Local Online Marketing Strategies that Increase Your Website’s Visibility
Ever wonder how some businesses are able to drive thousands of website visitors every month? The secret isn’t behind paying for ads or needing a multi-million dollar company’s reputation (well, partly). If you prime your website’s format so search engines can easily navigate and understand it, establish authority, and publish consistent, quality content, you’ll be ahead of 90% of your competition.
TOC:
Business Information
Location Consistency
Getting Reviews
Building Backlinks
Optimize Content
Business Information
Google relies on information from third-party platforms to confirm the identity of and validate your business. Google takes into account all of the known and discoverable information about your business and associates it with your website. For example, if you have a Google Business profile, a Yelp profile, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page, and an online presence on other similar platforms, Google relies on the information provided by those known and reliable sources to determine how relevant and trustworthy your site is.
If you have a profile on each of those platforms but your location, phone number, website, and email address are different on each of them, Google will flag this as a potential indication that your business is not what it claims to be. While this example is a bit of a stretch, it is no controversy that providing as much consistent information about your business as possible across every platform is essential for verifying your business with Google.
Along with this, your bio on those profiles and listed industry categories are just as important. Each platform should mention your services or products, your industry with the correct category listed, and should include relevant information about your website.
Location Consistency
As mentioned above, your location consistency is crucial for Google ranking your website. This means that listing your business on a map whenever possible will help improve your website’s visibility dramatically. Not only are you getting the extra exposure that a map provides, but it tells Google that you are indeed a real business at that real location, and you have all of these different sources verifying so.
Place a map listing on your website, Waze, Apple Maps. Google Maps. and other sources to indicate to Google that you are exactly what you say you are and that your website should appear first in the search results for anyone looking for your specific product or service in your specific area.
Maps have helped businesses increase their visibility on search by over 300% (conservatively) and have dramatically increased the amount of phone calls, website visitors, online orders, and in-person visits they’ve received.
Getting Reviews
Perhaps one of the Top 3 crucial elements to an overall search engine optimization strategy, reviews show Google that real people trust, rely on, and appreciate your business. The more reviews the better, but obviously the more high-quality reviews the (even) better.
Not only do reviews benefit your ranking in Google, but they help convert more customers as well. Reviews actually make up over 30% of all deciding factors for purchases, especially when it comes to a service or high-value product. Having above a 4.7 overall review on Google and more than 30+ reviews can help your business not only reach more people, but rank above competitors and convert more customers than them.
An important note for reviews is that a review with a detailed experience is better than someone just leaving a star rating. Google appreciates it when customers feel so strongly about your business that they have to write about it and explain. For this reason, the more written reviews, the more impressions you’ll get on Google.
Google isn’t the only place you can acquire reviews. It’s also important to remember that your reviews on other platforms matter almost just as much. Especially if you are a consumer service provider, acquiring reviews on platforms like Yelp and OpenTable are crucial for your ranking in search results.
Google is capable of finding your profiles on other platforms and they will also include your reviews on those platforms in their ranking algorithm. Not only do those reviews impact your ranking, but they can also appear in your Google profile. Especially if you have more reviews on one platform than Google, your profile could have a note that says “4.8 stars out of 79 reviews on Yelp” just to validate to their search users that they are in fact showing them the best results.
Building Backlinks
Backlinks are perhaps the most important factor in Google deciding how reliable your website is. A backlink is when another website links to your domain, often because they found the content of it helpful and wanted to share it with others. If dozens of well trafficked, reliable websites are linking back to yours, Google can tell just how important and trustworthy your content must be.
Just as this helps your website, it can also cause major damage. The more links you have from scam sites, unregistered domains, or domains that are blocked from Google, the worse your site’s authority and reliability appears. For this very reason, you should not fall for any “backlink building” service offers or promises, especially if it arrives in your email inbox from an unfamiliar source.
This is also why it’s important to check the health of your site’s backlinks. You can do this using softwares like SEMRush, Moz, or Google Search Console. Since not every platform can detect every backlink, it’s important to cross-check across multiple platforms. Some of these platforms will provide a “spam score” for how toxic a backlink appears.
The most effective method, however, is by checking the site yourself. Often these backlinks connect to a domain from a foreign country with nonsense text and links polluting the entire site. If you find backlinks like this, you’re not entirely in trouble. This will damage your website’s reputation temporarily, but as soon as Google discovers that you have disassociated yourself from that domain, your site can return to normal.
You can do that by using Google’s disavow tool, but if you are unfamiliar with coding, you should learn how to disavow backlinks first. While doing this won’t provide an instant solution, you should closely monitor your website’s impressions and traffic over the next couple of days to make sure it worked. If your visibility is still down, requesting Google to crawl your site in Search Console could help.
Optimize Content
Lastly, when priming your website to rank on Google and reach more people, the content of your site is what ultimately matters. You could have all the domain authority in the world, but if your website doesn’t produce consistent, quality content that is targeted towards relevant keywords, then your website will be outranked by the next competitors in line.
Even websites like HubSpot, one of the most reliable sources of information, accreditation courses, and software on the internet has to produce consistent content about relevant topics to maintain their spot at the top of Google’s Search results. That’s why it’s important to learn what keywords to use on your website, so you can reach the most amount of search volume possible each month.
Using Google’s Keyword Planner to find industry specific keywords that are relevant to your website, products, and services will help you reach more customers and rank for the search phrases with the highest monthly volume. Jamming your website with these keywords won’t help either. You have to use these keywords and relevant variations of these keywords in content that can be identified as helpful and reliable.
Once you find keywords that you can target, make sure to use them consistently throughout your site, but with conservation and relevance. The worst thing you can do to your website besides accumulating toxic backlinks is jamming your content with repetitive keywords that don’t make sense in context.
Much like mentioned before, a site without relevant keywords and topics won’t rank even if it has a domain authority of 95, and a site with the highest quality and most relevant keywords on the planet won’t rank with a domain authority of 5. That’s why SEO strategies are all-inclusive and time consuming. It takes several different factors to determine its success, but can be one of the most effective strategies available to you.
Building authority and being regarded as relevant will take some time, but by following these 5 simple tactics, you will be miles ahead of your competition.
