Top Local Search Ranking Factors: A Guide to Optimize your Local Listing

How to Rank High in Local Search

Yesterday read one very good article on MOZ about amazing local search engine ranking factors. Here i am writing about some of the take away from that post by Miriam Ellis.

Initially David Mihm came up with his list of Local Search Ranking Factors. He came up with a list of around 100 local search ranking factors after doing an industry survey and research.

After brushing up all those ranking factors Miriam Ellis came up with a refined list of search ranking factors.

Proper Category Associations :

Listing your local business against proper business category is very important from users and search engine point of view. Both users and search engine crawlers look for relevant business under a relevant business category.

To get your business listed in Google Local Business center you will have to select one of the listed business category among several local business categories over there.

Physical Address in City of Search

As a local business owner or to get your business listed for a particular city, you need to provide a physical address of your office. Google shows your local listings based on the location you have provided.

Consistency of Structured Citations

As per the Wikipedia "Citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears. Generally the combination of both the in-body citation and the bibliographic entry constitutes what is commonly thought of as a citation (whereas bibliographic entries by themselves are not). References to single, machine-readable assertions in electronic scientific articles are known as nano-publications, a form of micro-attribution."

      Inconsistent citations might involve:

• A difference in the business name (i.e. Smile Dentistry vs. Smile Dental Clinic)
• A wrong street address, a typo in street address numbers, or a missing suite number
• A wrong or different phone number, a toll free or call tracking number
• A different or wrong website URL

Quality/Authority of Structured Citations

We all know that having a business listed in high authority and quality website will always get more exposure in comparison to a business listed in low quality or authority website. So our prime focus should be to target high authority websites. 

Some of the high authority local business listing websites are:

• Google Places
• Google+
• Yahoo Local 
• Yelp
• Bing
• Merchant Circle
• Local.com
• Express Update USA(Info USA)
• Map Quest
• Insider Pages
• Four Square

HTML NAP Matching Place Page NAP

Google always does a cross check for your business listing by matching your listed details with the web page URL you have provided. If you have provided all the correct details then your listing is good or else you might not get visibility for your business listing.

You can always re-work on your business listing if you find some issues or want to make some changes  in your listings.

Quantity of Structured Citations

There are multiple citations like business name, address, contact details, about business and others which a business owner has to put in while creating a local listing. But to be competitive with other competitors and get higher visibility in search results every business owner have to include extra citations.

So quantity and quality of structured citations also plays major role in search local listings.

Domain Authority of Website

Domain authority of any website also plays a major role in higher ranking in local searches. You can check for your domain authority using Moz Bar. For different factors contributing in Domain Authority check Domain Authority Factors.

Individual Owner Verified Local Plus Page

For every business owner, to get their business listed in Google Places they need to verify their listing. Usual method used for verifying listing is through post card where Google sends a verification code through post to your listed physical address.

City, States in Places Landing Page Title

You should have your city, state and other local information in your page title of the web page which will be linked with your local listing. 

This way your proximity of getting higher local search ranking will increase. 

Proximity of Address to Centroid

Traditionally, the centroid in Local Search has been defined as the city center identified by Google in its Maps product. You can go to maps.google.com, type in a city and state and get a result that looks like this, with Google putting a red pin on the presumed city centroid.

Quality and Authority of Inbound Links to Domain

High quality and authority incoming links also play a major role in getting higher local search ranking. Remember one thing always focus on Quality and not on Quantity. 

With latest changes happening in Google Algorithm, Google now look for quality links only to provide ranking. 

Quantity of Ratings and Review for your Listings

It is currently felt that the number of reviews your business earns on its Google Places Local page influences rank more than reviews you might earn on other review platforms. You can easily see how many reviews you have by clicking either on the "reviews" link on your Google Places Local link in the main search engine results, or by visiting your listing  page directly.

NOTE: Only things to remember here is that you should not try and write review by your self as this may be considered as self promotional thing, which is not liked by Google.

Product/Services in Business Title

The business title of your business is its legal name or DBA. It is believed that having the name of a core product or service in your business name may give you some advantage over competitors who lack this.

Quantity of Citations from Locally Relevant Domains

Having your business NAP (name, address, phone number) mentioned on a website that relates specifically to your geographic community acts as a locally-relevant citation. This type of citation reinforces Google's trust in your relevance to your locale.

Proximity of Business Physical Address from the Point of Search

Google prefers to display most relevant and near by results in Local Search, from the location of search. If Google feels that your search term has a local intent, they will automatically detect your physical location and show you local results.

This phenomenon of proximity demonstrates Google's bias towards businesses with a physical location within a specific geographic area. If your business is physically near to the searcher, your chances are good of showing up in the local results, but if it's too far away, it is unlikely to be included in the results.  

Quantity of Citations from Industry Relevant Domains

Just as it can be helpful to earn to have your name, address and phone number listed on locally-relevant websites, being included on industry-relevant sites can improve your authority and rankings, too.

  

Local Area Code on Local Plus Page

Using your local area code phone number as your primary phone number on your Google+ Local page is considered a best practice. The area code of the phone number should match the area code/codes traditionally associated with your city of location.

Remaining three points are almost covered in previously discussed points.

For more details on Local Search Ranking Factors, please follow original source @ Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors

Responsive Design and Mobile SEO

Impact of Responsive Design on Mobile SEO

As per one of the latest videos from Matt Cutts, webmasters should not be worried about negative impact of responsive web design on SEO for mobile.

This has been a long time discussion in SEO industry that whether having a responsive design for website is a good option for mobile SEO or there should be a separate website all-together for mobile. Some webmaster says creating a separate website for mobile makes more sense as user expectations and experience on mobile is different from desktop or laptop.

Responsive Web Design

Matt Cutts in his recent video says that "you don’t have to worry about there being a down side, related to SEO, when using a responsive design approach for mobile web sites."

What exactly Responsive Web Design means?

As per Wikipedia "Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of re-sizing  panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors)." 

"A site designed with RWD adapts the layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries, an extension of the media rule."

Benefits of having Responsive Web Design

• No issue of duplication of efforts in creating a separate website 
• No additional efforts required for on-page seo
• No additional efforts required for off-page seo
• Advantage of same domain authority 
• Same PR transfer for mobile and desktop version of website

Conclusion

There is no harm in having a responsive webdesign for your website. There is no negative impact of it and in terms of benefits, you will have to put all your SEO efforts for one set of web URL's not for two (mobile and desktop version)

Humming Bird Update - Impact on Local SEO

What is the impact of Humming Bird update on Local SEO?

With Humming bird update and many other past changes in Google search algorithms, every SEO expert if forced to make changes in their approach for SEO Strtegy Planning. 

So what exactly is Humming Bird update?

As per Danny Sullivan: "Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words."

Humming Bird Update

So overall idea behind Google's Humming Bird update is to make search more better by matching spoken words with their database  and display the most accurate results to the users. 

Just to understand it in more detail we can take an example, if i have to do a cab booking i would have typed a query "Hire a Cab location name" and that would have given me some cab provider websites link (May be not close to my location" but with Humming Bird update if some one speaks entire sentence then Google will match word by word query and display more optimized results.

So how should we re-think about our Local SEO strategy?

Plan for some Question Answer section on your site:

Question Answer section or well known by FAQ section on website is the best place to get target long tail keywords and also to get idea from users that what exactly they are looking for?

FAQ is one section where users can ask long tail queries which is exactly like what they have spoken if they have to do it on mobile. Those long tail sentences are the best ways to capture exact words or statement what user can think for.

Update Fresh & Quality Data on a Regular Basis:

You should be regular on updating fresh and quality data on your website or blog. There might be a case that you don't have any thing to update regularly on your website, in that case should try modify your web content. You can divide your web content in different paragraphs and for each paragraph there should be a

heading. 

All the heading should include some local location name ( if possible) and should be tried and written keeping in mind that how a user might look for the content or page.

For some more information on Local SEO and Organic Result integration, refer to Nyagoslav Zhekov post on Local SEO.

Conclusion: Fresh and Quality content was always the king and it will remain the king in Digital World. You want to be on top of search results, be best with your content.

 

Does Higher Number of Indexed Pages Guarantees for Higher Ranking?

Matt Cutts Says Higher Number of Indexed Paged Does Not Mean for Higher Ranking

Many SEO webmaster had this common saying that if you have higher number of indexed pages in search engines, it will help in getting higher search engine rankings. But as per the Matt Cutt's latest video this does not seems to be the truth. 

As per Matt Cutt, this is not at all necessary that more indexing is equivalent to more ranking but this is also true that if you have more number of pages on website, your chances of being ranked for different search terms increases as you will be targeting different keywords on different pages. 

More pages to website also means that there will be more number of internal and external links for the website, which will help in increasing Page Rank for individual pages and also will help in increasing credibility for domain. 

Higher PR for webpages, more number of links pointing to inner pages of the site increase crawl-ability of search engine crawlers, which ensures that all of your webpages will be stored in search engine database for more keywords.

So a good PR website with good credibility get's higher preference for search rankings but just by adding pages to website doesn't ensures for higher search engine rankings.

To improve search rankings for your website you need to plan for a good SEO strategy and follow On-Page optimization SEO process along with quality link building techniques which helps in improving page rank for the web pages and also helps in improving Domain Authority. 

Top 8 steps for SEO campaign strategy planning

SEO Campaign Strategy Planning

Most frequent question asked by webmasters or SEO guys is "How to start with SEO strategy for a new campaign or website?"

Here we will be talking about some of the basic and important steps to consider while planning for SEO strategy.

Before starting SEO for any website there are few queries which should be answered:

1. What is the targeted Geography for the website?
2. What is the targeted audience segment for website?
3. What kind of services or products website is offering?
4. What is the main USP for the website?
5. Who are the competitors?
6. Is there any other Online Marketing being done for the website?
7. Are there any specific product or services for which webmaster want to rank first?
8. Are there any specific targeted keywords which should be focused first?
9. Is there any historical data present which can be shared?
10. How audience is currently reaching to website?

All of the above questions are for existing websites and some are for new websites launched.

SEO strategy planning points :

Planning for SEO strategy differs from industry to industry, but few are some basic points which remains common for every industry :

 1. Understand and read the website:

First thing before starting SEO for any website, all the webmasters should sit and give enough time to understand the website. This helps webmasters to know about the website

• Product or Services Offered 
• Targeted Audience
• Targeted Geography
• USP of Website
• Issues with Website
• Limitations with Website

Along with above points a detailed discussion with web owner can help in understanding what exactly he/she is looking as a outcome of the website.

 2. Identify the competitors:

After reading the website in depth, webmasters should look for the actual competitors present online. Now there can be a query "How to identify a competitor?" . 

There can be direct competitors for a website, which a web owner is aware about and want to compete with. If competitor's are not known to website then we can pick up some of our product name or services and see who all are ranking high for those terms. 

Competitor Analysis

Again there is one point to remember that, some informative websites like wikipedia or .gov, .edu, .coc kind of websites can rank high on search results as they are given high preference by search engines. We will have to be very careful while finalizing on competitors as given websites are not our direct competitor from business point of view.

After finalizing on competitors, we should analyze how they are promoting them selves online. Points to do in competitors analysis

• Domain Authority of Competitor's
• Page Authority of Competitor URL ranking
• Back link analysis for the URL's
• Keywords targeted for URL Ranking
• Anchor texts used for link building

 

3. Identify the keywords to target

Once done with competitor analysis now it's time for identifying keywords to target for website. Keywords are the most important factor for any website and for any SEO campaign to be successful. 

Identifying right set of keywords to target for website requires a deep analysis and market analysis. To do the keyword analysis we need to do:

Keywords Identification

• Do competitor analysis and come up with a keyword list what what they are targeting 
• Do market analysis using Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner to come up with different search volume keywords
• Do brain storming with in the team and with other people that what sort of keywords they will type to look for specific type of products or services
• Check for historical data (if available) and look for the keywords which have driven traffic to the site 

After coming up with a set of keywords, not it's time to filter keywords and come up with a more optimized list. 

Once keywords are finalized, we should pick one by one URL's of the website and should map relevant keywords to relevant pages. It should be taken care that only 3 to 4 keywords can be targeted on each page ( as all search engines have a limit to display characters in title tag). All the keywords should be arranged from high search volume to low search volume in a title as all the search engines start reading title from start and gives priority to initial words.

 4. Plan content for your website

Now it's a time for planning website content. Website content plays a major role for any website to get higher search visibility.

There are some basic tips to write quality content :

Ask Questions to Yourself

• Who is your targeted audience?
• What expected from that web page?
• What is the USP of the page?
• What should be targeted keywords for the page?

Write Text

• For readers not as an article or news
• Plain English should be used
• Concise



Web Content Creation

• Easy to understand

Use language

• Simple, familiar words
• Short sentences
• Short paragraphs
• Use the active voice ( direct message, not like a third party message)
• Use positive language
• Structure content for your intended reader

Space around text

• Use of headlines
• Short sentences
• Short paragraphs
• Bullet points

Information

Search engines and users look for information. Include your main message and keywords at top of your content

• Initial paragraph should contain main message and important keywords to target
• Break your content in paragraphs and sentences

Understandable Content

• Relevant, consistent and meaningful headings with a logical hierarchy
• Content should be well organized and easily to navigate
• Use easy-to-read text styles
• Put key ideas at the top of the page and at the start of each paragraph

5. Identify, Correct and Plan for SEO On-Page Optimization

On-Page Optimization

After completing above tasks, now let's move on to On-Page SEO optimization. First thing before starting the on-page SEO, webmasters should analyzed the complete website from technical point of view, architectural point of view, and on-page point of view.

Webmasters should always see that if any on-page activity is already done or not, whether current On-Page
tags are fine or not, how much modification is required ( as per finalized keywords and web content).

Webmasters should go page by page for on-page SEO for any website as it doesn't give any chance to miss on important factors of SEO for individual pages.

On-page is an important factor for website as search engines stores websites based on that and also users click on search results based on on-page tags visible there.

6. Plan for your Link Building Techniques

Once you are done with your on-page activity for all the pages present on the site, you should move on and work on your link building techniques.

To start with link building techniques planning, you should know :

Off-Page Activity

• Where your competitor's are present?
• Where users can find your website? 
• How would you like to reach to your users?
• Where exactly is your targeted audience present?

Based on above points we can finalize on what back link techniques will exactly work for us. 

But there is one point to be considered that Social Media channels should be part of your link building techniques as they are the most appropriate place to find targeted audience and increase traffic.

Social media channels are given preference by search engines as those are the places where user can write some content. All the search engines give preferences to user generated content, reviews and ratings which actually tells about the popularity of website. 

Webmaster should focus on Facebook Marketing, Twitter, Linkidin, Pinterest etc.

Only thing while planning for back link techniques is that places which are finalized for link building should be relevant, should be active place ( regular updates happening), should have some good page rank (try for min PR 4)

7. Create or Analyze Google Accounts Setup

Although this is one of the initial activity to perform, but can be done before actually implementing all the strategies for the campaign.

Webmasters should create Google Webmaster, Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster account to track performance of the website. Webmaster account can be created by verifying account through a file upload method or some html tags adding method. Analytic account can be set up by adding analytic code on each and every page of website.

Webmasters should create proper sitemap.xml and robots.txt file and update it on root folder of the website. 

Given tools are helpful from performance tracking and planning future strategy.

8. Monitoring, Reporting and Changing strategy

Once done with every aspect of strategy, planning and implementation now it's time to monitor the strategy impact on website.

Previously webmasters used to track keywords ranking and traffic coming through those keywords but since Google has stopped sharing keywords data now it's more important to focus on landing pages driving traffic to the site. 

You can check which pages are driving traffic to your site and see what all keywords are mapped against those keywords. By checking ranking for those keywords we can estimate which keyword might have brought traffic to your site. 

Continuous monitoring and analyzing of account gives a sense how your strategy is performing for the campaign. If you are not getting results are expected then should think about changing strategy or if strategy is giving you expected results, keep on looking for industry trends so that you can bring required changes in your strategy.