Some Local SEO Tips You Would Not Expect

Organic marketing and SEO best practices work hand in hand to deliver results. In order to have your brand stand out online you need to develop an understanding of how to maximize these activities in conjunction with social media to make your brand stand out. By separating fact from fiction, you can create an SEO strategy that produces real results.

We specialize in online marketing strategies and have complied these SEO best practices to help you understand what works best for local businesses.

• Establish Your Local Business Listing on Google. All of the major search engines offer a local business listing feature that can help your brand to stand out. While it may not necessarily increase the organic rankings for your website, it does help with organic marketing by placing your business on local maps and having it come up in various local search features that are separate from paid placement and organic listing results.

• Create a Google+ Business Profile. This will help with your social media exposure and provide SEO benefits through organic marketing. When creating your profile connect it with your website using the rel= “author” tags. This will help the content that you post on your website to show up with your picture in a Google search. Increase the overall engagement on your Google+ profile and page by participating in local Google communities.

• Focus on Quality Link Building. Traditional, spammy, link building is dead and can actually hurt your organic ranking. Instead, focus on quality legitimate link building. For example, if your company is featured on a local news channel you absolutely want to be linked with that story. On the other hand, an auto parts company doesn’t need links from the sweater store. Review your links to determine which ones make sense. Keep in mind that Google hasn’t evaluated the links on every site yet so it may be some time before you are penalized for spammy links. The challenge is that you never know when that day is coming, and it is hard to recover.

• Social Media Helps with SEO. This is a hotly debated topic, and the truth is that social media works when your content is shared. If you are posting on Facebook and no one likes or shares your content, it won’t do much for your SEO. If, however, you create content that goes viral on social media it will be posted on multiple sites and linked back to you. This is extremely effective and represents how well organic marketing can work.

• Put the Customer First. Everything you do online should make sense from the perspective of the customer or user. Content is a perfect example of this. People used to post content that was so full of repeating keywords that it was difficult to even read. This killed the user experience. Google has changed their algorithms to reward websites and social media activity that creates a positive user experience. Social signals are a fantastic way for Google to know if your content is relevant and helpful to users so the more shares and likes you get, the better.

These are some of the many SEO best practices that you can put to work for your business. Remember to focus on quality and consistency as part of your social media and organic marketing strategy. As a result, your SEO will improve.