This category of post will be centered on local search engine optimization including Google Maps and Places Listings.
With the meteoric rise of inbound marketing, it’s easy to forget bread and butter SEO fundamentals like on-page SEO.
Although the days of keyword stuffing are long gone, that doesn’t mean on-page SEO died with it. Actually, with Google’s renewed interest in user experience metrics as part of their gauntlet of ranking signals, on-site SEO is more important than ever.
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A little healthy competition never hurt anyone. In fact, one could say it even increases performance. At the PageLadder office we are always duking it out for who is the Mayor of PageLadder’s downtown San Diego office. As a matter of fact, I just ‘ousted’ Robb as mayor today which inspired this blog post. By having this healthy competition going on we constantly remind each other to ‘check-in’ and have grown the equity in our personal foursquare accounts at the same time as our business on foursquare. Read more
Once you realize it’s time to start claiming citations, there are a number of potential pitfalls to avoid. One of the major pitfalls is the phone verification listing. Approximately 11 major IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) like local business listing sources use it. You or your client have to be ready to claim these listings via telephone if you want to fully claim these important citations.
It just so happens this short list includes a lot of the top citation sources (most of the great ones require phone verification), so targeting this list is definitely worth it.
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Almost every small business owner has been plagued the last few years with some sort of Google Maps/Places listing hassle. At PageLadder we are constantly requesting and receiving Google postcards to sort out issues with duplicates or non-existent Google Places listings. These postcards, as many know, are part of Google’s process of verifying a business at an address. The old days of phone verification are looking to be a thing of the past as Google rolls out Google+ for Business which will require every business to once again go through the postcard process it seems.
Our clients often ask us why they are seeing different positioning on the SERPs(search engine results pages) than what it is showing in our reports. They also ask us why they are ranking when they search on their smartphone but not from their desktop and the other way around. There are many reason why Google might serve different results.
I’ve recorded a screencast video that brings to light the controllable factors that come into play with the search engine results page. The video covers personalized results, geographical or location based results and history/cache based results and how they effect search engine rankings. Please leave a response in the comments if this raises any further questions.
A question we at PageLadder often get asked by our SEO clients. We often answer “Don’t worry about that we’ll do the research for you and provide you with high ROI keywords for your industry.” Well it’s no secret that Google provides free tools for doing keyword research on your own. This is often necessary when crafting blog posts for your personal or business site. Writing blog posts without doing keyword research is kinda like stepping up the the plate without a bat. SEO should never be an afterthought. Use these 3 free Google keyword research tools to help you get loads of unique organic traffic and dominate your competition.
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