home o�ce. You can also use multiple 313 numbers (all forwarded to the same 540 home o�ce number) to track how e�ectively each ad or search engine result is doing. For example, if you’re running multivariate campaigns (let’s say that one advertises a discount special on rug cleaning, and one advertises a $100 bonus for referring a friend) having a di�erent virtual number displayed on each campaign gives you clear insight as to where your advertising budget is best invested.

Online ReportingThe data harvested from forwarded numbers doesn’t stop at what source the call came from. You also have the option to see when ads are more e�ective; how long each call lasted; whether or not the call resulted in a rejection, warm lead, or conversion; where the caller called from; and the caller ID. This data can be used to further tweak how you approach customers. If you find out that 90% of your carpet cleaning calls comes from the north side of Tallahassee, you might want to investigate why that happened. It might be something circumstantial (like if a local carpet cleaner has recently closed) or it might be something more usable (like that the average household size or average income of this area inclines customers there to get their carpets cleaned more often). It is the indi-vidual creativity and business acumen that you will impart upon this data which maximizes your results. Just as local SEO by itself will not guarantee higher profits, having a hosted phone number is only a part (albeit a very important one) of ensuring the success of your business.


MULTIPLE FEATURES

Forwarding ScheduleOne thing you’re going to want is the ability to set what phone(s) calls get forwarded to. If I, as the owner of Blake’s Carpet and Rug Cleaning, want to take a vacation, I don’t need to worry about missing any important calls when I’m on the beach in Miami. With forwarding schedules I can easily update my forwarding service to accommodate a change of numbers: to my cell phone.

All the while, those calls still garner all that useful insight data. (This is also useful if you do emergen-cy work. If a plumber gets a call at 4:00am to their o�ce because a client’s pipes broke and nobody’s there to take the call, that’s potentially thousands of dollars lost. With a forwarding sched-ule based on your daily o�ce hours, this isn’t something you’d ever have to worry about!)

Whisper Notifications and Call RecordingBeyond being the founder and CEO of the fictional Blake’s Carpet and Rug Service, I am an estab-lished dog walker as well. In order to save on business expenses and because 99% of my custom-ers come from referrals, I’ve decided to use my hosted number as the same number for both busi-nesses main contact information. Whisper notifications are the feature that I rely upon to make sure that I don’t gleefully answer the phone “Blake’s Carpet and Rug Service” when the person on the other end of the line just wants me to take their shiatsu around the block. In addition to whisper services, virtual phone numbers also allow you record calls from your customers. Recordings are useful not only to make sure that your employees are delivering the best customer service they can, but also because sometimes it’s easy to forget the little details of a conversation that mean so much to producing the perfect final product. With call recordings, you’ll always have those details on hand.

Beyond usage as an in-area-code number, virtual numbers give you the sort of bird’s-eye-view of your call analytics that allows you to cut what doesn’t work and invest in what does work. If you’re curious about how much getting a virtual local number costs (hint: it’s less than $10), please feel free to check out our home page.

If you’ve used virtual numbers in a way that I’ve forgotten to mention or have any other tips for local SEO, please comment below. There is no absolute paradigm for creating the best SEO and what works for you most likely will work for someone else, too!


Date post:	06-Apr-2016
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