You can find this update in the content policy for Google Business Profiles under the “Avoid spam” section.

This new bullet point was added with other, more traditional cases of content spam — including distracting content, malware, irrelevant links, gibberish, automated content, etc.

Why is it important to know?

It is important for local businesses to be aware of this content policy as it is very easy to violate it.

Businesses post all sorts of content online on a fairly regular basis. Now, Google has made it very clear that it wants businesses to only share unique content. Duplicate content will be marked as spam, which goes against Google’s guidelines.

What should local businesses do?

First of all, it is a good idea to review the type of content you post regularly. If there is possible duplication of content being published by Google Business Profiles, it is critical that you revisit your strategy and content policy.

This particular policy is relatively easier to violate than others. We suspect many local businesses would be violating this policy unintentionally — even if they are not trying to publish spam content with malicious intent.

Why?

According to these updated guidelines, Business Profiles are not allowed to share the same text block, videos, or photos.

What if you share a weekly discount offer with the same image every week? What if you advertise your weekly specials with the same graphics? What if you share the same business timings and operating hours regularly to keep people informed?

That’s not spam content in the traditional but can get you in trouble now with Google.

Additionally, using your business logo on every photo and image you share — depending on its size — may also be counted as duplicate content and, therefore, spam.

Takeaways

As we said earlier, it is easy to unintentionally violate this policy. Therefore, we recommend local businesses the following three tips:

1. Do not post the same content multiple times.
2. Make sure that all text blocks, videos, and images are unique.
3. Do not use a large-sized business logo on every image.

Stay tuned for more local SEO news, tips, and tricks.

The post Google updates guidelines on duplicate content for Google Business Profiles appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Search engines have evolved over the past few years. They do not rely on exact match keywords as much as they used to do a decade or two ago. Their search engine ranking factors are now more complex and involve many different variables.

One of those factors is the user experience.

Google wants to send visitors to a website only when it believes the site will offer a great user experience. Websites that offer a good user experience are more likely to rank higher in search engine rankings.

In other words, you can improve your organic traffic, conversions, and revenue by improving the local customer and search experience on your website.

Let’s see how you can do that.

1. Create high-quality, relevant, and useful content

First and foremost: you have to create great content.

High-quality content is the basis of modern-day SEO. If users cannot find relevant and useful content quickly and efficiently, they are less likely to have a good user experience on your site.

What does Google qualify as high-quality content?

High-quality content is (1) relevant to the search queries, (2) useful to website visitors, and (3) original.

For more information, check out Google’s content-specific webmaster guidelines and Google’s search quality rater guidelines.

2. Create content for different stages of the sales funnel

Not all website visitors are ready to buy from your business right away. Each customer goes through different stages, which we normally call the different stages of the sales funnel.

A sales funnel is commonly divided into the following stages.

1. Awareness. Awareness refers to the stage when the customer realizes they have a problem and start seeking a solution. You can create “top of the funnel” content (TOF) for website visitors who are in the awareness stage, e.g., “Benefits of using a commercial fleet dash cam”
2. Research. Research refers to the stage when your customer evaluates different solutions and options. This is the stage where they usually compare different products, read customer reviews, and search for case studies to see how much a particular product, solution, or service might help them solve their problem. You can create “middle of the funnel” content (MOF) for people who are in this research phase.
3. Decision. This is usually the final stage where the website visitor makes a decision, purchases your product, and becomes your customer. You can create “bottom of the funnel content” (BOF) to cater to this group of people, e.g., “Motive dash cam discount offers.”

Creating different types of content for visitors at different stages of the sales funnel will allow you to serve them better. This eventually translates into a better user experience, higher on-site engagement, and more revenue.

3. Clear, concise, and consistent NAP information

One of the key parts of improving the user experience is to minimise confusion. You can do that by displaying clear, concise, and consistent NAP information.

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number of your business, and it should be consistent across the web.

Learn more about the importance of consistent NAP and why it’s important for local SEO.

4. Add testimonials and reviews

Adding testimonials and customer reviews prominently on landing pages can not only help increase the conversion rate but can also help improve the user experience by establishing trust, authority, and credibility.

This small strategy also feeds into Google’s E-A-T requirements, which continue to become more and more important.

5. Create a user-friendly website design

Easy to navigate. High engagement.

The overall user experience on your website depends heavily on the website design and user-friendly it is. There are a few elements here that we should focus on:

• A clean, aesthetically pleasing, functional, and uncluttered website design.
• The site must be mobile-friendly.
• The navigation structure should be simple and user-friendly.

Many problems surface because of a poor navigation structure. If the user cannot find their desired page in less than three clicks, you have work to do. The navigation structure is also used by Google to determine which pages to prioritize.

A user-friendly website design and easy-to-use navigation structure leads to higher engagement, increased average time on site, and an overall better user experience.

6. Improve your website loading speed

Last but not least, you must improve the loading speed of your website if you want to improve the local customer experience.

No one likes a website that takes too long to load. Studies reveal that more than 40 percent of visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

That cannot be an indication of a good user experience.

If you want to learn how to improve the loading speed of your website, check out our free guide on website speed optimisation.

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• Local SEO Guide
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The post How to improve the local customer experience on your website appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

This was the first update in over nine months — the last time Google updated the search quality rater guidelines was back in October 2021.

In this post, we will take a look at what changed in the latest update and what content creators and local businesspeople should know when it comes to creating websites and content that meets Google’s guidelines.

What changed?

Google documented five big changes in the recent update.

1. The language was refreshed to align with the newly published guidelines.
2. Google refined YMYL, refreshed existing examples, and added a new table of examples.
3. Elaborated and added clarifications to low and lowest page quality sections.
4. Refactored language to be applicable across all device types.
5. Removed user location when irrelevant, removed or updated outdated concepts and examples, updated screenshots, and made other minor changes.

What does it all mean?!

We know. Some of it may not make sense.

So here is a brief explanation of what it actually means for you and what you need to do about it.

Changes to YMYL

YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life.

What it means is that Google is more sensitive about certain topics than others. After all, some topics have the potential to affect and influence other people’s lives in a more significant manner.

For example, a gossip website may not have the same impact on someone’s life as a blog that shares health tips. Google wants these website categories to be more responsible with the information they share.

Makes sense, right?

In this recent update, Google has updated how it defines YMYL and who is affected by it.

Previously, Google used to break down YMYL topics into the following categories:

• Health and safety
• Shopping
• Finance
• Civics, government, and law
• News and current events
• Groups of people
• Other

In this July 2022 update, Google has removed these categories completely. Instead of categories, Google is evaluating YMYL — and asking content creators to think about YMYL — by the four types of harm that online content can cause to individuals and societies:

• Health or safety
• Financial security
• Society
• Other

Google has also shared this new table that further drills down into the topics that Google considers or does not consider YMYL.

Changes to low-quality pages

What does it mean to have a “low-quality” web page? Google has updated its definition of low-quality pages.

Before July 28, 2022, the lack of sufficient expertise of the content creator might play a part in determining the quality of the page. That is no longer the case. Instead, Google has now expanded the role of E-A-T in determining if a page is low quality or not.

Here are the important points you need to know:

• Content creators do not need to provide information about themselves for topics that only require everyday expertise.
• The level of E-A-T required for the page depends completely on the topic and purpose of the page.
• Low-quality pages can exist on any type of website, e.g., academic site, government site, nonprofit website, etc.

Lowest quality pages

A new section was added to the “lowest quality pages”, suggesting that even expert and authoritative sources can publish harmful content.

The authoritativeness of a website does not guarantee the quality of the content. Pages with harmful, untrustworthy, spam, or deceptive content requires a “lowest quality” rating.

Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T)

E-A-T is critical.

Apart from the aforementioned changes to the E-A-T, Google also added the following line of text to the E-A-T section:

“Informational [main content] on YMYL topics is mildly inaccurate or misleading.”

That would help when determining whether a page is low quality or not.

New document on Search Quality Rater Guidelines

In addition to the aforementioned changes, Google also published a new, comprehensive resource on Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

This document explains how search works, how the Search Quality Rater Guidelines work, how to improve search, the quality rating process and how it works, who the raters are, and more.

Conclusion

We recommend going through the updated guidelines in detail and making necessary adjustments to your content strategy accordingly. E-A-T, in particular, is of utmost importance, and it is crucial that you take it into account when creating and publishing content on your site.

You can check out the updated guidelines here.

Please reach out to us if you have any questions.

The post 5 recent changes to Google search quality rater guidelines appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

However, Google still recommends “always try to fix internal links.”

This recommendation goes against the advice that Google’s Gary Illyes shared in 2015 when Gary Illyes said that if the redirects are properly implemented, replacing internal links with the correct HTTPS versions is “not worth it.”

Google’s John Mueller recently said it is “always” worth doing.

“I’d always try to fix internal links. It just makes things cleaner and is under your own control. I doubt it would have any visible effect, though.”

Benefits of removing redirect chains

It’s true that removing the redirect chains won’t have any noticeable visible effect, but it can help improve web page performance and your site’s overall performance in search rankings.

First, removing redirects means visitors can get to the web page faster — which is good for the user experience.

Second, search engines have a limited crawl budget, and every redirect counts as a page crawled against that crawl budget. If you have a massive website with lots of web pages, the crawl budget may get exhausted before Google has crawled and indexed all the pages on your site. That can have a  direct negative effect on your website’s performance in search.

Third, you cannot rely on redirects indefinitely. Things can go wrong, and links may break. It is always a good idea to keep your website clean and links straightforward without relying on redirect chains and hoops.

Replacing HTTP internal links with HTTPS versions

If you only have a few redirect chains, you can replace the HTTP internal links with HTTPS versions one by one. However, if you have lots of links, you might want to use a plugin, such as Better Search Replace, to replace internal links in bulk.

There is always a risk of something breaking when you are using a plugin or making changes in bulk. Therefore, we recommend saving a backup that you can revert to in case something goes wrong.

The post Google recommends replacing HTTP internal links with HTTPS versions appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

It can be especially important for local business websites that want to dominate search results by occupying as much as possible and redirecting searchers to the right pages for higher conversion rates.

But what exactly are sitelinks? How does Google generate sitelinks? And what can local business websites like yours do to get sitelinks for your search results?

This post answers all these questions and more.

What are sitelinks?

Google’s John Mueller defined sitelinks in the following words:

“Sitelinks are the additional results that are sometimes shown below a search result, where it’s usually just a one-line link to a different part of the website.”

According to Googe’s official documentation, sitelinks are defined as “links from the same domain that are clustered together under a web result.”

Here is an example of how sitelinks may look.

In the above image, the first highlight is the main search result, while the additional links (highlight number two) are site links. These links are displayed automatically by Google to serve as shortcuts for search engine users.

How does Google generate sitelinks for a web page?

“There is no meta tag or structured data that you can use to kind of like enforce a sitelink to be shown.

And it’s a lot more that our systems try to figure out what is actually kind of related or relevant for users when they’re looking at this one web page as well,” John Mueller explains.

What can webmasters do to get sitelinks?

There are a few best practices that you can follow. These best practices include: having a good website structure, building internal links, avoiding content repetition, creating informative and relevant meta titles and page headings, etc.

However, according to John Mueller, it is mostly up to Google.

“Our recommendation is essentially to have a good website structure, to have clear internal links so that it’s easy for us to recognize which pages are related to those pages, and to have clear titles that we can use and kind of show as a sitelink.”

Does a good website structure guarantee sitelinks?

No.

As mentioned earlier, it is up to Google whether or not it wants to show sitelinks. In addition, it is also up to Googe to decide which pages to include in the sitelinks.

Despite you following the best practices, Google may just decide not to show sitelinks for your main search result.

“It’s not that there’s a guarantee that any of this will be shown like that, but it kind of helps us to figure out what is related. And if we do think it makes sense to show a sitelink, then it’ll be a lot easier for us to actually choose one based on that information,” says John Mueller.

Can you change the links that appear?

Although Google picks pages on its own to be shown as sitelinks, there are ways to influence the page when you do not like the pages that Google is showing. The following tips may help:

• If there is a specific page that you want Google to prioritize, make it an important part of your website structure.
• Create a link to that page from the main menu if possible.
• Build strong internal links to that page.

On the other hand, if you want to remove a page from sitelinks, you can do so by adding a noindex tag and removing that page from the search index altogether. But that may not be a preferable option for many.

Conclusion

Sitelinks can help you improve organic click-through rate, traffic, and website engagement rate.

We hope you now have all the answers you need to improve your local search results with sitelinks. If you have any more questions, please reach out to us.

Related articles

• Local SEO Guide
• What Are Sitelinks?

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Here are five writing tips that can help local businesses with rankings.

1. Create high-quality content as per Google’s guidelines

If you want to rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs), you must create high-quality content. There is no way around it.

But what is high-quality content?

On the topic of high-quality informative content, Google shares the following guideline, “For informational content: very high-quality MC (main content) is original, accurate, comprehensive, clearly communicated, professionally presented, and should reflect expert consensus as appropriate.”

In addition, it is also important to follow Google’s E-A-T framework.

EAT is an acronym that stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Google evaluates a website’s content through the EAT framework, and it can play a crucial role when it comes to deciding which web pages get prioritized in search rankings and which ones make way for others.

More information on E-A-T can be found in Google’s search quality rater guidelines.

2. Keyword inclusion and optimisation

One of the basic principles of SEO writing is to optimise your web page for important primary and secondary keywords.

Search engines have evolved and become very smart in the last few years. Now, they do not rely on exact match keyword phrases as much as they used to. However, it is still a recommended practice to include primary and secondary keywords on the web page as it can help tremendously.

Here are a few tips on where and how to include the important keywords.

• Based on your keyword research, divide your keywords into two groups: primary keywords and secondary keywords.
• Include the primary keyword in:
  • The meta title
  • The page title (H1)
  • Body text
  • Meta description
• Include the secondary keywords in:
  • Body text
  • Subheadings (H2 and H3)
  • Meta descriptions

3. Create content as per the search intent of keywords

Before you start writing the content, however, it is crucial to understand the intent of the keyword you are targeting. How your content is written depends on your findings.

A keyword can have one of the following three search intents:

1. Informational — When the searcher is looking for information on a topic or answers to their questions, e.g., “what is the average temperature in Finland.”
2. Commercial — When the searcher indicates an intent to buy a product or service now or at some point in the future, e.g., “Ahrefs or SEMRush: which SEO tool to buy?”
3. Navigational — When the search intent is to visit a specific web page, e.g., “Basecamp log in.”

The easiest way to determine the search intent of a keyword is by looking at the search results for that keyword. Manually analyze and review the top 10 pages on Google’s first search result page and see what type of results Google surfaces.

After your analysis, make sure you write the content, so it caters to that search intent. That’d give your page the best possible chance to rank higher on the SERPs.

4. Create content for featured snippets

Featured snippets are small excerpts from the web page that appear on the main Google SERPs. Google uses featured snippets to provide relevant information to searchers as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Here is an example of a featured snippet.

While there is no definite rule for making sure your web page appears in the featured snippet, the way you write your content can influence its probability.

The easiest way to influence featured snippets is by following the “inverted pyramid” technique. In this technique, you start with a summary of the main point and provide a summarized answer to the main question. In the subsequent paragraphs, you elaborate on that and provide more information.

This gives Google an opportunity to take that summarized answer and rank it in the featured snippet. Searchers can click on the web page if they are interested in finding more details.

5. Readability, user engagement, and user experience

Last but not least, good SEO writing takes into account other factors such as readability, user experience, and user engagement.

Unlike traditional writing rules, SEO writing demands shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs. That makes skimming information easy, which can increase readability and engagement.

In addition, it is also recommended to use bullet points and numbered lists whenever possible. That adds variety to the content and makes reading a more pleasant experience.

One of the main goals of SEO writing is to avoid a big wall of text. Therefore, you should divide the content into multiple chunks with subheadings, videos, images, bullet points, and other visual elements, e.g., business map location, business reviews, product photos, etc.

Conclusion

Writing online content can be a fairly simple process, but effective SEO writing requires attention and careful implementation of various techniques.

The tips mentioned in this article can help your local business achieve better rankings on the SERPs.

If you have any questions or need help with local SEO, feel free to reach out to us.

Related articles

• Local SEO Guide
• Keyword Research for Local SEO
• Local SEO Visibility

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Sometimes, you may think that you have done everything right. But Google is still not indexing your web pages.

If you are facing a similar situation, here is a list of potential reasons why Google may not be indexing your website.

Identifying, confirming, and fixing these issues will likely lead Google to start indexing your web pages on the SERPs.

1. Robots.txt

First, the most common and obvious reason — the robots.txt file on your website may be blocking Google from indexing the pages on your site.

In case you don’t know, robots.txt allows you to inform Google which pages it should index or not. It is not uncommon to make an error and disallow important pages on your website in the robots.txt file.

The robots.txt file looks like this.

Note that there is nothing after “Disallow:”.

That means that nothing is disallowed, and search engine crawlers are allowed to index every single page on your website.

However, even a simple forward flash could change that.

The forward slash means that the root folder of your website has been disallowed, which means that search engine crawlers are not allowed to index any page on your website.

Make sure that the robots.txt file on your website is exactly how it should be.

2. The Noindex, Nofollow meta tags

Other than robots.txt, there is another method to prevent Google from indexing web pages — by using the Noindex, Nofollow meta tags.

Unlike the robots.txt file, Noindex, Nofollow meta tags work on a page-by-page basis. Unless you want Google not to index a certain page (for example, a thank you page that appears after an e-transaction is complete), make sure that the pages do not have the Noindex, Nofollow meta tags.

Check the HTML source code of the page and search for keywords such as “noindex” and “nofollow” and change them so they read index,follow instead.

3. Redirect loops

Pages with redirect loops are not likely to get indexed. That’s because these pages send search engine crawlers on a loop.

Check the HTML source code of the web page and see if you can find a duplicate URL pointing back to itself.

Sometimes, these issues do not appear in Google Search Console. In that case, you may want to use an external site audit tool, such as Screaming Frog, SEMRush, or Ahrefs.

Remove the redirect, re-submit the page for indexing in Google Search Console, and check again in a few days. The Google Search Console should show the green indexing status.

4. Crawl depth

If a web page is buried within folders, Google may not reach that page at all. If the search engine crawlers cannot crawl a web page, they cannot index it.

Here is an example of such a page navigation structure.

www.domainname.com/shop/shoes/men-shoes/men-nike-shoes/men-nike-running-shoes/men-nike-zoom-x-shoes.html

Google may drop the crawl if it cannot find a web page after crawling 3-4 folders. Therefore, make sure to structure your website in a way that makes it easier for Google to find all the web pages.

5. Orphan pages

Sometimes, Google cannot find a page because there is no path leading to it.

Google uses links to find different web pages on the site. Think of it as a spider web. One page may lead to another page, and so on and so forth.

Since orphan pages do not have any other pages linking to them, they are easy to miss.

Ideally, there should not be an orphan page on your site. Make sure to create internal links from relevant pages to every single page on your site. Creating this web of internal links from and to every web page on your site makes it easier for Google to crawl each page, pass link equity, and index them.

6. Missing sitemaps

Missing sitemaps may not be a huge issue, but it does make the job more difficult for Google to find, crawl, and index all the pages on your site.

Without a sitemap, Google is flying blind. Sitemaps help Google navigate your website more efficiently and find, crawl, and index more pages.

You can create a sitemap file easily with a plugin such as the Yoast SEO plugin and submit it to Google via Google Search Console.

7. A site that takes forever to load

Google does not want to index and rank websites that take forever to load and provide a poor user experience. Depending on how slow your website is, Google may decide to drop a web page altogether — instead of demoting it on the SERP.

Use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix to see how fast your pages load.

Conclusion

There are many things that can go wrong when it comes to indexing, but the reasons mentioned above are the most common ones.

If you’ve been struggling with your local business website because your pages aren’t getting indexed, this checklist is a good point to start.

If you have any questions or need help, give us a call.

Related articles

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If yes, try the following five local SEO tips. These tips are not overly complicated but can produce excellent results surprisingly quickly.

Let’s see what these local SEO tips are.

1. Optimise your Google Business Profile

If you have not found success with local SEO yet, optimise your Google Business Profile.

A properly optimised Google Business profile can often serve as the focal point of your local business website’s SEO, and it can dramatically increase your business’s online visibility.

Here are some of the things that you should look into while optimising the Google Business profile for your local business website:

1. Make sure the business description has the keywords you want to optimise for.
2. Choose the right category for your Google Business Profile listing. It is a good idea to first see if there are any popular searches that best define your business type.
3. Make sure that the NAP information is correct and consistent. NAP stands for the Name, Address, and Phone number of your business, and it is important to keep it consistent across the web. Learn more about the importance of NAP consistency in this post.

2. Online business directories submissions

Have you optimised your Google Business profile? Good.

Now, it is time to submit the same information to other online business directories across the web. Some of the most popular local business directories include:

• TripAdvisor
• HubSpot
• Yelp
• FourSquare

3. Revisit your keyword research

If your site is not performing well in search engine rankings, it is highly possible that you are not targeting the right keywords and keyword phrases. In that case, we recommend conducting another keyword research to identify the right keywords that best describe your web pages.

Keyword research for local SEO is a little more complicated and contains a few extra things to take care of.

First, like with any other keyword research, you need to identify the right keywords, which:

• Have a reasonable search volume
• Have a low level of search competition
• Have the right search intent for the type of content you have
• Are relevant to your web pages.

For local SEO, however, you also need to pay attention to a few more things. Namely:

• Geo-specific keywords. If you operate in multiple areas, cities, or regions, it is important to identify and separate geo-specific keywords. You then need geo-specific landing pages so you can optimise the right pages for the right location-specific keywords.
• Semantically related keywords. For local SEO, semantically related keywords can often play a big role — especially for service-related businesses. For example, the keyword “gas boiler installation near me” can be an important keyword for someone who offers plumbing services.

4. Conduct a content audit of your website

Many times, the content on a website is the culprit.

If you have been targeting the right keywords, but your content is not ranking higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs), conduct a comprehensive audit of your website content.

First, you need some subjective analysis: how good your content is compared to other pages that are outranking you on the SERPs.

Second, you also need to take a more objective approach in your content audit, for example:

• What is the average page on time?
• What is the bounce rate on your web pages?
• What is the exit rate?
• How do visitors engage with your content?
• What is the conversion rate on the page?
• How far are people scrolling when they land on the page?

Content analysis for SEO is usually highly dependent on your competitors’ web pages, so start there.

As long as your competitors have higher-quality web content, they will likely outrank your pages. Identify the shortcomings on your web pages and redo your content, so it becomes better than all the other pages on Google’s first page.

5. Conduct a technical site audit

Sometimes, you will notice that it is neither the keywords nor the website content. Instead, the poor technical foundation and site performance are the reasons why you haven’t been able to perform well on the SERPs.

To identify and resolve those issues, you will need to conduct a comprehensive sitewide technical audit. Try to find more information on:

• Internal linking structure
• 4xx errors
• Whether your website has a sitemap or not
• If your web pages are being blocked by robots.txt
• How quickly your website loads
• The overall health of your website
• Whether your site passes the test for core web vital metrics or not, etc.

Conclusion

While some of these things may be overwhelming, they are absolutely necessary to make meaningful progress toward the top search engine rankings.

If you are struggling with any of the aforementioned things or just local SEO in general, give us a call. We have helped over 400 local businesses generate over 2 million in revenue. We can take a look at your website and tell you what needs to be done and more.

The post 5 local SEO tips to quickly improve your website in search rankings appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

To be successful in search, however, you need a robust local SEO strategy. Here are the seven ingredients that a successful local SEO strategy should have.

1. A user-friendly website architecture

You need a solid foundation to build a successful local SEO strategy, and that comes only by building a comprehensive and user-friendly website architecture.

Start by taking a note of all the products and services your local business offers. Also, take a look at what your direct competitors are offering and how they are presenting their products and services. Any overlap that you have with their product lines can give you an idea of what you should do.

When you are shortlisting your products and services for the site architecture, do the following:

• See if you are using the right keywords to describe your products or services.
• Shortlist keywords for mapping.
• Distinguish between primary and secondary services/products.
• Visualize how you want to categorize products and services in the main navigation.

2. Comprehensive competitor analysis

Remember that the goal of a successful local SEO strategy isn’t just to rank your local business website on the search engine results pages. The actual goal is to outrank your competitors on the SERPs, so you can get a bigger share of the organic traffic.

That is why it is crucial to know and understand what your competitors are doing.

Use an SEO tool like SpyFu, Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc., to conduct a detailed competitor analysis. The competitor analysis should tell you everything about your competitors’ websites and organic strategy — from the keywords they are targeting to their most popular pages to how strong their website is in terms of technical SEO.

3. Robust keyword research

We have already briefly talked about keyword research earlier in this article, but this is such a crucial aspect of an effective local SEO strategy that it requires its own section.

No matter how good your SEO plan is, it will fall flat if you do not select the right keywords to target.

In the previous step, you must have identified the keywords your competitors are targeting. By now, you should also know which terms your audience uses to search for your products and services. That gives you a solid foundation to work with.

In addition, we have two more tips:

1. Focus on long-tail keywords as they are easier to rank for and may also yield a better conversion rate.
2. Focus on geo-specific keywords that are relevant to your local business.

4. Localized landing pages

Localized landing pages are the lifeblood of local SEO.

Remember the geo-specific keywords that you identified in the previous step? You can now create dedicated localized landing pages and optimize them for those geo-specific keywords.

This strategy allows you to not only target long-tail keywords but also capture the relevant audience in each city, region, or neighbourhood you are operating in.

5. Consistent NAP information

Determine how you are going to present your NAP information on the website, and then create necessary SOPs, so you stick with that.

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number of your local business. As per Google’s recommended practices, the NAP information should be consistent across the website.

Learn more about NAP and why its consistency is so important.

6. A localized link-building strategy

No SEO strategy is complete without an action plan for building high-quality backlinks. A local SEO strategy is no exception.

However, in the case of a local SEO strategy, you also need a plan to build relevant localized links to the website. Here are a few methods to build localized links:

1. Outreach to local bloggers and news publishers for backlinks
2. Directory submissions
3. Publish guest posts on local blogs and websites that can fetch you backlinks
4. Host local events and get featured in the local news
5. Get listed on your local business chamber website
6. Get featured on local websites owned by your customers

7. Positive customer reviews

Last but not least, focus on a plan to generate lots of positive customer reviews.

The total number of positive reviews your local business has can have a direct impact on the site’s search engine rankings. Therefore, make sure you have a plan in place to generate as many positive reviews as possible across all the different directory platforms.

Promote good customer service, conduct exit interviews, ask customers for feedback, follow up with customers via emails after you’ve delivered your product, and focus on after-sales support. These are just a few of the many tactics you can use to encourage more positive customer reviews.

Improve local SEO for your business website

Want to learn more about local SEO? Check out our free local SEO guide.

If you need more help with optimizing your business website for search, give us a call.

Related articles

• Local SEO Guide
• Local SEO Ranking Factors

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Let’s see what the three updates are.

Update #1 — Industry-standard protocols

According to the first update, Google is bringing industry-standard protocols for bringing hotel rates online — making uploading and changing new rates consistently.

Update #2 — Direct input of rates

The second update will have a direct impact on hotel business owners as it will make it easier for them to change hotel rates on the fly.

As of now, hotel businesses are required to manually upload complicated spreadsheets whenever they want to add hotel rates to their Google Business profiles. After this update, they will be able to directly input the rates into their Google Business profiles — making the entire process seamless and significantly easier.

This feature will come especially handy when hotel businesses need to change rates quickly — especially during busy seasons. Moreover, this will also make them less dependent on technology partners.

Update #3 — Open access to Hotel ads

Last but not least, the third update would allow Google advertisers to run ads for any hotel business website easily. That’s because they will no longer need a Hotel Center to run ads and ad campaigns.

Google also confirmed that the Hotel Center accounts wouldn’t be phased altogether.

“We will not be phasing out Hotel Center accounts. Current hotel advertisers with existing Hotel Center accounts will continue to operate and serve ads as usual,” Google mentioned.

Takeaways

With COVID restrictions being lifted in many parts of the world, the travel industry is all set to bounce back. Google highlighted that search interest in “passport appointments” have increased by 300% in the first four months of the year.

With an easier and more streamlined process, both consumers and hotel business owners will find it easier to operate.

You can read the full announcement by Google here.

The post Google to introduce three new travel products for hotels appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.