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Hey, small business owner!
You’ve got stuff to do today. Stuff that has to do with YOUR business. Not things that have to do with increased local search rankings.
I get it. You do your business and I’ll do mine.
So here’s the deal. There are a ton of ultimate guides out there with every gory detail about every aspect of local search. This ain’t one.
You need plain english, actionable items that any business owner can do that would have a big impact on your local rankings. And you need them now!
I nailed down 6 points that you could execute over the next week that will help you rank better locally. They take 15-30 minutes each day to do.
You interested? You’re dang right you are!
Let’s run over the 6 steps, broken out into days, that can help you rank better in Google today!
Have you claimed your listing yet? Yes? Great! If not you better do that now.
Ok, now that you’ve got control of it let’s run over some best practices:
Make sure you are using your official business name in the business name field.
Make sure you’re using your accurate address and local phone number.
Have a suite number? Put it on address line 2.
Write a good description of your business:
Knock out a quick bio that describes what you do.
Use the bold, italic, and bullet points.
Link back to one page on your site.
Don’t try to stuff keywords in there. Just write a natural description about your business.
Add 5 photos of your building, products, and/or services.
No pictures on hand to add? We’ve got you covered.
Pull out your phone and snap away. Here are some ideas for what to shoot:
company vehicle
store front
waiting room
staff
products
a selfie!
business complex
you with a valued client
you doing an upside down beer bong
ski the swiss alps? shoot it!
Feel free to get creative!
Got that done? Perfect!
Go ahead and get back to your day.
Don’t forget to bookmark this page or set up a reminder for tomorrow!
Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Don’t go running off. This is pretty easy to do.
If you have access to your site then great. If not, no worries, you can still get this done.
I’m sure you already have some text on your homepage about what you do and why you do it. But what you need to do is take it to a whole… ‘notha… level…
Here’s what this looks like…
Go into more detail on your services and products.
Add more details on your company, its history, why you’re the best, how you treat your customers, and why you love what you do.
Link to relevant pages in your site from here.
Add this new content to your site (if you have the ability) or save it to a word doc to send to your web developer.
While you’re at it, add some of those photos you took yesterday for your Google+ Listing.
If you aren’t comfortable uploading these things to your site then shoot it over to your webmaster.
This is a fun one. A lot of local businesses overlook this feature of SEO and you can make some quick wins here.
What you need to do is take a little self-business inventory.
What is your one main service or product that people love and know you by?
Perhaps you’re a personal injury attorney. Maybe you’re the best place in town to get Chinese food. Remove dents from cars?
After you have nailed down your specific service write it down on paper and let’s craft your home page title tag.
Here are three examples:
(Town) Personal Injury Lawyer – Abe Lincoln Attorney Offices
Best Chinese Food In (Town) – Cal-Wa Kitchen
Dent King – Automotive Dent Removal In (Town)
See how that works? Great!
Important tips to keep in mind:
Include your business name, a keyword, and your town.
Keep it under 60 characters.
Don’t stuff it with keywords.
Now you can update your home page title tag yourself or send the word doc with your title tag to your web developer so they can do that for you.
Next you’ll need to add some schema mark-up to your homepage as well…
Wait, ski where?
My mom’s a what?
Don’t let this word intimidate you. Google loves big words. This is just a mark-up language that helps the search engines identify where you are and what you do.
Bonus: You don’t even need to know how to code to do this.
Head to this tool and add your official business name, address, and phone number.
After it spits out the code, copy and paste it into your homepage or the footer on your site.
Again, if you’re not sure how to do this save the code on a word doc and shoot it over to your webmaster.
You’ve got some of the basics of local seo down. But…you need some reviews!
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Love it or hate it, Yelp is the review site of the current time. Note: you cannot directly ask for reviews on Yelp so I’m going to show you how to passively let people know you’d like one.
You’ll need to have claimed your Yelp profile already for this step to work. Here’s the link to claim your business listing if you haven’t already.
Find the specifics on how to get your Yelp badge. Then place the provided code on the homepage or the contact page. In the footer or the header file. The choice is yours but it needs to be visible on your site.
Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges. Well, actually, turns out you do.
You’ll also need real world visibility for your Yelp account, so let’s get a sticker for the front door!
Fill out this form to have a sticker sent to you.
When the sticker shows up, slap it on the window or door that sees the most traffic in any given day.
But what if I’m service based?
Ah, take heart my lamb.
If you’re service based then you most likely have a nice database of emails and a service that you use to communicate with those people.
If you don’t then I advise you do one of two things 1) Start one today. Like, right now!!! 2) Curl up in the fetal position and get a good long cry out. Then go start one.
Here’s a super easy script you can copy and paste into your email after you login to your email provider:
    Subject: We’re On Yelp!
    Body: Hey! We wanted to let you know we’re on Yelp!
    We just went and updated/customized our Yelp account.
    Go take a look and let us know how you like it. Maybe you could upload a picture of a      project we did for you? No pressure though 🙂
    P.S. We enabled the chat function so you can ask us questions privately and we’ll          respond! So cool, right?
    Have a great day!
Shoot that puppy off and monitor your Yelp account over the next week to see what shows up. Don’t be afraid to hit the list again in a couple of weeks to remind people that you looooove Yelp.
Notice I didn’t touch on Google?
Well, there’s a reason for that, which I’ll explain at the end of this article. But, for now, you can get some easy Google reviews that will really help your rankings with this link if you’d like to start there instead.
Not everyone is willing to put up with Yelp, after all.
You’re starting to really get into the nitty gritty of local seo.
Building citations can eat up a lot of time. But you don’t have to claim ALL the citations, you just need the best ones! Hurray!
Assuming you’re in the U.S. let’s get the top 10 websites that list your business BUT are easy to claim. Remember not to get burnt out on these. Claim just 1-2 a day over the next week.
CitySearch – search business name and location, then claim
Have you ever looked at your competition’s website?
Do you know what they are missing 90% of the time? (no statistical evidence of this stat, it just sounds nice.) Service pages! Yup, most businesses forget to break out each service they offer as an individual page and speak in detail about it.
Silly, huh? But you’re not silly because you’ll have all these pages in a couple of weeks!
Open a word doc and and list out all the pages that you need to create, the more the better. Then start typing away. Talk in detail about what the specific service is/does that you provide to your customers.
If you were an electrical engineer you could add all these (if they applied):
New Construction
Remodels
Rough Electrical
Electrical Rooms
Generator Installations
Panels & Panel Boards
Dimmers and Accessories
Interior Lighting
Landscape Lighting
Lighting Systems Design
Lighting Control Systems
Solar Panel Systems
Trufig Interior Finishes
Customer Care Programs
24hr Emergency Service
Make sure you update your title tag, add a photo or two, and link to other pages on your site on each of these pages. Much like you did with your homepage. Continue to build out these pages until every. last. one. is done and optimized!
You’ve spent the last week on your local seo and you’re feelin’ pretty darn good about yourself.
Heck, you might even pop a cold one today and celebrate your new subtitle “Owner/Local SEO Expert.” We can relate to the feeling.
This is a good start to your Local SEO, and with these basics covered you’ll probably get some decent traction in the local search results.
But, if you’re in a competitive industry or just want to kick your rankings up a notch, then you might be interested in our LocalSpark program.
Finally, don’t forget to sign up for notifications on new blog posts as I’ll be doing a follow up to this article in the next couple of weeks and you won’t want to miss it!
By the way, this is my first post here at Whitespark and I’d like to say “Howdy!” If you’d like to say “hi” back in the comments below that’d be pretty rad!
