Common sense local SEO is what’s needed by most local businesses, not expensive SEO consultants.  Many local business owners have no idea what’s involved in ranking well in local search.

It can be very complicated just like regular SEO, but, like anything, there are a few common sense local SEO things you can do that will help a lot without paying large fees to SEO firms. Here they are:

1. Fix your title tags

Especially the title tag on your home page. A common mistake is to have too many keywords and to be written for search engine robots, not people. Keep it to no more than 3 keywords.

2. Make sure your name, address and phone number is on every page of your site.

This makes it easier for humans to find you and search engines like it too.

3. Make sure your contact info is the same and is on all the local directory sites.

This is the one of the biggest causes for poor rankings other than being delisted by Google. Sites like mybusinesslistingmanager.com or expressupdate.com can help.

4. Make sure to have reviews and have a plan for getting more.  

Since Google has made it much easier for people to post reviews so you need to be asking your customers, clients and patients for them. customers, clients or patients. The most important place to have reviews is on Google + (we’re talking about Google rankings after all . . .)

5. Have a separate page on your site for each product/service you offer.

This will help you in that some of these pages may rank on their own in addition to your home page.

6. Take the time to make your listings on local directory sites more complete.

These are called “citations” and should include info on all your services, not just your name, address and phone.

7. Be careful of duplicate content or too many links on one page using the same keywords.

If your content does not read well or “flow” for human readers, it will not rank well either.

8. Do not try to “trick” Google!

They are a lot smarter than either of us, so how about focusing on giving your visitors what they were looking for when they searched instead?

Google makes their billions on ads, not search. So, in order to make sure people continue to prefer Google over other search engines (so they can sell more ads), it makes sense that Google pays close attention to how relevant a search is for their users.

Two of the ways they do this you can see for yourself in your Google Analytics data. (you do have Google Analytics on your site, don’t you?)

If someone comes to your site, then promptly leaves and goes to another search result, Google rightly figures that means they didn’t find what they were looking for. They measure this with two metrics, “time on site” and “bounce rate”.

If your “time on site” stat is a couple seconds, Google will figure you need to be ranked lower than another site where someone stays for 5 minutes.

Another sign of “engagement” is “bounce rate”. A high percentage on bounce rate (bad) means people did not click to go to other pages on your site, they just left (“bounced”).

A low percentage on bounce rate (good) means they went from the page where they landed on your site to another page on your site.

If you’d like some help with all this common sense local SEO stuff, give me a call at 720-890-8760 or email joemcvoy@gmail.com and let’s talk.

This video is about how to get 300 backlinks per day for $4 Per Month.

If you used this tool daily, that’s 9,000 backlinks in a month for a cost of $4.00,  I can’t imagine anything cheaper than that.

The purpose of backlinks is to make your blog post rank better in the search engines and be easier for people to find.

Why bother doing blog posts at all if no one ever sees them?

That’s why we use tools like this to help us get found.

The link to get your copy of Social Monkee is here.

You’ll also need a spinner to spin your headline and description. There are plenty of good paid ones, but there’s also a free one that is good enough for this. It’s called the “Best Free Spinner“.  For a little more explanation of spinning, for this backlink building, you are just spinning a few words in the headline and one or two sentences in the description.

The purpose of spinning is to create different copies of the text so you avoid any penalties from search engines for duplicate content.  I also like to make sure the copy reads well for human visitors and it’s not hard to do when you only have a headline and a sentence or two of description.

Essentially all a spinner does is substitute various synonyms when creating the content to post.  I like to read/edit what it comes up with since sometimes it makes no sense.  I show you some of that in the video.

Social Monkee distributes bookmarks in a trickle fashion over a number of days so the links all seem natural to the search engines.  You can choose how fast and how many sites, but I always go for the max sites and the slower distribution.

Just FYI, I was using another tool to do this – which is probably better – but it cost $497 per month!  I like $4 better!  So now you know how to get 300 backlinks per day for $4 per month.  Any questions, just call or email me – always glad to help!

One of the things you can do to get ranked on Google and get more clicks is to change your “meta description” text.

Your “meta description” text no longer counts for SEO purposes, but it’s what people see under your title in the search results.

What I just learned today, is that after 155 characters, it will get cut off. What you want is a well written description along with a “call to action” that gets the searcher to click on your link, not someone else’s.

In a survey reported in the SEmoz newsletter you can see only 34% of all companies are doing this correctly!  They either don’t even have a “meta description” or it’s too short or too long.

To see the complete article, go here.

Getting ranked high on the search results is only step one – then you need to make people want to click your link!

What you put in your meta description is for that purpose and that purpose only.  It does you no good for SEO, but can do you a lot of good with the real people who see your listing!

So, make sure to include a call to action and give people to click your link.  Offering something free can be good.  Think of it like a classified ad in a newspaper where you only have a set number of characters/spaces.

Write your meta description as though it was an ad, because that’s what it is!

If you have a WordPress blog, it’s easy to fix – just go to your admin login and look for the section called, you guessed it, “meta description”.

Any easy way to count characters is by using Word, Pages or any other editor that does it for you.  That way, you optimize your use of the available space.

It’s amazing to me that only 34% of the listings that show up in search do this right.  If you do, you can leapfrog over your competitors.  This is a lot easier to fix than page authority, quality backlinks or any other issues to get you ranked higher – at the end of the day, it’s all about clicks and leads.

The best training for learning all this stuff is here.  Or, get ranked on Google and get more clicks the easy way by calling me and I’ll do it for you!  720-890-8760.

Please “like” this post on Facebook, Google + or Tweet it if you find this info helpful!  I will stop posting this “geeky” stuff if no one wants it;)

 

For small business SEO can be too expensive to be realistic. But there is hope!

The way to do it is to learn how yourself or have someone in your business learn it.

There’s nothing better than being found # 1 on a search engine when someone is looking for someone who does what you do! If you can’t pay to have it done, learn how – your business depends on it.

(The number one listing on the search results gets 34% of the clicks – # 2 thru # 10 share the rest!)

Small Business SEO – The “How To”

The first thing I want to tell you is that it’s not that hard to learn! And don’t let me hear the excuse that you’re too old and that’s for the young “techies”. I had no clue a few months ago and I learned it and I’m 65! No age excuses allowed!

Small Business SEO – “Results”

In case you can’t read the text below – the search phrase was “marketing strategy simplified”. Check it out yourself in Google or Yahoo.

In this example, I was already ranked # 4 in Google after a couple weeks, but just for fun, I decided to check Yahoo today. I haven’t even been on Yahoo for over a year, but was curious to see if I get ranked on Google where I might be on Yahoo. What a surprise! I’m ranked both # 1 and # 3! I guess what works on Google works on Yahoo too!

Small Business SEO – “Another Result”

Obviously being excited about that result, I decided to try another, more competitive search phrase – “Rank Better On Google” of all things . . . to see how Yahoo ranked that . . .

I guess what works on one works on another search engine even if they are direct competitors!

So, how did I learn how to do this quickly?

I learned how to do this from Rob Fore and his training on the Empower Network. The cool thing is that if you buy his training on Empower, you get the rest of his training for free from him personally.

Lastly, I, one of the newest to learn this will be glad to help you on the phone or by email to get to where I am.

You may find that helpful if you are clueless about how to do this and need someone who understand where you are because I was there a few months ago myself.

My recommendations for you are:

1. Sign up for Empower Network here. Understand the $25/month is just for the blog platform, the training you need to learn SEO is called the “15K Formula”. Once you have joined, login to your back office and buy that.

2. When you buy all the Empower training and you get all Rob’s training free!

3. Once you own those trainings, I’m glad to help you one-on-one for as much time as you need to get it right. This is an awesome deal. I paid $35K a few years back for marketing training that was not even close to this.

Questions, call me at 720-890-8760.

The first step to rank better on Google with the free Google keyword tool is to understand how to use it.

to find it, the first tip is to make sure you have a Google AdWords account. Setting up an account is free, you don’t have to spend anything, but doing this allows you to bypass the “captcha”  – that awful test to see if you are human that I usually fail . . .

What’s with that, anyway?

Rank Better On Google – With An Adwords Account

When you have a “Google AdWords” account, you can login to the free keyword tool with your account and avoid those annoying “captcha” forms and also get up to 800 results instead of 100.  Usually your login will just be your gmail login, so if you don’t have a gmail account, get one of those too – they’re free.

Do we have any questions about why Google is dominating the world?  Offering lots of free stuff gets us hooked, and then they get us to spend money for ads that make them billions every month . . . but I digress . . .

There are three kinds of searches you can do using their tool.  A “broad match”, a “phrase match” or an “exact match” search.  Here’s what each of those mean:

Rank Better On Google – “Exact Match”

The “exact match” choice means Google will return only the traffic counts on keywords that have traffic for exactly that phrase. An example we’ll use as our phrase “dog training”.

Rank Better On Google – “Phrase Match”

“Phrase match” will return a larger search volume because Google is looking for any search phrases that include your phrase no matter what comes before or after it in the search string.  So, with this option Google will give you counts that include phrases like “Golden dog training”, “Dog training my terrier”, “Dog training for dummies”, “German Shepherd Dog Training”.

Rank Better On Google – “Broad Match”

“Broad match” is now looking for any search phrase that includes these terms in any order, with any other words before, after or in the middle of the phrase.  Phrases like “training my dog to sit”, “why does my dog pee in my house – I thought I was done with training him?”  Will show up in the search count.

Rank Better On Google – “The Secret”

Normally, SEO experts tell you to focus on the “exact match” searches to define your market.  But, what they are missing is that the difference between the “phrase match” results and the “broad match” results are an indicator of how many “long tail” searches are being done.

“long tail” searches are those with phrases from 3 – 10 words long.  Although the number of searches on any specific “long tail” term may be low, if you target correctly, you can get found for thousands of long tail phrases which will, in total, amount to a lot of traffic.

Rank Better On Google – “How To Use This Secret”

When you see search results for a phrase that has many more “broad match” listings than “phrase match” listings, what you need to do is include many of those lesser trafficked terms in your post.  Make sure they make sense, but by including 10 – 20 other phrases in your post, your post will get ranked for all kinds of obscure phrases.

Hope you found this helpful and, as always, call me anytime at 720-890-8760 or go to my blog at joemcvoy.com for more info

 

 

 

 

 

A few posts ago, we discussed 4 things that affect the way you get ranked better on Google.  Here are two more you probably didn’t even know about.

Get Ranked Better On Google – Using Google Authorship

You have seen examples of this whenever you do a search.  Google authorship is the term for having your photo show up next to your post in search results. You will get ranked better on Google if you use it.  See the examples below.

There are two separate reasons that this helps you. First, Google likes people to identify content that belongs to them that they created, and second, people are more likely to click on a search engine result with a photo. It seems more personal and people can feel more like they know you.

So, how do you get this done?

1. You need a clear headshot type photo.
2. You need a Google + account.  If you don’t have one yet, they are free.  Go to plus.google.com  to set one up
3. Next, you will need an email address at the same domain as your site/blog.  This is easy to set up by going into your hosting account and creating it there.  I already had joe@joemcvoy.com
4. You need your “author byline” to match your name on your google plus account.  I found this to be confusing as how to make it happen, so I recommend you install the free WordPress plugin called “Google+ Author Information in Search Results (Free Version)“
5. Once you install the plugin, your getting close to done.
6. You need to link your email from your site to your Google + page and also do it the other way too.  The Google site explaining this is here:  https://plus.google.com/authorship
7. Now, to check to see it works go to the “rich snippet” Google web site tool and put in the complete URL of one of your posts and you should see it.
8. Understand it can take a couple weeks for Google to get it going, and when you are good to go, they send you an email with the subject line: “Welcome To Google Authoriship”.

Get Ranked Better On Google – Using Google Circles

The next thing that helps a lot is your Google circles count. Not so much how many people are in your circles but how many people have you in theirs.

Google sees this as essentially third party endorsements of you so ranks you higher.

You can use the tool in your Google + account to show you people in your gmail to invite. You can also go on fiver and find people to get you Google circle followers. BUT, big warning, do not go and buy lots of followers all at once because Google will see that and probably penalize you.

Your circle growth needs to seem naturally occurring, not overnight so if you are going to buy some, I’d suggest adding 10 – 20 at a time and then wait a bit before adding more.

Do all these things and you will get ranked better on Google!