Local SEO
-
To date local SEO seems to be the weak part of my SEO efforts. Are there any good references for local SEO?
-
Brett, another resource to consider would be a Local U session, either Local U or Local U Advanced. Local U is organized by Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm and it includes the expertise of faculty like Aaron Weiche, Matt McGee, Ed Reese, Mike Ramsey, Mary Bowling, and others. The Local U half-day sessions are scheduled around the country and Local U Advanced is next scheduled as a workshop following SMX Advanced in Seattle, June 13. If you're interested in attending Local U Advanced in Seattle, early bird rates expire on Saturday. There's more information about the curriculum at LocalU.org. I've attended two Local U sessions and Local U Advanced in the last year and it's transformed what I can do for my clients -- I recommend it! Good Luck! Paul
-
Most welcome, Brett. Main thing to keep in mind with local SEO is that citations are the local equivalent to links. (though links are still important, especially if they contain local intent e.g. Comox real estate agent).
Citations are essentially other sites mentioning your NAP or Name Address Phone. These don't even have to be direct links to your site.
Good luck and have fun with it!
Paul
-
thanks Paul, great list
-
thanks very much Kevin
-
For a real estate professional like you, Local SEO will likely become your bread and butter, Brett. It's a very challenging subset of SEO because its parameters and processes change even faster than general SEO. On the other hand, it holds tremendous opportunities because so few other small businesses are doing it well.
Here's a comprehensive list of Local Seo resources created by the guys at Whitespark - a Canadian bunch.
www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/9-essential-local-search-resourcesTheir blog is also useful because it gives Canadian perspective on some of the processes, which are substantially different from US. For example, here's their review of essential Canadian places to get reviews. Many of the usual recommended US sites just aren't that useful to us Canucks.
www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/10-canadian-local-business-reviews-ecosystemPaul
-
David Mihm seems to be a big local voice in the industry. I think this article on all of his ranking factors should give you a pretty good idea of what to do:
To build citations (similar to link building), you have a few options (or all):
- https://www.ubl.org/
- https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/
- http://www.neustar.biz/infoservices/solutions/localeze
Does this help?
Kevin Phelps
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwphelps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will it help/hinder our local seo by including our local adress on multiple pages?
We have a large website that targets the whole UK. It has landing pages for every town in the UK. For the towns that this particular business has a bricks and mortar hq, we have set up a local/places page. We then added the corresponding places adress to the appropriate town page on the website. This is just a handful compared to the 3,000,000 towns our site aims to rank for. Question: Would it help or hinder our SEO efforts to add the local addresses to other town pages in close proximity to the original? For instance say we have a places address for croydon in London. Would it hurt to add this address to pages that target towns near croydon, such as Mitcham. All opinions greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Image & Video Optimization | | Silkstream0 -
Google categories for local limousine service
I manage the Google places page for a SAB (local limousine company). The question is, should I add "taxi" and "airport shuttle service" as categories? I have listed only "limousine" and "car service' for now and I want to play it safe although those 2 are related to limo service. Sometimes people refer to limo service as "taxi service" or they are inquiring about prices for shuttle service to the airport and they end up booking the service quite often. Does Google look to our website to find these words in the content? Google Analytics show lots of people are finding us through those two keywords as well although you cannot find the word “taxi" on our website. The interesting thing is that when searching for "taxi + my zip code" the company shows up 4th on maps results and when searching for "shuttle service + my zip code”, the company shows up 2nd on local results and also 2nd in organic results. Is this enough to make me add these 2 categories? Second question is about the area served, does it make a difference (in rankings) if I choose “Distance from one location"over"List of areas served"? What happens is the red pin would be in a different location. If I choose "Distance from one location" the pin would be right in the center of the city (which I think it shouldn't matter anymore that much since the proximity to the centroid is not a ranking factor anymore). If “list of area” served is selected, (the city name will be chosen) then the pin would be about 5 miles West of the city center. Any thoughts will be appreciated. Thank you!
Image & Video Optimization | | echo10 -
Timeline For Local Prospect
Hi Mozzers, I need a judgement. I've been approached by a deck building company whose business is local. They do have an existing web site, but almost no content or indexed content. Their visibility online is very close to zero. They are also a seasonal business, with people getting interested in decks from April through June by which time they would be expecting a result. There is one very large competitor and many smaller ones. This gives me 6 months, starting from very close to scratch. Would you take it on? Discussion and debate welcome.
Image & Video Optimization | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Consolidating mulitple Google+ Local pages with one Google+ Page
Hello All, I have trawled the internet, but can seem to find the answer to this question: "How will Google integrate multiple Google+ Local pages with one Google+ Page?" A bit of background to this. I work for a company that started online, but has since moved into retail stores. We currently have 14 stores around the UK. Now each of these stores has a Google+ Local page which were automatically converted over from the old style Google Places pages. I have read that these pages should be integrated with our regular Google+ account. All of the examples I have read about seem to relate to offline businesses that have moved into online, rather than online business that have moved into physical retails stores. And these examples are just one store, one Googe+ Local listing & one Google+ business page. That seems simple enough... but what about multiple locations?! Do I just need to sit on my hands and see what happens? Or are there things I can be doing now? Cheers for any help! Rich
Image & Video Optimization | | JBGlobalSEO0 -
Is creating great content not important for Local seo?
I'm helping a friend out with Local SEO/Google Places and his content is lacking - no blog, no articles, etc. I've read the major "How To" guides for Local seo by Andrew Shotland and David Mihm and their ranking factors but I never see anything about content or linkbuilding (aside from directories).
Image & Video Optimization | | seo_f20120 -
Has Anyone Used CBS Local Pages?
CBS has a service that they offer to their advertisers called CBS Local Pages. Has anyone used this? It's about $1500 a month and basically they send "business data" to local listing platforms, this is similar to UBL and LocalEZE it seems. One of my associates subscribed to this and they're unsure of the value, they are paying $1500/mo for something that can be achieved with $125/year with localeze. Has anyone used this?
Image & Video Optimization | | qlkasdjfw0 -
Video SEO: Videos in Multiple Sources
Frist time question, so excited! 🙂 We are hosting videos on Wistia for a new series we're calling Tatango University - Very similar to Whiteboard Fridays as you can tell - thanks Rand for the idea. My question, should we also be uploading the videos to YouTube or will this somehow we looked at as duplicate content or video spamming? Also, if we host them on YouTube will they always come up before our videos on our own site, therefore driving all the traffic to YouTube? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Image & Video Optimization | | Tatango0 -
Hosting All Content Images On Flickr For Blog - What are SEO implications?
Hi, I am starting a travel blog and thought of the idea of hosting all the content images over at Flickr and just calling them into my blog content when needed. Benefits: push traffic over to my Flickr account pull traffic from Flickr to my blog However, I was just wondering about any SEO implications of having 3-4 links per post pointing to Flickr. Is this spammy? Will I lose my juice? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.
Image & Video Optimization | | DigitalLeaf0
