This is a recap from a local city search engine optimization session at the Pubcon marketing conference. If you want to attend this fantastic conference, checkout our pubcon coupons for discounts.
Google is hungry for new data and uses QDF – Query Deserves Freshness, results with a timestamp and from news and blogs.
Video/images are important for universal search. Organic Local Optimization is getting listed in your city keywords.
Sometimes it is bad to get universal results, if people click on a video that does not convert it can kill your conversion, and is worse than having a classic ranking that links straight to your main website.
Different topics get treated differently in search results.
Google Review Document:
1. Named Entities
2. Action queries – focused on what you do
3. Location Details
4. Reviews/Citations/Comments
What percentages of search phrases are multi-intent, a keyword may have multiple meanings that can destroy conversions.
Geo identifiers, using a search query with a city name depends on word order with city name either first or last. Reversing the city name location can give you a different result.
Which queries allow organic results above the local search results box, these should be targeted.
Example articles.latimes.com aggregates SEO’d content that gets much better rankings.
Build microsites for a specific city to get that local ranking, even better if you can use a city keyword domain name such as carpetcleanerlosangeles.com .
Google keyword tool and instant search results have different keyword results, usually the instant is better as it has more hyperlocal results. The G KW tool strips out lots of specific and geo specific results. The solution is to pull keyword data from multiple sources then normalize the results.
Getting local results using microsites can be a good strategy that does not dilute your main website, and works well for larger brands. For a local business, creating multiple microsites is not the best strategy.
The google panda update has google focused more on holistic website quality rather than page quality. If your entire website is relevant, you will get more long tail keyword rankings.
Using press releases with community focused events in your local papers and getting citations from city focused businesses are a huge plus.
3 Responses
Great write-up, I am a normal visitor of traffic strategies, maintain my nice site and operate PPC campaigns, and It is going to be a regular to see google changes to their ranking algorithm.
This is very good information for our local window washing business and this will help me in my local website marketing in our neighborhood.
Local websites need tons of reviews to get search engine rankings. These are truly some amazing ideas to help build backlinks to local online shops.