Local search ranking tips needed

[SeoSheikh]

Hi there, I've been working on my clients website for a while now. About a month ago I created him a local business listing in Google. I was wondering if there are any new tips to get his business up the rankings in local search? I've researched and only really found information relevant to the old way Google displayed local search.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jo Ann,

Local is not about how many websites you have, but how many physical locations a business has. So, one business location = one local listing. If you've got 2 business locations and they each have a unique phone number, that = 2 listings. You can created these listings via the old Google Places dashboard, and that will automatically generate Google+ Local pages, but multi-location businesses cannot merge the social features of a Google+ Business Page with their Google+ Local page at this point. Hope this helps!

[jojojo]

Hi Associate, If a company has more than one site would you put all the sites under one Google plus site or have different google plus sites?

[MichaelC-15022]

Hey Alex, in the U.S. at least, a good trick for cementing Google's understanding of your client's locations is to manually add each place in Google MapMaker.  EVEN IF IT'S THERE ALREADY.  Just go through the process and try to add it, when it asks if it's a duplicate, accept that option.  It'll then say it's discarding your changes, but click OK and then Save.  Mike Blumenthal told me at lunch at SMX Advanced this year that he recommends doing that every couple of months even if there don't seem to be changes.  If I remember correctly, he said Google trusts the MapMaker updates a LOT.  Pretty sure David Mihm told me the same thing. And from my own client's little projects, I know that they're manually reviewing these, so that makes sense.

See if that helps...it'll just take you 5 minutes to do it, and then a week or two before they review your update.

Google's confidence in a business' current physical location seems to be pretty important to their algo (and it makes sense, as they look foolish anytime they direct a consumer to an empty office!).

MC

[Carson-Ward]

No problem, good questions! You can include the schema information any way you want, but you'll want to make sure it's nested correctly. See the examples on http://schema.org/Place as an example. If you'd like to format itemprops/itemtypes via CSS instead of doing it in-line, that's perfectly fine.

Search engines generally prefer that schema info isn't hidden. There are some fringe exceptions, but the idea is that you only want search engines reading the local info when it's also relevant for users to do so. Miriam's suggestion to show the location data on each page is a good one for small local businesses.

[SeoSheikh]

Also.. is there a certain way I should display this schema info or can I just hide it with css? Is it fully controllable via css? Sorry for all the questions.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Alex,

It's my pleasure, and thank you for using Q&A!

[SeoSheikh]

This is all such great advice. i can't thank you enough. I will set at it this week and see if there is any improvement.

Thanks

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Alex,

So sorry for the acronym.

NAP stands for Name-Address-Phone Number. These are the core factors in your local business data. Everything in local hangs on NAP.  It's a standard Local SEO best practice to put the complete NAP of each location on a Contact Page and, typically, in the website footer sitewide.

To further strengthen the signals your NAP is sending to the bots, you can choose to encode your NAP using Schema. Here is the definition of Schema from Schema.org:

What is Schema.org?

This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, search engines have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

Local businesses can use Schema to markup their NAP. Here is a generator to help you with this:

http://schema-creator.org/

*Be sure to choose the 'Organizations' tab from the left menu.

You might also like this:

http://raventools.com/blog/free-schema-creator/#explanation

Hope this helps!

[SeoSheikh]

Thanks for your response, it waas great. So I guess I learn something new everyday.. today's lesson... what is a Local Business Schema (NAP)!!!!

Many thanks again

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for sharing your client's identity. My honest opinion on this is that you need to find a top notch Local SEO in the UK to work with, because a full assessment of this is going to be necessary, and I can't really provide that in the scope of Q&A (plus, I'm most familiar with North American Local SEO). But, here's a few things I've noticed:

• The website really needs some help!

• It lacks traditional Local 'hooks', so far as I can see. What are these?

• There is no NAP in the footer. All 3 addresses should be in the footer, preferably coded in hCard or Schema.

• I know you've got the 3 city landing pages, but you should have a traditional Contact Us page, as well. My opinion is that the bots look for this, and you should have all 3 NAPs again, coded in hCard or Schema.

• The content on this site is so thin. Only a few words on the homepage, a few on the Roker location page and zero on the 2 other location pages. This truly deserves work.

• From a traditional SEO and UX viewpoint, the navigation on the site needs quite a bit of work. It is not good that any time I get onto a page, I have to hit the back button to return to the menu that's on the homepage.

• Also puzzled that of the 11 items in that menu on the homepage, only 3 are links? More evidence that a copywriter needs to be engaged or the owner needs to get writing so that the site has good, unique, rich content for every service.

• Regarding your question - no, having 3 locations should not have any effect on your rankings, provided you are taking the proper steps to distinguish them from one another. Right now, with the lack of NAP and content, you're not making ideal efforts to do so.

This is just a start, typed up from taking a brief look at the client's site. A full investigation of the client's site, plus citations and other factors is definitely advisable. And, you might also like to check out 51 Blocks' competitive analysis tool for Local Search, though I am not 100% positive it works for the UK yet. It's brand new and I'm not sure in Michael Borgelt (the creator) had included the UK yet. Check it out:

http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/

Hope my straightforward response on the issues I am seeing at first glance will actually give you and your client hope. There are far more efforts that can be made here, giving you a possibility of moving up in the rankings if you can assess all areas of possible improvement, implement new work and see if it's enough to nudge you up in the rankings. Good luck!!!

[SeoSheikh]

So theres still been no improvement in this. There are 3 business locations within my clients company. Hi Performance 1 in Sunderland, UK, Hi Performance 2 in The Barnes, UK and Hi Performance 3 in Seaham, UK

Do you think this is having a negative affect on the listing? The main listing should be Hi Performance 1. I've tried alsorts but seem to be going further and further down the list now.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Alex,

Though the display has changed from Places to +, the work is basically the same. The aspects of Local SEO that have the most impact and over which you have total control are:

• The strength and optimization of your website

• Citation building

• Social Media participation

• Linkbuilding

• Avoiding violations of various guidelines

The important aspect over which you have some control is:

• Review acquisition

Other important ranking aspects over which you have little or no control are:

• Age of domain/citations/links

• Proximity to centroid

• Competitors' efforts

If the goal is to move from #3 to #1, you can work to make a superior effort in the first 2 sections of my above list in comparison to the efforts of competitors and hope that this pays off, but the third section of my list is not something you can control. If competitors are older, closer to centroid or making a greater effort, these aren't things you can control, making outranking them quite difficult.

While these recommendations are more or less the same as I would have given prior to the changeover to Google+, people are blogging about their findings as Local changes and grows. If you want to catch up on some of these issues, there are 3 blogs I would recommend you peruse. Go through the posts on these blogs for the past 3-4 months:

blumenthals.com/blog

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/

http://www.ngsmarketing.com/blog/

These are my top 3 picks for really good coverage of the issues, and the three authors also happen to be Google And Your Business Forum Top Contributors, so they not only have their eyes on the ball, they have a special perspective because of their interactive relationship with Google itself.

Hope this helps!

[SeoSheikh]

Thanks for that Matt. Some good resources there, ill definetly give the Whitspark a go. I've already read the post by Rand but it seems to be out of date to the Google that I get when I do a search. I don't get any reviews so can't see where they're coming from. All I've done so far is make sure all of my address and contact details are the same throughout and then I typed in my competitors brand name in google and registered with the same directories as they did as long as they weren't dodgy spammy directories. Most of the appeared to be relative to the website I'm working on.

[MattAntonino]

Local SEO is all about citations and matching info.

Make sure the address on your contact page matches your Google+ page and your Bing Local page.  If you have other "local" listings - Yelp, etc, match those exactly, too.  Phone numbers, contact email addresses, physical addresses.

Then you should work on citations.

https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/

Read Rand's thoughts here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local

And check out this list of local citation sources:

http://www.poweredbysearch.com/local-seo-citation-sources-us/

That should help local search and if you do it correctly, you'll find yourself in the 7-pack, 4-pack and whatever-pack Local displays on your related searches.

[SeoSheikh]

Just to add to this, my clients website has much better weight than its competitors but yet it still ranks on page 3 for local search. What am I doing wrong? The search term I'm using is garages Sunderland.