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Local Business: How to Get Found and Get Chosen

/ Google, local search / Leave a Comment

You need to get found — and chosen

Local listings on Google: the Local Pack or 3-Pack.

Getting found on Google

When someone local is looking for what you do, you need them to find you. Typical SEO is great for getting you to show up prominently in the search engine results. But Google has been changing and you have additional opportunities to get found.

The Local 3 Pack  on the right often displays near the top of the page when a local search is performed. Whether you show up here is a function of three things:

  1. Your SEO
    This includes on-page optimization for the keyword phrases customers use most when looking for what you do, and off-page link building to improve your website’s online “authority”.
  2. Proximity to the searcher
    This is what it sounds like: how close your location is to wherever the searcher is searching from. Clearly you can have no influence over this.
  3. Prominence of your business
    This relates to your online citations: how broadly across the web your location data is listed and how consistent it is across dozens of local search engines, directories, maps and apps.
How to show up in Google’s Local 3-Pack when people search for what you do.

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At Rank Magic, we’re experts in Local SEO for small and very small local businesses. And we have a simple solution for ensuring your local search prominence across the most important locally focused sites across the web.

Reach out to us for a free SEO and prominence consultation about your business.

The Moz Blog calls location data and review ratings “The 1-2 Punch of Local SEO”

Image courtesy of The Moz Blog

Once you’ve optimized your location data and customers can easily find you, the next step is to get them to choose you.

Getting chosen

Once you’ve been found, it’s very likely that some of your competitors will also show up. You want them to pick your listing in preference to the others. One of the best ways to do that is to demonstrate that you’ve got a very strong positive review profile. Inc Magazine says

Research shows that 91 percent of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews, and 84 percent trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

The impact of online review ratings is clear in this Google local 3-pack.With that in mind, take a look at the Local 3-Pack on the left for someone doing a local search for an Indian restaurant in upstate New York. Which would you check out first? Most likely you would choose the one with 4.5 stars rather than the one with 1.6 stars. And if one of the restaurants listed had no reviews at all, odds are that would be your last choice.
It’s pretty clear that your online star ratings can have a significant impact on your business.
If you don’t have a strategy for encouraging positive reviews from your customers, now is the time to start one.
At Rank Magic we have a simple  program to generate positive reviews and balance them across the top rating sites like Google, Facebook, MerchantCircle, Yelp, and more. Contact us to learn more about how our solution can drive more customers to your business.

In fact, we have a free scanning service. Now you can see how good your own location prominence and reviews are. There’s no obligation, and did I say it’s free?

Just click here to run a free scan of your local listings.

Join the conversation with your opinions and experience in the Comments below.

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Does Your Site Use Intrusive Interstitials? Better Not!

/ Google, page content, user experience, web design / Leave a Comment

Why you need to avoid intrusive interstitials

What’s an Interstitial?

An interstitial is an ad that appears in between two pages. Sometimes they can appear before the home page on your site. Often interstitials are pop-up ads, but sometimes they will be helpful, like an offer to chat with a live person. An interstitial ad is a form of interruption marketing used by advertisers who want their ads to be more like broadcast ads.

Many interstitials are just fine. But you want to be  sure your interstitials aren’t intrusive.
Examples of intrusive interstitial's that can generate a Google ranking penalty.

What’s wrong with an intrusive interstitial?

An intrusive interstitial or pop-up ad is one that annoyingly blocks all or most of a page. This is more problematic on mobile sites where there’s much less screen real estate. With less room on the screen it’s very easy for an interstitial to be considered intrusive.

One thing intrusive interstitials do is that they annoy your visitors. That’s a bad thing in and of itself, especially if it’s annoying enough to drive the visitor away. They also slow down the loading of your site because it’s extra material to download into a phone or browser.

You need to avoid intrusive interstitials on your website!

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Why is it important to avoid them?

It’s been well known for years that Google favors fast sites. If your interstitial is slowing down the display of your pages, that might hurt your ranking. But even beyond that, Google hates them. Google announced about a year and a half ago that at the beginning of 2017 intrusive interstitials would negatively affect your ranking. And here at  Rank Magic we are always concerned about the health of your rankings.

A few exceptions

Google has identified three types of interstitials that “would not be affected by the new signal” if “used responsibly.”

  • Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
  • Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. For example, this would include private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall.
  • Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app-install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.

Please join the conversation and share your observations in the Comments section below.

If you’re struggling with your online visibility, please call us. Because at Rank Magic, we can fix that!

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Page Speed for Google Rankings and Conversions

/ Google, user experience / 4 Comments

Page Speed Affects Your Search Rankings and Conversions

Take a stopwatch to your page download speeds.
When it comes to your website slow speed kills rankings and conversions.

What is Page Speed?

Page speed refers to how quickly a page on your website downloads into a visitor’s browser or phone. It can be measured a few ways. Google and some other sources report a score for your speed on a scale of 0-100. Others display it in seconds.

You can measure page speed a few ways:

  • Time to First Byte (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte from the web server
  • Page Load Time (how long it takes to fully display the page)
  • Above the Fold Time (how long it takes to fully display as much as you can see without scrolling down)

However you measure it, faster is always better.

However you measure it, the faster your web pages load for a visitor, the better.

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Page Speed and Google

I’ve written before about how a slow page speed can hurt your rankings in search results. Google has explicitly stated that how quickly a site loads into a browser is now a ranking factor. All other things being equal, a faster site will outrank a slower site.

Google  scores your site separately for download to a desktop/laptop computer and for a phone. It’s quite common for those to get very different download speed scores. And mobile speeds are usually slower than desktop speeds.

Mobile Speed is Increasingly Important

Google is moving toward a mobile-first index, which means that the information they know about your website comes from the mobile version of your site,  not the desktop version.  Those two may be the same for a responsive site, but some websites actually have differing amounts of information between the two, usually with the mobile speed being slower. Since Google is now focusing on the mobile version of your website, it stands to reason that the page speed it measures on a phone is more important than the speed it measures for a desktop/laptop computer.

Google really cares how fast your web pages display on a phone. We explain.

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Page Speed and Your Visitors

A visitor snoozes while waiting for a slow page to load.
Don’t test your visitors’ patience or put them to sleep with slow page speed.

There’s another equally important reason to pay attention to your download speed: visitors. We are all increasingly  stressed over time and as a result have less patience for watching a slow web page load in our computer. If your page is too slow, visitors may leave before the page ever loads for them. If they find you in search, become impatient and immediately go back to the search results to select something else, Google makes note of that as a black mark against your page. That will negatively affect your  rankings moving forward.

Needless to say, the more people who abandon your website, the fewer conversions (converting visitors to paying customers) you will see.

Compared to a page with a two-second page speed, one that takes six seconds can expect to lose 25% of its visitors to abandonment.

page speed related page abandonment percentages
Abandonment rates as a result of slow page speed

Several years ago, Forbes reported

A 1-second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions.

Assessing Your Page Speed

There are several tools you can use to assess whether your page downloads quickly enough.

Each of these measures and scores differently. You’ll get the best idea of your page speed by running and evaluating all of them.

Fixing Your Page Speed

How to fix a slow page is beyond the scope of this discussion. It’s technical enough that most small business owners aren’t equipped to attempt it. This is something best left to your webmaster.
If you’d like an idea of what’s likely to be involved, the folks at Moz list the main factors at play in this overview.

Update 12/30/2019:  Matthew Woodward in the UK has also written a helpful guide you may find useful. 6x Free Ways To Increase Website Speed (and search traffic!)

This is just one of many factors that affect your online visibility when people search for what you do. We can help with the full array of optimization factors. Contact us for a free SEO consultation.

How has your experience been, wrestling with your site speed issues? We’re interested in your perspective: please comment below.

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Google’s New Possum Algorithm Change

/ Google, local search / Leave a Comment

Is Google’s Possum helping you?

Google's G logoGoogle’s been reporting a surge in “near me” type searches, probably at least partly related to the increased use of mobile phones for search. That’s prompted a good bit of their recent Possum algorithm update.

One of the problems centers around searches by town or city. If your business falls just outside the city limits, you were unlikely to show up in the Local Stack or the listings revealed when you click on “More Places” for searches focused on that city. People very close to you might find only listings within the city limits that are much farther away from them than you are.

We’ve been able to get good rankings in the organic listings for searches like this. But listings in the Local Stack and More Places have been very difficult if not impossible to achieve

Google's Possum algorithm change

Then Came Possum

Possum arrived on or about September 1. Search Engine Land calls this the most significant update since Google’s Pigeon update in 2014. And it seems to be doing wonders for those businesses just outside of the city limits. This is a good thing.

The physical location of the searcher is now more important than before in these searches as well. Normally that’s a good thing, especially for “near me” types of searches. However, a client of ours has headquarters in New Jersey and a second location on the outskirts of Phoenix. While Arizonans searching for what they do in Phoenix find them in the Local Stack, if my client searches for their Arizona location from their office in New Jersey they’re not there. Organic searches appear to be unaffected though.

Is Google’s Possum helping you? Or is it hurting?

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Possum Helps … and then …

On the down side, when there are multiple companies in the same line of business with offices in the same building, it appears most of them get filtered out, leaving only one of them in the Local Stack results. It’s as if Google thinks they’re affiliated with one another, like multiple doctors in the same medical practice.

Search Engine Land is reporting significant fluctuations in behavior leading them to conclude that Google is still tuning up the Possum algorithm. We expect it to settle down soon.

What changes have you seen in your local rankings since September 1? Let us know in the comments below.

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Not showing up for local searches? Rank Magic can help.

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How Do You Get Your New Website on Google?

/ Bing, Google, SEO practices, Yahoo / 3 Comments

Google’s the biggest, but …

Google, Yahoo & Bing logosDon’t ignore Bing and Yahoo! As of last month, Americans conducted 64% of their searches on Google, 22% on Bing, at 12% on Yahoo. That comes to 98% of all the searches done in the US, so there’s no need to worry about any other search engines. But don’t dismiss Bing and Yahoo. Even at only 12%, Yahoo handles more than 500 million searches a day in the US.

Fortunately, the things you need to do to get listed on Google are pretty much the same things that Yahoo and Bing need.

How do I submit my site to Google?

You don't need to submit your site to Google to show up and move up in rankings.You don’t. It’s worth repeating: you don’t need to submit your site to Google, Yahoo, Bing, or anywhere else. Submitting to search engines is kind of a scam from the past and a persistent myth. It’s not necessary as long as you have links to your website from other websites the search engines already know about. We explain that here.

6 Steps to Get on Google

  1. Figure out what keywords you need to be found for. These are the phrases your customers will use to find what you do or what you sell. Think in specifics. The best  keywords are probably not the one or two word basic searches like limousine. That’s too broad. Better would be limousine service in San Diego or car service to O’Hare airport.
  2. 6steps to get your brand new website on Google.Make sure your website is search engine friendly. That means your pages download quickly, your site works well on a phone, navigation is easy to follow, you have a sitemap the search engines can follow to get to all your pages, and so forth.
  3. Block search engine spiders until your site is ready for prime time. Important note: this applies only to brand new websites, not a redesign of an older website. You never want an existing site to become invisible to search engines.
  4. Create lots of content. Make your pages about specific, narrow topics. Focus them on the keywords you determined in step 1, and use logical variations on those phrases. If you do or sell more than one specific thing don’t try to cover all of it in one or two pages; flesh out your site with rich, engaging and helpful content.
  5. Keep creating content. Don’t feel you need to constantly tweak your pages or freshen them up, instead add new pages. The most natural way to do that is with a blog. Be sure your blog is on your domain and not hosted separately someplace like WordPress.com or Blogspot.com.
  6. Promote your content across the web. The easiest way to do this may be with social media: write posts on Facebook, tweet on Twitter, mention (and link to) your content on Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. Each one of these gets the word out to a different population, and each adds a new link to your website.

Search Engine Journal has an excellent article on this topic with good explanations about each of these six steps.

6 steps to get your brand new website on Google.

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That’s just the beginning …

These things will get your website into the indexes for Google, Yahoo & Bing, an essential first step to being found easily by customers. Once in the index, you should show up when people search for your keyword phrases. But if you’re showing up on page seven or eight, that’s probably not good enough. We have lots of ideas in this blog on how search engine optimization works to get you near the top of the rankings. If that’s a concern for you, this is a good place to start.

If you find you don’t have the time or inclination to do your own SEO, Rank Magic can help.

You can share this with friends & colleagues with the buttons on the left or the helpful tweet just above.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.