Local SEO For Your Business Part 1: Local SEO Audit And On-Page Optimization

This post originally appeared here: Local SEO for Your Business Part 1: Local SEO Audit A local SEO audit may seem scary (it sounds way too similar to a tax audit — not fun) but it’s really not all that complicated. A local SEO audit for your local business simply allows you to better understand what your current SEO situation is, and what steps you may need to take in order to begin ranking better in the search engines. A typical SEO audit for your business will include answering some questions about your website or past penalties, and establishing some basic information. After that, it’s pretty easy to begin taking the first steps in local SEO by optimizing your website itself. If none of that made sense to you, don’t worry! In this article I’ll break down each of the steps you need to take to perform your own SEO audit for your local business website. I have also included a free worksheet that you can download to keep track of your progress and make more informed SEO decisions later on. Get your local SEO audit worksheet! Gather your current information Before you begin really looking at your current SEO status, it is important that you have gathered some relevant information about your business. This is because things like your business name, address and phone number (often abbreviated NAP) are frequently used by search engines to identify your business, as well as identify other listings your business may have on the web (for example on Facebook, or YellowPages.com). Make sure that you have determined exactly the spelling and formatting you want to use for your business, because all of this information needs to be exactly identical across all of your business listings. Using the worksheet you downloaded, go ahead and fill in the spaces for your current company information. You’ll want to keep that handy for future reference to ensure all of your listings are correct. Compare your current information with what is listed on Google My Business (if you have a GMB page) Google My Business pages allow you to list your business in Google Maps, Google Places and Google+ all at once. If you do not currently have a Google My Business page, I highly encourage you to set up your Google My Business page here. If you would like to learn more about using Google My Business, check out this awesome Google My Business tutorial webinar. Once you have set up your page, go to your main dashboard and click ‘manage location’ for your business page. In your page management dashboard, you will see several fields for your business information. Double check what is currently listed on your page against what your current business information is. If there is a discrepancy between the two, make a note of it so that you can fix it later. Define your goals Before we jump into the main tasks of your local SEO audit, it is important to define your goals. After all, it’s hard to achieve anything if you don’t know what you’re working towards. Using the worksheet, take some time to really create an honest and in-depth answer to each of the following questions: What are the top keywords that you would like to rank for? What is the most valuable keyword that you would like to rank for? What are your primary goals for SEO? Why are you choosing to start SEO now? What does SEO success look like for your business? Having these goals and objectives clearly in mind and written down will help to keep you focused, and will also help to inform choices regarding your SEO strategy down the line. Knowing what you are working toward and why it matters is the first step in any important endeavor. As a side note, I would also encourage you to set up some kind of keyword tracking for your SEO work. If you can, using a service like Moz Pro or Majestic SEO(free, if you can verify your site) will help you tremendously in the future by providing valuable information regarding the health of your website. If you are not currently able to use Moz or Majestic, there are some more basic alternatives that just provide keyword tracking such as SerpBook. Tracking your target keywords is crucial to your SEO success. Being able to watch how you rank from day to day will help inform you of what tactics are working, which are not and what adjustments you might want to make. Determine your current SEO standing Now that you have your goals clearly defined, we can move on to understanding where you are at currently when it comes to your SEO. To do this, we will cover several important questions about your website’s history, your business and any previous SEO you have had done. 1: Does your website have 301 redirects coming to it? In most cases, your site won’t have these. A 301 redirect just means that visitors are sometimes sent to your website after visiting a secondary domain. For example a visitor goes to www.site1.com, but is then redirected to www.yoursitehere.com without ever seeing the original site. 301 redirects are occasionally used to boost SEO in a rather questionable manner. If you have 301 redirects, you will probably need to perform a separate audit on those domains to ensure they are not hurting your SEO. If you know that the 301 redirects were implemented as part of an SEO campaign, you should probably remove them. 2: Do you currently have a Google My Business Page? We covered this in our last section, but in case you haven’t already set up your Google My Business page, you should do that now. Google uses the GMB pages for a variety of things, and your Google My Business page will have a huge impact on your local search engine rankings. Google My Business pages are free to set up and manage, and they’re super easy to use. A lot of information regarding your business is pulled from your GMB page to be displayed in search results — so if you have not set one up, you are at a disadvantage. 3: Have you recently changed your business address, phone number or other information? Earlier I mentioned that it is critical for all of your online business listings to have identical information. If you have recently changed any of that information, chances are you have not gone back and updated your listings. Think back as far as you can to determine whether or not the information on your listings may be outdated. If that information is outdated, those business listings will cause a conflict between the listings themselves and your website’s information. Even though you know that the information on your website is up-to-date, Google does not know that and will have a hard time determining which information is accurate. 4: Is your site currently in the Google index? If your site is not in the Google index, that means you are not showing up for any search terms — ever. Google has decided not to include you in search results. In case it wasn’t obvious, it’s really really important to have your website indexed by Google. To check whether or not your website is indexed by the Big G, just type the following into Google without quotation marks: “site:yoursitehere.com” If that search returns results from your website, congratulations your website is indexed by Google! However if the search came up empty, you’ve got some problems. In the event you are not indexed, you need to determine why you are not indexed: Is your website relatively new? Sometimes Google takes a while to find websites on it’s own Have you submitted your website to be indexed through Google Search Console? Did you employ somewhat shady SEO consultant or SEO agency in the past? If so, it is possible that Google manually de-indexed you because the SEO company used spam and other black hat tactics to boost your rankings. 5: Have you worked with an SEO consultant or an SEO agency in the past? If you have worked with either a consultant or an agency to boost your SEO, it is important to know whether or not the tactics they used back then are hurting your rankings now. Ideally, an SEO agency or consultant would provide your with some kind of documentation that details the type of work that they did. Unfortunately, not every SEO does this. If you have any kind of documentation or records at all, they will come in handy in determining whether or not you need to focus on undoing whatever they did. 6: Have you ever hired someone to build backlinks to your website? Similar to having previous SEO work done by an agency or consultant, some companies hire people to build backlinks for them. While link building in itself is neither black hat nor harmful, all too many SEO companies will use black hat link building methods to turn a quick profit. Typically this involves a lot of spam, and spammy links are extremely annoying to have removed. Again, any documentation you have regarding the links that were built will be helpful. If you have documentation, go through the links they built and decide whether the links appear genuine or if they were built by means of spam. If a link doesn’t look natural or occurs in an article that doesn’t make sense on a website that doesn’t look ‘real,’ you probably have spam links to deal with. Fortunately, even if you can’t remove all of the spam links Google does provide the Disavow Tool. The Disavow Tool basically allows you to request that Google ignore certain backlinks when determining where your website ranks. The Disavow Tool should be a last resort though — at this point just try to do a quick analysis of the work your previous link building company did to determine if you have spam links to clean up. 7: Have you built website citations in the past, or hired someone else to build citations? Spam citations are less common, but all too often the business information on a citation is outdated. This causes conflicts with the information on your website like I mentioned earlier, and tends to confuse Google. If you built citations yourself or if you had someone else build citations, make sure you have a list handy of all the citations your business has so that you can double check the business information listed. If you do not currently have a list of your citations, you can use tools like BrightLocal to find your citations and then build new ones if necessary. 8: Do you have Google Analytics set up for your website? Google Analytics provides a ton of useful information regarding your website traffic, the types of people visiting your site, how people interact with your site and which content performs the best. If you do not currently have Google Analytics set up, get that done as soon as possible. Google Analytics will provide you with invaluable data down the line that will help inform further decisions and changes regarding your SEO strategy. 9: Have you verified your website on Google Search Console? Google Search Console is another extremely useful tool for monitoring your website and adjusting your strategy. Once you have verified your site in Search Console, you will be able to see your index status (including how many pages from your site are indexed), analytics on what search terms people are using to find your site, your average ranking position in search engines, and a whole lot more. Search console also comes with several super useful tools for SEO. For example you can use the Fetch as Google tool to request that Google re-crawl your site after you have made changes. You can also test your Schema data to make sure it is valid, verify that your robots.txt file is working properly and error-free, and detect potential usability issues. Google Search Console is absolutely essential for your long-term SEO success, and I would highly recommend you set it up now so that you can gather as much data as possible. 10: Do you have access to your websites statistics? As I mentioned earlier about tracking your progress, it is important to be able to monitor your websites statistics. Some common statistics include: Trust flow and citation flow [Majestic SEO’s way of measuring how trustworthy your site is vs. how many backlinks are pointing to it] Domain authority and page authority [Moz’s way of measuring how authoritative your entire website is, as well as how authoritative individual pages on your site are] And of course several more, however those are the most common. Tools like Majestic SEO, Moz Pro, SpyFu and Ahrefs allow you to not only monitor statistics like those, but also analyze the statistics of the backlinks pointing to your site. There are numerous tools included in these services, all of which contribute to having better data on which to base your SEO decisions. All of the above services do include some kind of free version or free trial. However Majestic SEO will give you the full data on your website if you verify your site through Google Search Console. Phew! Now that we have covered the most important questions regarding your local SEO and tracking your progress, we can move on to actually optimizing your website. In SEO there are two types of optimization, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to optimizing your website itself to be attractive to search engines. Off-page SEO primarily refers to things like backlinks, citations and things of that nature. In this post we are only covering on-page local SEO, however off-page SEO for local business will be covered in a future post. Optimizing your Google My Business page As previously mentioned, your Google My Business page will play a massive role in your local search rankings. Although this is technically off-page SEO, I prefer to include it with the on-page items since your GMB page is so important and forms that basis for later off-page optimization. 1: Verify that the information on your Google My Business Page is correct, and reflects how you want all of your online listings to appear Google places a lot of weight on the information contained in your Google My Business page. In fact, the information on that page is directly used in search results to display things like your business hours, logo, services, address and phone number. If this information is incorrect or conflicts with the information on your website, best to fix it right now. 2: Search for and remove all duplicate Google My Business pages Sometimes businesses end up with multiple pages that were set up at different times or by different people in the company. Since we know that Google places a lot of importance on these pages, we want to make sure that Google understands which page is really yours and is actually associated with your business. Perform a very thorough search for duplicate pages, and remove all pages but one. Use that last one for your business and do not build and duplicate pages in the future. 3: Verify that your Google My Business page is not penalized Just like regular websites, My Business pages can be penalized too. Unfortunately, these types of penalties are notoriously hard to spot. To check if your page is penalized, try searching for your keyword or business name, coupled with your location. Perform the search both in a normal Google search, and in Google Maps. If your website shows up in Google Maps, but not in the ‘maps’ section of a normal Google search, you are more than likely penalized. Reversing a penalty like this is not something we can cover in this article, but there are other resources that cover reversing various penalties. For now though, just understand you will likely have some extra work to do in the future if your page is penalized. 4: Ensure that your Google My Business page is verified If your GMB page is not verified with Google, your My Business page will go to waste. Typically you will have to verify your page either by phone, or by having Google send you a postcard in the mail and then entering the 6-digit code on the postcard. If your page is verified, you will see a green ‘verified’ check mark on your page. 5: Make sure your page is using the proper URL for your page For most businesses with a single location, this won’t be much of an issue — just make sure your page is using the right web address. If your business has multiple locations, make sure that you are using the correct URL for that specific location. If you are making a page for your Nashville, Tennessee location, but are using the homepage of your entire website, Google will get confused. Instead, you would want to have a specific landing page for your Nashville office, then another landing page for any other locations. Make sure your My Business page uses the correct URL for whatever location you are optimizing. 6: Create an in-depth, keyword rich description for your page Many businesses use their page description incorrectly. Make sure that your description includes any relevant keywords (without spamming them), and is longer than 250 words. Ideally you would want to include your keywords for city and state as well as your business name and products/services. Be sure to make it clear how your business benefits the customer. Really focus on writing a description that would make people want to click on your page. 7: Ensure that your GMB profile is complete Obviously if your page is incomplete, that means that it is missing essential information. Google My Business pages show a progress bar at the top of the dashboard showing how complete your profile. Make sure yours is at 100%. If your profile is incomplete, go back through your page and fill in any information you may have missed to ensure Google has plenty of relevant information about your business. 8: Upload relevant photos of your location, your work and your team members Google loves to use photos in their GMB page results. Upload any photos you have of previous work you have done, your office interior/exterior and team members who work with you. While you don’t have to include pictures of all of those things, upload photos of whatever you feel is relevant. Remember that these photos will be displayed right alongside your business information and will be very visible to people who see your page. Be sure to at least include your current logo if nothing else. Also be sure that the photos you upload are high-quality and give a positive impression of your business. 9: Include your business hours on your page Google local search will also include the hours your business operates right alongside organic search results. Make sure to include your current working hours and days. Be absolutely sure this is accurate, because if the information is incorrect you will likely end up with some very confused and unhappy visitors. 10: Keep your Google+ page active Just like any social media profile, your Google My Business / Google+ page must be kept active. If you do not keep your page active, both Google and your potential customers will assume that you either are no longer in business, or you do not care enough about your marketing to post regularly. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite make it super convenient to manage your social media — keep your page active so that Google and your customers know that you are active and open for business! 11: If possible, include a virtual tour of your establishment Google offers a really cool feature of uploading a virtual tour of your place of business. This virtual tour confirms beyond any doubt that you are a legitimate business, and shows potential customers a little bit about your business itself. Uploading a virtual tour is not critical, and in some cases is not really possible, but it is certainly beneficial if you have the ability. Getting started with on-page optimization On-page SEO refers to optimizing your website to be more attractive to search engines through the content and other media displayed on your website. On-page SEO is fairly straightforward to implement, so here we will cover some basic on-page SEO steps you can take yourself. 1: Verify that you have your correct name, address and phone number on the home page of your website Remember how I said that your NAP would be really important? Yup. It’s important here too. Make sure that your website has all the correct contact info listed on your homepage. You might also consider including it in the footer of your website so that it is listed everywhere. Make sure it is all correct and matches what you have listed on your Google My Business page. 2: If possible, use Schema markup to list your name, address and phone number Schema markup uses special HTML tags to help search engines better understand your page. Instead of just listing your NAP information on your website, try to list it inside of Schema markup that identifies it as your contact information. There are numerous websites that will help you to create valid Schema data for your website just by filling in the blanks with your correct information. 3: Ensure that all major pages are easily accessible from the homepage Neither people nor search engines like to search through a website to find the information they need. Make sure that your website’s navigation menu contains links to all major pages on your website, and make sure that any relevant pages are linked to within those main pages. Overall, just remember that you want every area of your website to be accessible within about 2–3 clicks and no more. This helps people to move through your site more easily, and it improves the crawl efficiency of search engines (which they greatly appreciate). 4: If you have multiple locations, does your website have separate pages for each one? We touched on this just briefly a bit earlier, but if you have several business locations using a single website, you need to help Google identify which pages related to which locations. Ideally, you would want to structure your site so that pages for specific locations have a URL similar to this: yoursitehere.com/locations/specific-location This URL structure helps both people and search engines better identify the different pages for each location. 5: List your business hours clearly on your homepage and/or footer, preferable using Schema markup Remember that Google likes to see consistency between your GMB page, your website and all of your business listings. Be sure to include the days and times that your business is open, and if possible use Schema markup to identify your hours clearly so that search engines can make sure they have the correct data. Never use images for your hours. Recall that Google cannot understand images like humans can, instead Google relies entirely on the text your page holds. If you must use an image for your hours, include your hours inside the image ALT text. 6: Add plenty of unique content to your homepage Knowing that Google relies on text information to understand your page, you will want to ensure you give the search engines plenty of information to work with right on your homepage. Try to get a minimum of 450 words on your homepage, and include your business name, city, state and product or service keywords at least once. If you are having trouble meeting all of those requirements, just try to write copy that will be helpful to your customers and then include keywords where possible — never resort to keyword stuffing. 7: Write a keyword-optimized meta title for your landing page The meta title is not the main heading on your landing page. The meta title dictates what title will be used in search results (the blue link to your website). Be sure to include relevant keywords with your city, state and business name, along with a product or service related keyword if possible. Ideally you want to keep this title below 65 characters, but the character limit is less important than including relevant keywords. 8: Write meta titles for the rest of your pages, including keywords wherever natural The remaining pages on your site should also have descriptive titles that include keywords. You do not need to include city and state in these titles, but where appropriate you should include keywords related to your products or service. Ultimately though, just ensure that the title for each page accurately represents the information that a user will find there. 9: Write a compelling meta description for all pages Meta descriptions are the little paragraph of text you see in a Google search under the blue link. Meta descriptions do not directly influence where you rank in Google, but they do affect how many people will actually click through to your site. Make sure that you have written meta descriptions for all major pages, and that they are written in a way that will encourage people to click through to your website. 10: Include only one H1 tag on each page The H1 tags on each page of your website play a major role in how Google understands your page. In particular, they help inform Google what your page is about, and what keywords your page should rank for. However if you have more than one H1 tag on a page, Google can get confused since it does not understand which one is actually more important. If you have multiple headings on each page, use the H1 tag for the most important one at the top of the page, then H2 for the next, and H3’s or H4’s for the rest, according to significance. 11: If possible, embed a Google map on your page with directions to your location Not every business will be able to do this, but if you can embed a Google map on your homepage that shows the location(s) of your business and a way to get directions to drive there, Google will appreciate it and so will your users. More than anything this will help your rankings because Google sees it as a way to improve user experience on your site, and Google always wants to promote the best sites available. 12: Include relevant payment information and your price range on your homepage This is also something you can include on your Google My Business page, and while it is not essential, it does provide some very useful information for both search engines and your customers. Including the types of payment you accept (i.e. cash, check, Visa etc) helps inform customers of your business practices and makes it easier to do business with you. Including your price range also tells them what kind of prices they can expect there, and this can also affect how your business is perceived when it comes to quality. 13: Include a customer review or two using Schema markup Schema markup also has code you can use to identify customer reviews and product or service ratings. If you can get a review or two on your page, you may get a star rating displayed next to your page in search results. This tends to help improve click through rates, and is very useful for showing social proof that you provide an outstanding service. Use this feature with caution however, as Google will sometimes penalize businesses who abuse this. Google knows that the ratings and reviews on your site are static and are placed there by you — making them easy to manipulate. Always use real reviews, and never spam reviews on any page. 14: Add ALT text to all images, but especially homepage images ALT text on images is essentially a chunk of text that is displayed if for some reason that image does not load. ALT text is technically meant for visually impaired people who cannot see the image. ALT text was originally meant to describe the image itself, so that people using a screen reader would still get the benefit of the image without actually seeing it. ALT text, when used appropriately, is also very helpful for SEO. Always try to describe the image first and foremost, but if you can try to include keywords related to your city, state, product or service. This helps show Google that the media contained on your website is relevant to your users’ needs. Remember that Google cannot ‘see’ images like we can, so it relies heavily on ALT text to understand your images. 15: Make sure your website loads quickly Since Google wants to promote websites that are useful to searchers and that are convenient to use, Google gives priority to websites that load quickly. No user enjoys waiting around for a webpage to load, so you should make sure that your page loads quickly. You can do this by using Pingdom Tools to check your page load time. The tool will give you an overall grade, as well as suggested improvements you could make to reduce the loading time of your page. 16: Make sure that your website does not use keyword-stuffing Keyword stuffing is an old SEO tactic that some people still try to get away with. Keyword stuffing consists of simply repeating your target keywords over and over again in a webpage, typically in unnatural ways, so that you rank highly for that particular keyword. Keyword stuffing is bad for user experience, looks spammy, and will get you penalized. Don’t do it. If your webpage copy does not sound natural when you read it aloud, you need to adjust it. 17: Make sure your entire website can be crawled by Google Remember that Google and other search engines cannot understand images. They also cannot understand bits of a website that are rendered using Javascript (mostly) or Flash. Heavy use of this type of content makes your page uncrawlable, and since Google does not ‘see’ any content that it can understand, it will assume your page is empty. That is a bad thing, since you need content in order to rank well. Make sure that as much of your page content as possible is regular text, not images or Flash/Javascript rendered. If some content is contained in images, make sure you include relevant ALT text to help Google understand your content better. 18: Ensure your website is mobile-optimized You have probably heard this before — that is because it is important. Being mobile-optimized is important now, and it will only continue to get more important as time goes on. Google knows that many people use their phones or tablets to search for information nowadays. Since Google wants to provide a good experience for it’s users, Google will give mobile-optimized websites higher rankings in search results than non-mobile-optimized websites. In short, if you are not mobile optimized you are losing traffic and sales. If your website is not currently mobile-optimized, this could be your highest priority. Conclusion: That’s it! Although there are a lot of steps mentioned in this article, the tasks required for local SEO are not all that complicated. Most of the tasks described here can be done over a single afternoon and will greatly help you in ranking better. Our next post will be covering competitor analysis and replication. This is a slightly more advanced local SEO tactic, but is still pretty simple to understand and implement. Competitor analysis and replication is probably the single most useful local SEO method I know of, and I’m super excited to share it with you! Want to learn more about local SEO for your business? If you want to learn all of my tricks for ranking a local site, you should attend my local SEO masterclass! This free online live training session will be held on Wednesday, April 27th 2016 at 1PM CDT. Register for the training session by clicking below! Click here to register>>