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SEO Delivers the Best ROI for Local Businesses

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ROI-600x360Search Engine Land recently published the results of a survey that examines the sources of traffic and leads to local businesses. According to the 288 respondents, SEO ROI delivers the best to local businesses. The survey found organic search delivered the most website traffic and phone calls into local businesses, which justifies the effort spent on it.

Google Business Profile comes in second and delivers almost as good an ROI, although it sends significantly less traffic to local business websites.

website-traffic-600x371When asked what percent of visits to their websites come from different sources, organic search again came out on top, with local search on Google coming in second. The combination of organic search and local search account for a full 40% of all visits, dwarfing the other sources of traffic. That illustrates the importance of having good local visibility in place as well as organic SEO.

Does this agree with your experience? Or do you disagree about SEO ROI? Let us know in the comments below.

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Need help with your own organic and local visibility? Rank Magic can help.

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Are You Getting Screwed by Google’s Pigeon Update?

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PigeonRankIn late July, Google released a new algorithm change nicknamed the Pigeon Update. Not to be confused with PigeonRank, a Google April Fool’s posting we reported on back in 2007, this one is very serious, indeed.  And not everyone is thrilled by it.

The “Yelp Problem”

Yelp had complained they it was being discriminated against in Google local results. It seems that even if someone included the word “Yelp” in their search Google often listed is own local listings ahead of Yelp listings.

According to Search Engine Land, the Pigeon Update does in fact solve the Yelp problem.
Google's new Pigeon update
The question now is whether that comes at the expense of your own local listings. Has solving the Yelp Problem caused a new problem for you?

Directories Win. Do You Lose?

It seems that local directories like Yelp, InsiderPages, CitySearch and others are showing up more prominently now than they used to.

That’s great for those directories, but it may come at the expense of listings for individual small business websites like yours.

Are you getting screwed by the Google Penguin Update?

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How do you respond?

Google is constantly trying to improve the relevance of its results, so over time the Pigeon Update will be refined and improved. But how do you respond in the meantime?

Those local directories are showing up more prominently now and are seeing a bump in traffic. The folks at Social Media Today have written why it is more important than ever for you to have fully optimized listings in those very local search directories, hopefully supported by positive reviews there. For our own locally oriented clients, we’ve been doing that for some time but for the immediate future that seems to be a more critical activity than ever before.

If you’d like to learn more about that, check out our local search blog posts.

What’s been your experience? Have you seen a loss of local rankings? Have you seen any negative impact on traffic? Please let us know in the comments below.

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The Most Common Mistake for a Local Business Website

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The local business error we see more than any other

You serve people within a limited geographic area.

Oops-250So when consumers in your area search for what you do or what you sell, you need to show up in the search engine results. And to maximize the likelihood of that, search engines need to understand where your business is, and what geographic areas you serve.

Despite how much better search engines have gotten in understanding the focus of a web page, they’re not yet as smart as a person. If you have a page all about in-home widget repair, search engines will understand that very well.

And if you have another page about your service area, they can understand that. But what they don’t do well is connecting those dots. To a search engine, each web page is like an island. It connects with others via links, but it needs to do the dot-connecting itself. In other words …

You need location information on every page of your website.

Depending on your business, it’s good to have your phone number posted prominently near the top of every page. And make sure it’s a local area code. Toll-free numbers for local businesses make customers suspicious.

You need your location on every page of your website.

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Then, make sure your address, including state and zip code is on every page. Beyond that, you might allude to your service area: counties you serve, or even the major cities and towns, as long as you don’t make that annoyingly long. The easiest place to include this is in your page footer because that allows you to put and maintain it in one spot that will be inherited by all the pages on your site. For example, if Rank Magic was limited to local business, I might place this in our footer:

Serving the north Jersey counties of Morris, Essex, and Sussex
from offices in East Hanover, NJ 07936

If you serve customers (or clients, or patients) at your office or store, you should obviously include the street address as well.

See also our discussion describing Local Search Optimization and how we help support it.

How do you deal with this on your site? Let us know in the comments below.

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3 SEO Tips For Lawyers – Plus 1 Bonus Tip

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21.9% of people needing a lawyer search online.Not everyone looks for a lawyer online.

However, according to Lawyernomics, search is the second most common way people look for an attorney.  If you want your share of those clients, SEO is essential so your website ranks near the top in Google, Yahoo & Bing.

Are you getting your share of clients from search? It’s easy to tell. Pretend you’re a potential client who doesn’t know the name of your firm or of any attorney on staff. Go to the search engine you use the most and see if you can find your website.

If you don’t show up in the top two or three pages, you’re missing out on those clients.

And if other local firms show up prominently, guess where those clients are going for representation?

21.9% of people in need of a lawyer search on Google, Yahoo or Bing.

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1  — On-Page Local Optimization

Attorneys deal with clients on a face to face basis, so your clients are going to come from a certain radius of your offices. They’ll be searching for such terms as

  • Morristown child custody attorney
  • North Jersey workers compensation lawyer
  • New Brunswick DUI lawyer
  • Wayne NJ estate planning attorney
  • Lake George business attorney

As such, it’s important to have local terms on your web pages so the search engines know exactly where you practice. And it’s not enough to have a page entitled Service Area or something similar; search engines won’t readily connect the dots between that page and your page about child custody, workers comp or DUI. You need your geographical terms on every page.

2  — Local Search Directories

Local three-pack example from a search for a local attorney.You also need a presence on Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local, well optimized for display in the local search results. Beyond that, you need to be listed at local oriented directories like Yelp, City Search, Insider Pages, Yellow Book, etc. It takes explicit action to ensure you’re listed in all those places with appropriate information about your firm.six

Lawyers need an optimized presence on the local pages of Google, Yahoo & Bing.

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3  — Focus on Sub-Practice Areas

Many firms concentrates in a limited number of practice areas. For sake of discussion, let’s say you practice family law and elder law. It’s not enough to have a Family Law page with a bullet list of sub-areas like divorce, mediation, custody issues, and child support and an Elder Law page that lists services like estate planning, wills, medicaid planning, trusts, elder care issues, probate, etc. You need a page about each of those detailed practice areas with meaningful content. Ensure there’s clear navigation on the site so a potential client can find information related to their specific concern.

Attorneys need a page about each of their detailed sub-practice areas

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Bonus Tip – Not everyone comes from search

Content is what converts visitors to clients.Clearly, many potential clients come not from search but via referral: from a friend or another attorney. Those people will still go to your website to check you out and verify your expertise and professionalism. Regardless of how a potential client ends up on your site, it’s up to your website to convert them into a paying client.

You need clarity, reader-friendly copy, appropriate calls to action (“Call now to schedule a free consultation”), and information about the attorneys on staff and their education and experience. But don’t make your content all about you  — you need a clear client-focus to show you’re goal is to solve your visitor’s problem, not to brag about your skills.

Need professional help making this happen? Rank Magic can help.

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3 Steps to Better Local Search Visibility

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Local search use is way up

Nearly half (46%) of Google searches are for a local business and users are gravitating toward the local listings over the organic listings. So if your business serves local customers on a face-to-face basis you need to respond to that.

Here are three steps to take advantage of local search to build traffic to your website and in turn build new customers for your business.

  1. Big Three local search engine listings
  2. Citations
  3. Reviews
3 Steps to Better Local Search Visibility

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The Big Three

To start with, you need your own page at Google Business Profile, Yahoo Local, and Bing Places for BusinessLocal to even be considered for a local listing. You need to flesh it out as much as possible, with your logo, other images, information about your service area, hours of operations, payment methods accepted, and more. Then the more challenging part begins: getting citations and reviews.

Sample local search listing in Google

Citations

There are lots of local directories that people use to search, and it’s very helpful to ensure you’re listed on the most popular/powerful ones. Not only will it help your local SEO and your organic link authority, but these citations also provide another way for customers (or clients or patients) to find you.

Here’s a list of the biggest general ones that you need to be listed in:

  • Amazon Alexa
  • Brownbook
  • City Search
  • CitySearch
  • DexKnows
  • Dun & Bradstreet
  • EZLocal
  • HotFrog
  • Insider Pages
  • MapQuest
  • Merchant Circle
  • Nextdoor
  • Superpages
  • Yellow Pages
  • Yelp

Reviews

Make it easy for delighted customers to review you.Reviews from customers, clients, or patients can be very helpful. For one thing, they add legitimacy to your citations. So the more positive ones you have the more likely you are to be listed prominently in local search results. There’s also another thing. If you have a lot of stars and many excellent reviews, people reading your review will be more likely to click over to your website or call you.

I recommend asking a few delighted customers to go to one of the listings that accept reviews and write a few words about how they feel about you. Caution: don’t put words in their mouths and don’t try to phony up reviews yourself. Search engines are very conscious of the natural temptation to do that and are quite diligent about sniffing those out.

When asking a customer to write a review, it helps to provide them with a direct link to your listing page where there’s a clear “Write a Review” button.

Find this process a bit daunting? Rank Magic can help.