Have you ever wondered how Google knows to show you a store or service near your location, even if you don’t add ‘near me’ to your search? This isn’t search engine magic. Many local businesses shown in search results will have done one simple thing: they claimed their Google business listing. You too can harness this powerful SEO weapon — and get your business in front of people looking to buy products or services close to your location. Am I eligible for a Google business listing?Google My Business launched in 2014 as a one-stop shop to help local businesses shine. In its official announcement, Google said it was created for businesses as “a free and easy way to find and connect with your people, wherever you are.” However not all businesses are eligible, so before you rush to get started, you’ll need to confirm that you qualify for a Google business listing. You don’t need to have your own business website to claim your Google business listing. In fact, with Google My Business, you can create a mobile-optimized website at no cost. How will a Google business listing help me?Google My Business is a free tool, so you can set it up yourself without eating into any marketing budget. In return, it offers a range of benefits that will increase your business revenue by helping you make more sales. 1. It will get your business seen more in searchesGoogle tells us that four in five people use search to find a local business, and local search ranking factors studies prove that listings information directly influences how visible your business is in Google’s Local Pack, Knowledge Panel and Map results. So think of your Google business listing as a dating profile. It’s your opportunity to win over both Google and local consumers by sharing everything that make your business unique:
All of this data tells Google what you do and where you’re located, helping it to decide when and where your business should be shown to users. 2. It will encourage more customers to choose your businessAs a local business, the chances are that someone else sells the same items or has the same expertise within your town or city. Google business listings offer people an easy way to compare similar service providers and retailers. Listings are standardized, so searchers can quickly narrow their selection down and decide who best fits their needs. This makes a Google business listing an invaluable SEO tool to get seen by people who are new to the area, or a local who needs a product or service for the first time. 3. It will show off your reviewsIt’s no secret that online reviews are a powerful sales tool. They’re the digital age’s word-of-mouth recommendation, giving people valuable intel about where to spend their money. Feedback from peers is highly valued when trying to assess an unfamiliar business, and can push a not-so-sure consumer into a confirmed customer. A Google business listing makes it quick and easy to reply to reviews and easily monitor what’s being said about your brand. 4. It will give you insight into your audienceThe Google My Business dashboard includes an ‘Insights’ section. Just as the name suggests, this offers you useful information about your audience’s behavior and your business performance in search. This data can tell you whether users are looking specifically for your business name, or finding you through other search terms. Insights also make it possible to keep tabs on what action consumers take after seeing your profile – such as requesting directions or placing a call. Our Google My Business Insights study dives into what you should expect to see, and how you can use this data to improve. Please note that the Google My Business dashboard is currently limited to 6 months’ worth of data. If you’d to look further back, then BrightLocal’s GMB audit tool offers access to 18 months’ worth of Insights data. How do I set up my Google business listing?Embracing your free Google business listing is an easy way to win new customers, and step one can be accomplished with a quick Google search. Simply check if a listing already exists for your business. If it does, you can claim the listing. If it doesn’t, you can create one:
With your listing claimed, you now need to verify it. This checks your credentials so that Google can confirm that you’re the correct owner of the listing:
What happens next?Once you’re claimed and verified, the next step is to take some time to completely fill out your listing. Doing so will mean that you’ll be much better placed to compete for business in your local area, and so drive more traffic to your website or physical store.
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This is an edited excerpt of the ‘Optimizing a Google My Business Listing’ lesson from Niki Mosier’s free ‘Google My Business Management 101’ course in BrightLocal Academy. Having a well-optimized Google My Business (GMB) listing can make a huge difference in how a business shows up in search results. Here we’re going to walk through all of the different areas of a Google My Business listing that can be optimized. Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP)It’s important to make sure that there’s consistency in how your name, address, and phone number appears across the web. Creating and optimizing your GMB listing is a great time to double-check that all this information is correct. There are some useful tools that let you check far and wide on the web, BrightLocal being one of them. Google My Business CategoriesYour primary category is very important in how you show up in Google Maps. Your secondary categories are also important. This is a good place to use GMBspy; a tool that shows you what secondary categories competitors are using on their listings. Another important thing to remember about categories is that you can switch them up seasonally. For example, a bike shop that sells bikes in the summer and skies and snowboardes in the winter, would want to switch their categories seasonally to accurately reflect what type of business they’re doing. Business HoursOne of the most important areas to make sure you keep up-to-date is the Business Hours section. One of the changes GMB made due to COVID-19 is the ability to now add hours for specific services or areas of a business. This option, and the categories for additional hours, depends on the primary category of your listing. It’s also important to keep your Special Hours up-to-date for holidays and other events. I know from experience, especially when traveling, that it can be really frustrating to think that a business is open on a holiday, and then show up to find that it’s actually closed. Website URLThe website that you link to from your GMB listing can make a big difference in how that listing shows up in local search results. If you have a single location business like Bella’s Bakery, linking to the home page is a good idea. However, for businesses with multiple locations like Target or Tesco, linking to the actual location page for the location is better practice. If you’re a restaurant, or you allow booking of services, you can also add URLs to your main menu or your booking page. It’s also a good idea to add UTM tags to any URLs, so you can accurately track traffic to that URL from the GMB listing. My pal and fellow BrightLocal course leader Claire Carlile has created an amazingly helpful guide to all things UTM related for GMB. I highly recommend bookmarking it. Service AreaThe Service Area section of GMB is often misunderstood. Use this section if you serve customers at their location, like a plumber. If your business serves customers both at your physical location and the customer’s location, enter both a business location and service areas in this section. Only enter the cities, zipcodes or regions that you actually serve. It’s important to note that no matter how big of a service area you set, you’re still not likely to show up in areas more than 20 miles away. Business DescriptionThe Business Description is really the only large open text area that you have on the GMB listing to talk about your business. This space allows for 750 characters, however only the first 244 will show up unless the user clicks on the ‘More’ button. This is the place where you really want to highlight what you want people to know about your business. Think about writing the description for someone that might not know anything about your business or the services it offers. It’s important to avoid being salesy or promotional in this area. While there’s little evidence that the business description is a GMB ranking factor, it’s still important to use best practices like avoiding all caps and other gimmicky attention-grabbing tactics. Another thing that I would recommend is changing your Business Description seasonally, especially if your business changes. For example, there’s a business here in Colorado that focuses on ski and snowboard sales and rentals in the winter season, but in the summer months they sell patio furniture. So changing their Business Description to match that is beneficial to them. Services, Menus, and ProductsThe Services, Menus, and Products feature is highly underused in my opinion. Adding a list of services, or having products on your GMB listing, can be a great way to get more website traffic and revenue. However, the ability to add services, a menu, or products in a GMB listing is only available for certain types of businesses such as restaurants. So if you don’t see any of those options in your listing, that’s likely the reason why. Service businesses, such as doctors, dentists, and marketing agencies, should get the option to list services. My partner, for example, runs photography experiences, her listing has the option to add both products and services. Let’s start with services. ServicesTo access the services section, you can select it from the menu on the left or go to the Info tab, and then scroll down a bit. Your primary and secondary categories will automatically show up for you to add services under those. You can also add additional categories from this screen at the same time. To add a service, simply add the service that pops up, or add a custom service based on what that business offers. The description for each service can contain 1,000 characters, so definitely take advantage of that space to be descriptive and use relevant keywords. ProductsThe process to add a product is pretty similar to adding a GMB post, if that’s something you already have experience with. Follow this simple checklist and you should be good to go:
I’ve personally seen pretty good revenue success from products added to a GMB listing. A CBD client I worked with saw an average of $600 to $800 a month in revenue from products just in their GMB listings. Business AttributesBusiness Attributes can be another confusing GMB feature, as they can be either business-defined or user-defined. Business-defined attributes are objective, and give searchers more detail about what they can expect. Examples would be ‘women-owned’, ‘wheelchair accessible’, or ‘outdoor seating’. To add them, just go to the Info tab in the dashboard, and click on Attributes. You can also add these in bulk using the bulk spreadsheet upload option. User-defined attributes are subjective. They’re crowd sourced from people that Google thinks might have more information, most likely people that have visited that listing in real life. You can’t control the subjective attributes Google asks about your business nor the responses that people might give. PhotosPhotos are one of the most important parts about optimizing your GMB listing. According to Google, businesses with photos received:
Photos give searchers a first-hand look at what to expect when visiting a location. I personally find photos super helpful when I’m looking for somewhere like a hotel or if I’m trying to scope out the parking situation somewhere. Regularly uploading your own photos is important because it gives them the chance to show up first over user-uploaded photos. And speaking of user-uploads, we know that Google is a fan of user-generated content, so encouraging customers to upload photos is also a good marketing tactic. If you’re unsure about what types of photos you should try and take, here are some ideas:
Here’s a checklist, of helpful things to remember when uploading GMB photos:
PostsGMB posts are another sometimes misunderstood area of Google My Business, but they can be really beneficial. With GMB posts you can manage and create posts from both the dashboard or the Google My Business app. There are a few different types of posts. There’s the ‘What’s New’ type of posts. Those tend to be just general information, and they used to expire after seven days before falling off of the GMB listing completely. However, that’s not the case anymore – ‘What’s New’ posts now stay up indefinitely but do get pushed down by each new post that is made. ‘What’s New’ posts are definitely the most versatile. You get 1,500 characters, there’s a multitude of call to action buttons, and they’re visible on desktop, mobile, and in the Google My Business app. So if you’re just adding something informational about your business, I would definitely use a ‘What’s New’ post. Another post type is ‘Event’ posts. With these you can specify a start and an end time, and apply to one day or multiple days. Again, you get 1,500 characters as well as the option to add photos. A thumbnail preview will show up in the knowledge panel for all ‘Event’ and ‘Offer’ posts. This is nice because it allows people to get a really quick snapshot for that post. Another post type is ‘Offer’ posts. These are really helpful if you are running a sale or a promotion as you can add coupon codes and discount codes. They also use a start and end date, so the post will only show up when that offer is valid. ‘Offer’ posts have a little orangish yellow tag on them which show people that there is a specific offer there. Again, these are visible on desktop, and mobile and in the Google Maps app. There are also ‘Product’ posts which are pretty self-explanatory. They’re similar to adding a product to your GMB listing, but this time in the form of a post. Obviously, if you’re managing multiple locations sometimes even just adding one post can be a daunting process. That’s where a tool like Postamatic from the team at Two Octobers with Noah Lerner is really helpful because it helps you to manage posts at scale. Q&AGoogle My Business Q&A is a feature that popped up a few years ago. A lot of people don’t realize that you can actually add your own questions to this section without getting penalized. Also, businesses can actually thumbs up and thumbs down their own questions. The question with the most thumbs up will show up on the knowledge panel without having to click the ‘View more’ button. If you have a question that a lot of people ask on your website or on the phone, definitely put those on your GMB Q&A. I’d recommend having three to five questions that are similar to the ones you have on your FAQ page on your website. You can also update these seasonally, so post any changes on your Q&A, give it a thumbs up, and get some friends or co-workers at different IP addresses to also give it a thumbs up, that way it will be the most prominent Q&A. GMB Q&A is also a great place to monitor for leads, especially if you monitor regularly. For example, if somebody asks an auto shop if they do brake work, then that person could potentially be looking to use that auto shop. If somebody is monitoring that Q&A and responds right away, and saying something like “Yep we do brake work. We have appointments this week, give us a call” they can potentially get a lead from that Q&A. It’s also important to monitor Q&A because anybody can ask and answer questions, and you want to make sure that people are getting the most accurate information possible about your business. Want to learn more? Head over to BrightLocal Academy and enrol on Niki’s ‘Google My Business Management 101’ course for free! via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/3j8InwD Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ You’ve probably noticed that things look a little different around here. That’s because we’ve just launched our new brand identity! Taking our brand forwardWe’re big believers in the power of brand, which is why we’ve continued to invest in ours over the years. We’re confident that we have one of the most recognized and trusted brands in local SEO, but as with everything we do, we’re not going to rest on our laurels. We have a restless nature that urges us to always question what could be improved and how we can do things better. This isn’t the first time we’ve refreshed our brand. After all, we exist in an industry that is constantly evolving. Sitting still is not an option. Our business is constantly evolving, too. In the years since we last refreshed our brand identity, we’ve welcomed over 70 new faces to the BrightLocal team and expanded our offering with Local Search Grid, Showcase Reviews, BrightLocal Academy, BrightLocal Agency Directory, Local RankFlux, and much more. Whereas previous rebrands have mainly been motivated by the need for a visual refresh to reflect changing design trends, this time we’ve gone much deeper and asked ourselves to really think about who we are, who we’re here for, and what’s important for our customers to know about us. So without further delay, let me guide you through the new BrightLocal brand identity. No change of heartOur logo has undergone a subtle change. It’s an evolution more than a revolution because, quite frankly, we really liked our logo! The ‘Heart Pin’ is one of the most recognizable and iconic aspects of our identity. It proudly displays our love of all things local and communicates the importance of teamwork, community and generosity within the business. It’s also the symbol of our monthly team awards, The Big Heart Awards, where we recognize the team members who have done exceptionally amazing work and gone above and beyond for their colleagues and/or customers. Each month, BrightLocal makes a donation to a charity that’s important to the winners. Since the launch of the awards last year, we’ve donated $10,000 to 24 charities. It was a no-brainer to keep the ‘Heart Pin’ sitting proudly within our logo. The text in the logo is now lowercase, and the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice the font type has changed. The lowercase text is less formal and more approachable, which better reflects our welcoming culture. While the logotype is changing to be lowercase, rest assured we’re not changing the company name formatting. Everywhere else, we’re still good old ‘BrightLocal’, with the capital B and the capital L. Color me impressedColor was a major area we wanted to look at. Over the years, our color palette has expanded considerably, so it was important for us to question the role that color was playing within our identity. We’ve used color to distinguish between different products within our platform. We also slightly diverted from our palette when creating the identities for BrightLocal Academy and BrightLocal Agency Directory. It’s fair to say we had had a lot of colors competing for attention! Our old primary colors
When it came down to it, there were two colors that we felt were most strongly associated with BrightLocal: green and blue. So while we still needed a variety of colors to paint with, green and blue needed to be leaned on more heavily, and elevated within our identity. Beyond having too many competing colors, our previous palette felt too muted. After all, half of our company name is ‘bright’, and these colours were definitely not that. We like to think we’re a bold and vibrant bunch, and we wanted colors to reflect that. I won’t go deep into color theory here, even though it’s a fascinating topic. Instead let me introduce you to our core brand colors: Bright Green and Local Blue.
Our new core colors
Our core colors needed to stand alone and work in a variety of different contexts. And importantly, they also needed to work together.
We also have new secondary colors, which complement our core colors and create a more harmonious palette. Our new secondary colors
Color isn’t just about making a statement—accessibility was a big part of the decision-making process. We want our website and platform to be accessible to as many people as possible. Around 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women suffer from “red-green” color vision deficiency, which makes it hard for them to distinguish between shades of red, yellow, and green. That’s a lot of people who might have been finding it difficult to use certain parts of our website and platform. Many accessibility issues have been resolved with our new palette, but there are some things we’re still working on. Over the coming months, we’ll be updating many of the charts in the BrightLocal platform to ensure the great insights included are instantly obvious to many more customers. Just our typeAccessibility also informed our new typefaces, which you’ll now see across our website and platform. These typefaces are easier to read at any size, which allows them to work perfectly in any context—whether that’s making a long-form article easier to digest, helping our website copy sing, making it quicker to navigate our website and platform, or ensuring an important notification doesn’t get missed. Picture perfectWe’ve been a little guilty of relying on tried-and-tested illustration styles. If we’re honest, we were getting a bit tired of seeing the same whimsical, long-limbed people that are living rent-free on every SaaS website under the sun. It was time to get a style we can call our own. We explored a number of different approaches, and in the end we landed on two that would work in a variety of contexts. PhotographyPhotography is the perfect medium for celebrating the people who make BrightLocal what it is—whether that’s our team, our amazing customers, or the broader local SEO community. We chose a photography style that is dynamic, real-to life, and shows the impact that BrightLocal has on our customers’ working lives. We also wanted to ensure our photography represented and celebrated the diversity within the local SEO community.
And this is just the start! We want to celebrate even more of our amazing customers, so if you’re interested in getting featured on our website with a testimonial, drop us an email. IllustrationsIllustrations were still going to be key within our visual identity, particularly in Bright Ideas, our content hub for everything local SEO. Our amazingly talented Visual Designer, Ken Iizuka, explored various styles that would help elevate our content and one stood out as the clear winner. The style is vibrant, playful, and offers a lot of flexibility to reflect the variety of topics we cover. You’ll start to see these custom illustrations appearing on Bright Ideas, which itself has been fully redesigned with better readability and new-and-improved search functionality. Consistency is kingOver the years, our visual identity had become slightly disjointed. That’s understandable. Things had been created at different times by different designers who all suffered from a lack of defined brand guidelines. The visual disparity between our website and platform was the most stark example of this. Our old brand touchpoints
But there were also inconsistencies playing out at a much smaller scale. A full brand audit revealed a vast spread of styles being used across our icons. Our old icons
Our brand plays out across multiple touchpoints: there are big hitters like our website and platform, but there’s also email, social media, video, our podcast, presentation decks, and so on. So when we approached tackling the rebrand, we were adamant that this wouldn’t be isolated to our marketing website—every inch of BrightLocal was going to be scrutinized. Bringing consistency to such a broad set of touchpoints is a major undertaking, and there are still a few things to tackle, but today when you use our website and platform, you’ll be treated to a more visually-aligned experience. Our new brand touchpoints
Even the smallest of icons are now singing from the same hymn sheet. Celebrating our cultureA big part of this rebrand is the launch of our employee brand. Our people are key to our success, and bringing awesome new people into the business is obviously a huge part of that. However, if you came to our website before today, you wouldn’t know much about what it’s like to work at BrightLocal (spoiler: it’s awesome), and you wouldn’t have been able to see the exciting opportunities to join the team (we’re hiring btw). So we’ve changed that with our ‘Working at BrightLocal’ careers page, where you can learn more about our culture, what life at BrightLocal is like, and browse our open vacancies. Show me the swag!No rebrand would be complete without some swag, right? Here’s some of the team modeling our latest swag. It would be cruel to show you these highly desirable items without giving you the chance to get your hands on them. And you can do just that, by entering our sweepstake to win one of twenty BrightLocal goody bags. Just head on over to our Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook and interact with the competition post for your chance to win your very own BrightLocal t-shirt, cap, tote bag, and sticker!
A BrighterLocalSo that’s it for the tour. We really hope you like our new look. Under the hood, we’re still the same BrightLocal, but we’re confident that our new brand will do a much better job of showing off who we really are. Even though things look a little different now, you can still find everything on our website and platform in the same place as it was before. Over time, we’ll be making further visual updates within the platform, such as improving the accessibility of our charts, and we’ll be sure to let you know when these changes are happening and, importantly, why. If you want to learn more about the process behind our rebrand and see more of what’s changed, look out for our in-depth overview coming soon. A thank you to the teamEvery part of our rebrand was handled by our internal team, so I’d like to finish off by saying a massive ‘thank you’ to the people behind it. Dom, our Lead Designer, was the driving force behind this rebrand. He undertook a huge amount of research to ensure we really got to the core of what our brand should stand for, and you’ll be able to read about that soon. Ash made the rebrand a reality on our website. This wasn’t just a case of simply updating some CSS; our website was feeling the strain of technical debt and Ash rebuilt the site to ensure it’s running faster than ever. Ken only joined the team earlier this year, but he quickly got to work developing illustrative styles to bring a playful and memorable look to our identity. Inzi and Yurko handled all user interface updates within the platform to ensure our ambitions for a consistent brand identity was fully realized at launch. This was a big team effort and many more people played a part in getting get us here today. Thanks to everyone for your commitment and passion. So… how do we look?We’d love to hear your feedback on our new brand identity. Head to the comments to let us know what you think, and don’t forget to enter the sweepstake for your chance to win a BrightLocal goodie bag. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/3BS0krV Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ This is an edited excerpt of the ‘Positioning Yourself’ lesson from Claire Carlile’s free ‘How to Land Your First Local SEO Client’ course in BrightLocal Academy. We’re going to explore the age-old marketing concept of ‘positioning’, and help you to develop a clear idea of your business’s position or place in the market. Before you can start planning your marketing, you need to have a clear idea of your business’s position in the market, so let’s begin! What is positioning?Marketers like to have a kerfuffle about what positioning is, akin to a conversation about the true meaning of life. Marketers eh! Let’s keep it simple and credit the advertising genius, David Ogilvy, with developing the concept of positioning in the mid-1950s. I, for one, appreciate the lack of marketing fluff in his definition of positioning as ‘what the product does and who it is for’. Sounds simple, right? Basically, before you start work on any of your marketing materials, you need to figure out how you want your customers to think about your services. Think carefully about how you want your customers to think about your services. Your positioning will help you to be clear and focused in all of your marketing efforts and to develop a unique and compelling narrative. Positioning will show what your business does, who you do it for, and why you’re different from your competitors. Crafting a Positioning StatementYour positioning statement will be a brief description of your services, your target market, and how your service will meet their particular needs. In many cases it also includes differentiation – why a potential customer should choose you over a competitor. Keep it short and sweet; this isn’t ‘war and peace’. Three sentences is plenty. Download and use this as a basic positioning statement template for writing yours: Let’s break that down with some examples. Who is your target customer?
What are the name(s) of your services?
What is your service category? If you’re taking this course, then local SEO hopefully!
What are the key benefits to your target customer?
What is the primary competitor alternative? List the competitors you see popping up in potential clients’ consideration sets.
What are the details of the primary differentiation?
Your Next StepsCraft your own positioning statement using the points above as a guide. How does it all hang together given the niche you’ve chosen, your target market and the services you want to offer? Remember, your positioning statement doesn’t have to remain set in stone. As you grow and develop it’s likely that your statement will change and mature – much like a fine wine or a stinky cheese does! Want to learn more from Claire? Head over to BrightLocal Academy and enrol on the ‘How to Land Your First Local SEO Client’ course for free! via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/3ietBFv Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ Growing your online visibility via a local business directory listing (also known as building citations) is integral to your local marketing strategy. Using business directory listings like the ones below helps to increase search rankings, build trust and authority with search engines, and gives potential customers a greater chance of finding you online. There’s a wealth of free business directory lists out there (many of which we’ve published ourselves), but we’re confident that this list of the top 50 is the very best place to start if you’re looking for free citations in the USA. Are you not in the USA? Check out the top free international citation sites! How do you go about adding a business directory listing to each site?We have included links to each site so you can go straight to them, create an account and build your business listing. This usually takes around 15-20 mins to do per site. Not enough time on your hands to sort it? Let BrightLocal take care of your citation building instead. We build citations for 1000s of businesses every year, our expert team will build and fix your listings on top business listings directories – quickly, accurately, and cost-effectively. Top 50 Free Business Listing Directories for the USAThe following local business directories have been selected based on Domain Authority (DA) gathered in June 2021.
If you need further clarification of what an online directory or local business directory is, here’s a quick explanation:
Submitting your business to local business listings directories with consistent information and links helps you build citations. Citations help search engines such as Google identify your business and can help to increase organic rankings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Consistent NAP provides a trust signal to Google, whilst the backlink to the business’s homepage benefits SEO. If business directories rank above your website in SERPs, then it makes sense to be listed in those directories too, right? Now that you’re clear on the importance of adding local businesses listings to online directories, don’t postpone it – work through the table and begin the process today. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/2KVvU0r Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ Want to find out why your competitor’s page is No. 1 in Google organic SERPs? Well, now you can! (To the extent that Google is willing to tell you, anyway.) That’s because Google yesterday announced a feature that shows a selection of reasons for ranking individual pages in SERPs, bringing some much-needed transparency to search. Source: Google This feature is a section called ‘Your search & this result’ but it doesn’t have a catchy name yet, so we’re calling it the ‘Ranking Factors Box’, simply because, well, it’s a box that displays ranking factors! The Ranking Factors Box is an extension of the ‘About this result’ box, which is accessible by clicking the ‘three vertical dots’ at the end of a search result and was originally launched back in February of this year. Where is the Ranking Factors Box currently live?According to Barry Schwartz’s excellent overview for Search Engine Land, the feature is currently live for around 10% of English-language queries in the USA, and Google aims to have it 100% live by next week for both mobile and desktop. Source: Google When will the Ranking Factors Box be available outside of the US?Google’s own page says:
However, after witnessing the glacial pace of other rollouts (I’m looking at you, Local Services Ads) some are understandably not holding their breath on playing with this feature any time soon.
Want to see this in action outside the US? If you can’t wait to find out why your page ranks, try out BrightLocal’s free Local Search Results Checker tool, which emulates a location to show results as if you were there! What sort of information does the Ranking Factors Box show?In the aforementioned Search Engine Land piece, Barry Schwartz discovered the following (non-exhaustive) list of factors as reasons for ranking a page:
I’d encourage you to head over to his post for more detail on each of these. How are SEOs reacting to the Ranking Factors Box?It’s my tendency to catastrophize (I more charitably call it ‘black-sky thinking’), so my initial response to the announcement was to immediately decry the end of SEO as we know it. I figured that with potential SEO clients now being able to see why they rank, and getting keyword ideas from competitors right there in the SERP, smaller businesses would have much less need to invest in assistance with understanding their online visibility. Luckily, I’m alone in my cries of “Ranknarok is here!” (hat tip to my colleague, Mark Crowe, for that one). Judging by the online response to the Search Engine Land piece, SEOs are split between being excited…
…justifiably cynical…
….or nonplussed.
Don’t let your hot take cool down: let us know what you think in the comments below! What does this mean for SEO?While I’m cautiously optimistic about the positives of such transparency, I personally share Mordy Oberstein’s concerns about a race to the bottom:
I’ve been in this business long enough—*strokes gray beard*—to know that your average SEO will do anything to make their job easier. (Understandably—it’s not an easy gig!) My concern is that easy access to the keywords that Google itself says will lead to a top spot will just mean SEOs optimising for the same few terms and chasing the same links; potentially to the point that high-ranking websites are indistinguishable from one another. However, this is precisely why having access to digital marketing tools like rank trackers, keyword research tools and the like could become, if anything, more important. Free access to this information technically leads to all parties playing on a level playing field, and so it’s more critical than ever to one-up your competitors. And that’s true whether you’re an in-house marketer for a small business, or a nationwide digital marketing agency. Besides, Google might be telling you which keywords are leading to a result, but it’s not telling you how to optimise for those keywords, how to structure your site’s architecture around them, or how to get those all-important links. This is where creative SEOs, and the tools they use to get more insights than their competitors, can truly shine. Will we develop new SEO practices thanks to this update? Probably not. None of the ranking factors uncovered so far are a surprise, but this does provide fantastic ammunition for anyone looking to prove the worth of optimization to their clients. What does this mean for local SEO?“Yadda yadda organic SERPs blah blah whatever…” I know, I know: you’re here to find out about how this impacts local search and your local business clients. You’ll have noticed the ‘This result is relevant for searches in [region]’ ranking factor in the list above. This brings some confirmation that a result in organic is indeed a localised organic result, as the [region] in question will undoubtedly be based on the searcher’s location (implicit localized search) or geomodifiers in the search term used (explicit localized search). If we’re talking purely about Google My Business rankings in the Local Finder and Google Maps, then no, this doesn’t really change anything. Google’s organic and local algorithms function separately, and this feature isn’t available in the Local Pack… yet (who knows?!) As with anything Google, it’s always good to consider what even a small change might bring. Knowing that Google is starting to take transparency of search results seriously (perhaps at the behest of its army of lawyers, perhaps not), could mean that SERP transparency could be coming to the local pack? After all, Google has already made a start on this by including ‘justifications’ in local SERPs, using info from everything from Google My Business Services, to customers reviews, to the content of the linked website, in order to show the searcher why it’s shared a particular local business. What do local SEOs say about the Ranking Factors Box?Whether or not this update was going to impact local search right away, I was still interested in the opinions of the local search community, and so reached out to some local SEO pros to get their takes. Their responses range from interested and intrigued to the comparatively unruffled:
ConclusionWhat this all means for Google and SEOs remains to be seen, but while it’s a feature that’s left many cold, I do believe it signals a seachange for Google’s relationship with SEOs. Now almost slyly acknowledging the practice in a format accessible to all (who know to look for it, admittedly), Google might be warming to the good that most SEOs try to do in their work. Agree? Disagree? Impatiently waiting to see this feature for yourself and just want to vent? May I cordially invite you to the comments below? The post Google Now Shows ‘Ranking Factors Box’ in SERPs to Explain Results appeared first on BrightLocal. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/3i3BdKQ Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ As a local business, you know that you need to invest in digital marketing to reach potential new customers. So what is ‘local search marketing’, and how should it fit into these plans?
Why should you care?Local businesses come in all sizes and areas of expertise. Whether you’re a dog groomer in Portland, a pizza franchise in Chicago, or a plumber in Queens – if your customers will put the name of your town or city into Google, or add “near me” to their search, you’re a local business to them. This means that local search marketing can directly benefit your business. In fact, Google research confirms that four in five consumers use search engines to find local information, and half of consumers then go on to visit a local store within a day! BrightLocal’s Stephanie Newton: “For many brick-and-mortar and service-area businesses, local customers are the best customers…they’re easier to reach, and they’re more loyal and will keep coming back if they like what they’re getting.” If you aren’t doing local SEO marketing, you aren’t visible to potential new local customers and could be missing out on sales to competitors. The seven steps below will show you how to get started with local search engine marketing, and help boost your business by directly targeting your local customers. 1. Google like a localIf you want to win over local customers, you need to put yourself in their shoes and that means focusing on Google. StatCounter shows that Google currently holds 92.5% share of all local searches, while the behemouth’s closest competitor is Bing with just 2.3%. Google My Business (GMB) is a free listing that any business can set up on Google – even without a website. Google can then use the information that you provide (your business type, opening hours, location and services, etc.) to show your details in a relevant local search. Claiming your free listing and completing your profile with as much information as possible goes a long way towards helping Google better understand your business, so it’s an absolutely crucial first step. If you need help to get set up, our in-depth guide to setting up a Google My Business listing will walk you through the whole process, with lots of helpful images, step-by-step instructions, and best practice tips. 2. Keep things currentIn the last 12 months, more than seven in 10 consumers have had a negative experience because of incorrect local business information found online. One of the best local SEO tips we can give you to avoid this potentially damaging hit to your reputation is to invest time and resources in keeping information up-to-date. Example 1: opening hoursYou can easily communicate this to local consumers by logging in to your Google My Business listing and editing the ‘opening hours’ section of your profile. This change will be reflected immediately in the search results, and you can also use free graphic design tools such as Canva to create visuals of your new hours to share on social media. Example 2: special offersUse the Google My Business ‘Posts’ function to share your latest news and offers. Log in and click the ‘Create post’ button on your dashboard. Then, input details of your offer, upload an image and select the start and end date. Learn how to use Google My Business Posts to win over local consumers. Example 3: show off your products, services, team members, or store locationFor local consumers, a picture really is worth a thousand words. According to Brain Rules’ John Medina, adding an image can ensure that 65% of information is retained after three days, compared to just 10% without an image. BrightLocal’s own research confirms the importance of images for search. 60% of consumers say search results paired with great images capture their attention and help them to make a decision. So when you next load photos to your social media channels, think about adding them to your Google My Business listing as well! Head over and read Google My Business photos: the ultimate guide for everything you’ll need to get this part of your local search marketing exactly right. 3. Get the other searches coveredThis may sound counterintuitive when we’ve already heard that Google commands more than a 92% market share. But while other search avenues can’t claim to handle as much traffic as Google, they do have the eyes (and ears) of millions of local consumers. For Apple Maps that figure is about 23.3 million users, while Microsoft loyalists will get all of their information from Bing. And voice search reaches an estimated 83.1 million of smart speaker owners in the USA, with 68.2% using Amazon Echo. Apple Maps visibility is heavily dependent on your Yelp ratings profile, but other factors, such as Apple reviews and your use of images also play a part. Read our blog to understand how Apple calculates its Maps ratings and master this part of your local SEO marketing strategy. For Bing, you’ll need to create a Bing Places for Business listing. This is similar to Google My Business and you can even import your GMB settings. Find out how in our guide: Bing local listings explained. 4. Get your name out there with citationsA lot of the time, people search because they need a product or service, and they don’t already have a company in mind. Getting your name out there puts you in the best possible position to scoop up as much of that new business as you can. One way to do just that (and to give your local SEO rankings a boost at the same time!) is to build citations. A citation sounds scary, but it’s simply a piece of information about your business that exists on a third-party website. Typically this will be your business name, address, and phone number (known as NAP) but it may also include your website URL and email along with other key details. Generating as many of these mentions as possible will benefit you in two ways:
Where to find citationsAny place where your name, address, and phone number are provided is a citation. Once you’ve inputted your information, the citation directory then does the hard work of spreading that information and making it accessible to its users. For example, Yelp sees an average of 31 million app users each month, while FourSquare reports around 50 million users. Adding your business to relevant directories like these is an easy place to start building citations. If you’re feeling confident, the next step is to try a data aggregator. An aggregator automates the process of submitting your NAP to a vast number of directories, apps, and other appropriate platforms. See our complete guide to local citations for more information on the process. 5. Reviews (even the negative ones!)It’d be impossible to talk about local search engine marketing without talking about the importance of online reviews. In years past, we may have asked colleagues, friends, neighbors, and family members for the name of a local store or service provider. Today, we turn to reviews to help find a local business to trust. BrightLocal has been studying this trend for more than a decade. In our most recent research, conducted in 2020, we confirmed that 93% of US consumers searched online for a local business, with 73% searching weekly and 34% daily. Every review you accrue has the potential to either bring you a new customer or drive them away to a competitor. Many people say that they’ll only pay attention to recent reviews (one to three months) and are looking for a minimum of four stars. It’s natural for talk of ‘star ratings’ to strike fear into the heart of any business owner, but while negative reviews are impossible to avoid, they don’t have to spell disaster. 78% of local consumers say that they pay attention to how a business responds to reviews, and so these offer opportunities for you to showcase your standard of customer care and willingness to do better. You can find tips for dealing with negative reviews here. Google also pays close attention to your review profile. The number of reviews you have, the frequency of new reviews shared, and whether or not you respond are all ranking signals, making this an especially important area of local SEO marketing. Everything you need to know, including how to get more reviews and how to respond to reviews to get a better rating, can be found in our complete guide to local review management. 6. Build local linksResearch suggests that it can cost anything from $1,000 – $20,000 per month to bring in a social media expert. While that may be OK for larger brands, it’s not realistic for most local businesses. So, what can you do instead? Embedding your business within the local community is the perfect grassroots tactic for any local business. It helps you to create stronger relationships with the very people you’d like to do business with and offers you a chance to increase your visibility. By linking this activity back to your website, you’ll help your business appear higher up in search engines, opening the doors for more traffic and creating more chances to sell. We asked a range of experts to give us their thoughts, tips, and tactics on working with industry sites, community pages, and local news outlets. You can read their local link building insights here. 7. Keep on learning…Embrace the mindset that there’s always something new to learn. The more you learn, the better placed you’ll be to beat the competition and that can only be good news for your bank balance! For your next step, read our complete guide to local SEO, which offers a range of practical examples to master local search. The post Local Search Marketing – How is it Different to Regular Digital Marketing? appeared first on BrightLocal. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/3rwSY8e Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ “What are these GMB Products and GMB Services that you speak of?” In a nutshell, GMB Products and GMB Services give businesses the opportunity to showcase their products and services to potential customers. Content from GMB Products and GMB Services can show in their Google My Business profile as well as in the Local Finder. By adding GMB Products and GMB Services, you provide potential customers with additional information that might help them choose your product or service over a competitor’s. And by adding your products or services you’re directly ‘feeding’ Google details about your organization as a ‘named entity’. Should I use GMB Products or GMB Services?Like most things in the world of SEO, there’s no correct answer to this question, and a one-size-fits-all approach is nigh-on impossible to adopt. However, I’m going to do my very best to equip you with as much knowledge as possible about the pros and cons of both GMB Products and GMB Services so that you can decide if, and how, to implement them for your own or your client’s business. What is GMB Services?Google tells us this:
Which types of business have access to GMB Services?If the listing has access to ‘Services’, you’ll find it in the menu when you log into your Google My Business dashboard on a desktop. It also appears in a section on the ‘Info’ tab: You’ll also find it in the GMB app, in the ‘Overview’, tab when you click ‘View all’: Where do GMB services show?GMB services have very limited visibility. They don’t show up as a list of services on a desktop. Like, at all. However, on a mobile device, you’ll find the services displayed in a tab labelled ‘Services’ in Google search: In the Google Maps app, it looks like this: I’ve noticed that some businesses (for example a coffee shop) have services available as a section in their GMB dashboard but the services tab is not showing on mobile. I don’t know why, or what this means, so watch out for that. You’ve probably read something about ‘justifications’ on local listings in the SERP. If you haven’t heard of them, I’d recommend reading this post from Joel Headley from way back in 2017, and this 2021 post from Miriam Ellis. ‘Justifications’ do just that: they ‘justify’ a listings presence in the SERP by featuring (and usually bolding) relevant content; indicating that the business will likely meet that searcher’s need and intent. The interesting news is that ‘services’ recently started to power justifications, like in the example below: Note that the little blue tick icon also appears for ‘In stock’ justifications, which are powered by local inventory ads. If you want to try to get your products listed like this, it’s free to add your products via Google Merchant Center. How do I add my services?The services dashboard can look quite different, and function quite differently, according to your listing. Some listings have sections that are defined by the Google My Business categories of the listing: Listings with a service dashboard like this may not add a ‘custom’ category. New services can only be listed if you first select one of Google’s predefined categories: There exist other dashboards in which the services are added in a more freeform way. Here, the services are called ‘items’ and we see the use of the term ‘section’ rather than ‘category’: With this services dashboard, you’re not limited by having to place your services menu within sections based purely on Google’s list of categories. I rarely see this dashboard in GMB, so if you have it be aware that at some point it could well be retired. Another configuration of the services dashboard is when it’s seen for businesses such as plumbers. In August 2019, Joy Hawkins noticed predefined services showing up in the dashboard: Whatever the configuration of the services menu in your GMB dashboard, you’ll find that you can edit your services in terms of the service name, you can give a price for the service, and you can write a description: If you’re adding services to your listings, I recommend keeping a master spreadsheet to keep track of them. That way you have a record of what you’ve chosen to add and it’ll be easy to see if Google is messing with your data (read on to find out more about how fun that can be). To make this easier for you, I’ve created a Google My Business Products and Services record sheet. Go ahead and make a copy, and add your own services on the ‘SERVICES’ tab. Huh… why is Google filling up my GMB Services with irrelevant services, or services that I don’t want to list?Ah Google, always keeping us on our toes! Uh-oh, look at this: Wut? Why are these getting auto-populated by Google, and where are they scraping this from? This isn’t new or recent. In fact, it’s been going on for a while:
Worst of all, each time it goes away, it comes right on back. You’ll need to manually remove the erroneous services if they’re not relevant, so I’d recommend adding a task to ‘check GMB services’ to your schedule for your regular GMB checks. How can you stop Google from overwriting the information you’re adding to your Google My Business dashboard with data from other sources? Phil Rozek has some excellent advice on how to do this. In summary, make sure that the page that you link to from your GMB profile contains all of the information you’d want associated with your GMB listing, in crawlable, clearly-worded text. Does adding GMB Services scale for business with many locations?Yep! It can do. Thanks to Krystal Taing for sharing your knowledge on the Local Search Forum. If you have API access to Google My Business, it’s possible to add ‘StructuredServiceItems’ and ‘FreeFormServiceItems’ via the API. You can find more details on this in the ‘ServiceList’ section of the Google My Business API documentation. How can I measure the success or impact of adding GMB Services?You can’t… well, not easily anyway. GMB Insights doesn’t offer any data specific to the consumption of your GMB Services content, and since they don’t include the option to link to your website, adding UTM tags isn’t an option. If you were a real keen bean, you could run a test where for a period of time you include services, and for an equivalent period of time you don’t, and then compare KPIs with and without. You could check to see if your UTM-parameterized URLs in Google Search Console had more impressions and clicks before or after adding services. Obviously there are many factors at play here so you’d need to make sure that your testing was rigorous. Alternatively, you could just use that time to add your GMB Services and be done with it; it can’t hurt! What is GMB Products?From the horse’s mouth:
Google refers to the functionality to add GMB Products via the GMB dashboard as ‘Product Editor and Product Catalogue’, but you’ll most often local SEOs talking about ‘GMB Products’, which is understandable given the labeling of this feature in the Google My Business dashboard. GMB Products allows businesses that don’t have the ability to integrate product feeds via Google Merchant Center to add product inventory manually. GMB Products has been around since 2018, when Products (Beta) made an appearance in the dashboard of many listings. Since then, this functionality is ‘out of Beta’ (I joke because GMB is in a permanent state of Beta) and many businesses will see ‘Products’ in their GMB dashboard. Where does GMB Products show?When GMB Products launched, it only showed as a section on mobile devices; desktop had no GMB Products visibility at all. There wasn’t a field in which to link to a product page on your website—there was just a ‘Call’ button that was added to the top of the products field: GMB Products circa April 2019 These days, GMB Products has great visibility on both desktop and mobile in the business profile, and in Google Maps. GMB Products has good visibility in the business profile on a mobile On a desktop, GMB Products appears high up in the business profile, usually just under ‘events’: You can click on a product to view that product: And click on ‘view all’ to see all products: Which types of business have access to GMB Products?Access to GMB Products is dependent on a listing’s primary category. If you notice that competitors that have access to GMB Products and you don’t, check their primary category. If you share the same primary category but you don’t have access to GMB Products, this could be as a result of a bug last reported in 2020. If this is the case, head over to the GMB support community and ask for some help. As with many Google My Business features, any business in the lodgings or hotel industry gets the short straw and doesn’t have access to GMB Products. This is because Google’s hotel listings are a very different beast to standard listings. GMB Products is also not available to listings with a primary category related to alcohol, guns, cannabis, gambling and adult entertainment. Let us know if your business doesn’t have access to GMB Products and we’ll add anything new to this list! What’s the difference between ‘Google Product Posts’ and ‘Google Products’?Back in 2019, Google Product Posts were separate from GMB Products. If you’d like to learn more about how they were different, you can take a trip down memory lane here. If you have access to GMB Products, you’ll also see ‘add product in your GMB posts section’: This is a little misleading, as you won’t be adding a ‘product post’, you’ll instead be populating GMB Products. If, historically, you added Google Product Posts, you’ll still see this in a Google Products category labeled ‘from Product Posts’: In summation: there’s no difference between the two any more—they’re both GMB Products, just accessed from different areas in the GMB interface. How do I add GMB Products to my Google My Business profile?Many businesses now have access to the GMB Products feature. If you do, you’ll see it here in the GMB dashboard on a desktop… …or on the info tab here: Products can also be added via the ‘Posts’ section: They can also be added in the Google My Business mobile app in the ‘Profile’ section in the ‘Products’ tab: The interface to add products looks like this: For each product, you need to add the following:
Did You Know? It’s also possible to upload a GIF to a product in the image section, which can look pretty fun: While I’d suggest using moving images sparingly, when used in the right way they can be pretty eye-catching. My early tests (very informal and with a small sample size) demonstrated an increased number of website visitors via GMB Products using gifs. These elements are consider ‘optional’ by Google, but obviously it’s a no-brainer to add a CTA and a link to your site:
When you add your products, I suggest you think about them in the same way that you would if you were setting up an e-commerce website. Ask yourself these questions:
I recommend planning out your GMB products before you add them, and keeping a record of what you add and when. As with GMB Services, I recommend using my Google My Business Products and Services record sheet to keep all of this data in one place. I’ve automated UTM tagging for your GMB product URLs in the Google Sheet, but feel free to configure yours differently! If you’d like to learn more, check out my full guide on how to UTM-tag all the URLs in Google My Business. Does adding GMB Products scale for businesses with many locations?Google tell us this about Google Products:
They go on to suggest that larger chains should provide data about the products that they sell, and their availability, through Local Inventory Ads. It’s currently not possible to manage GMB Products via the GMB API, but I have seen larger chains make use of GMB Products, such as these car dealerships: What else do I need to know about GMB Products?I think one of the main things to keep in mind is that these all need manual curation. It’s not a ‘set it and forget it’ job. especially if prices change, URLs change, or anything else changes with the product. If a potential customer sees a product in your Google My Business profile priced at $250 and then clicks through to your site only to see that product listed at $299… that’s not a good customer experience. Neither is it a good experience if they click a link and get a 404 page, or if they click a link and get a 301 to a different page. Redirects can strip out the referral data that’s communicated to Google Analytics via your UTM tags, so that’s a double-whammy of bad news if that happens. For this reason, for Google Products it’s best to stick with purely listing your ‘evergreen’ products—items that stay in stock and rarely change in terms of pricing or URL location on your website. If you have a small, closely related selection of products that change regularly, you could try linking to a category page and using the ‘Price range’ field in GMB Products. That way you’re presenting a small selection of similar items according to that category when a potential customer clicks through. N.b I’m not sure what Google would think of this, but it seems like it would be a good solution for frequently-changing URLs and product details. Don’t forget that you can also use GMB Products to showcase your services. If your business listing has service offerings rather than physical products, then add those, too. Take advantage of this opportunity to list your services in a format that can link through to your website while also illustrating your unique selling propositions: According to Allie Margeson, adoption of GMB Products by businesses is low, so by adding GMB Products before your competitors, or by adding products that are better than your competitors, could be your ways to stand out from the crowd and earn those clicks! Also, is anyone familiar with the overuse of emojis ? Guilty as charged Unlike Google Products, Google Posts, GMB Services and a lot of other fields in GMB, you can’t use emojis in GMB Products, Google labels them as ‘invalid characters’. Harsh! How can I rearrange categories and products in GMB Products?In the olden days, you used to be able to move your categories up and down and alter the order that they appear in the business profile. However, this is no longer the case. Your business profile’s arrangement is based on how recently a product was added or updated; the product which was updated most recently will show first, the product that was updated before that will show second, and so on. If you want to change the order of your products, all you need to do is make a small edit, and then Google will change the product order in the business profile: How can I measure the success of GMB Products?GMB Insights is barren in terms of reporting on views on GMB Products. It does report on the number of people that ‘visit your website’, but this isn’t granular in the sense that it doesn’t tell you which part of GMB that click came from: This is why I like to monitor Google Products performance in Google Analytics. If you fully tag up your Google Products with UTM tags, you’ll be able to see their performance here, in the Campaigns report: The UTM-tagged product URLs won’t register any ‘impression’ data in Google Search Console because of the way that the URLs are served in Google, so sadly you won’t be able to use impressions, clicks or CTR data for your UTM-parameterized product URLs. If GMB Products and GMB Services got into a fight, who would win?I’d say GMB Products, hands-down. GMB Services is certainly not a fierce opponent for GMB Products—you’re not able to link to your website via GMB Services, and at the time of writing, it’s only showing on mobile devices. But, given that it ‘feeds the machine’ in terms of Google’s understanding of your business entity, and that it could be a conversion factor when it appears as a justification or if a potential customer consumes the services content as they’re browsing, it’s a no-brainer to add it if you have the time and resource. If it’s easy to add services for your single-location business or a business with a few locations, I’d add them. If you have a multi-location business model, and your service provision is relatively consistent or uniform across locations and therefore easy to scale, then I’d get these added too.. All in all, in many cases GMB Services is a ‘nice to have’ rather than a priority when it comes to optimizing your GMB listings. What should I do if I have access to both GMB Products and GMB Services?Add both! I can’t see a problem with that. It’s a bit like getting two bites of the apple (although admittedly the ‘services’ apple is much smaller, and far less juicy). What are the pros and cons of GMB Products?GMB Products, in my mind, is a heavyweight feature and a wily competitor to GMB Services, but there are some things you’ll need to keep in mind when you’re using GMB Products. You might not have access to themWhether or not you have them is dependent on your primary category. I’ve known businesses change their primary category to get them, but since having the correct primary category is thought to be a ranking factor, and that GMB Products is likely purely a conversion factor, I know that personally having the correct primary category trumps having GMB Products. Your competitors probably aren’t using themAt the moment, businesses that are using GMB Products are few and far between. Get ahead of the curve, add your products, and stand out from the crowd while you still can. You can use them to add servicesIf you are the type of business that doesn’t sell tangible ‘products’ and instead you offer services, you can still use the GMB Products interface to instead showcase your services. Or your USPs. Or something else! But obviously don’t abuse it—we don’t want Google to take away our toys! Multi-location businesses can use them (but they don’t scale)If you’re a multi-location business, or you work with multi-location businesses, the lack of API access makes GMB Products harder to implement, and thus harder to recommend. Google has also stated itself that GMB products added via Products Editor aren’t for larger chains. Chains like these are supposed to use Local Inventory Ads to push products into the SERPS and Google Maps, and Google started moving the merchant feeds for big brands into GMB products some time in 2020. If you’re a multi-location business (and you’re not already using Merchant Center, or your products aren’t compatible with Merchant Center, or you’re a service-based multi-location that doesn’t have products per se) maybe you could test-run GMB Products across a few highly-trafficked locations to see if they drive revenue and conversions? If they do, and the return on the investment is credible enough to populate GMB Products at more locations, you could go ahead and do that. You can measure their impact in Google AnalyticsFor the businesses with which I work, GMB products are a definite conversion factor. They drive relevant, qualified traffic to my clients’ websites, and I can prove it with UTM tags and Google Analytics. In Google Analytics, my clients can all attribute e-commerce revenue, or other on-site conversions, back to clicks that came from UTM-tagged GMB product URLs. Wrapping upSo, that’s it for now. We’ve looked at both GMB Products and GMB Services, what they are, where they appear, how to use them, and the relative pros and cons of each. Are you using GMB Products and/or GMB Services? How are they performing for you? Any words of wisdom to share, or any questions? Let me know in the comments below, or tap me up on Twitter at @clairecarlile. The post A Guide to Google My Business Services and Google My Business Products appeared first on BrightLocal. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/2UtAUjv Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ Would you like to take your local business to a new level? Launching a solid, well-planned local link building and PR outreach strategy is an effective way to generate traffic, grow your brand, and build local backlinks! What is PR Outreach?PR outreach is a marketing process in which a company contacts various publications in order to build coverage. It’s commonly conducted by email, although additional methods like social media messages and phone calls may also be used from time to time. More often than not, the purpose of outreach is to gain press coverage. With that in mind, I’ll be referring to outreach targets (i.e. people you are contacting) as “press prospects”. Define Your GoalsDepending on your goals, outreach tactics will vary. Public relations and outreach can mainly be used to:
You may have both of these goals in mind, but if you’re at an early stage of reaching out to press prospects then I suggest starting with location-based outreach:
With that in mind, let’s agree that email outreach should start within your location. But before we delve into that, let’s take care of some important basics: Do the Basic Work FirstSet-up and establish your email addressOne of the first questions you’re going to face is, “Where should I email from? Should I use my own domain? Should I use a free email service like Yahoo or Gmail?” These are all valid questions, and I’ve been going from method to method to come up with a winning strategy:
Instead, set up a new email address on a new domain. There are tons of cheap top-level domains that will look like something coming from your brand but will help you keep this part of your marketing separate. Namify is a cool service that will help you find a great cheap domain for those purposes: Make sure you register your email address, set up a mailing server, and start using it a few months prior to starting your outreach strategy. Most spam filters will flag emails coming from brand new domains. Also consider using a tool called Mail Tester on a regular basis. The tool will alert you if your email might be flagged as spam and include a reason why, so you can fix it and improve deliverability. Create your email outreach guidelines and policiesChances are your outreach emails are going to be sent by interns, freelancers or a separate marketing team, and that’s where problems can occur. When a task is moved from person to person, some of those people may not clearly understand the responsibility of communicating on your business’s behalf. Outreach is part of external business communication and hence should be handled very carefully. You cannot allow your brand to be misrepresented, or to have your relationships with journalists ruined. So before you launch your outreach strategy, create a clear business communication policy and make sure everyone involved is familiar with it. Note what can or cannot be included in emails, what to do if a recipient is irritated by being contacted, and which situations should be escalated to you.
Create or beef up your “Press” pageNot many bloggers or reporters will write an article about you or your business right away. The best you can hope for is that those bloggers or journalists will click a link in your email and give you the benefit of the doubt: “Is there really a story here?” This is where creating an effective “Press” (and possibly also “About”) page is so important. You need to spark curiosity and trigger an action on that page. With that in mind:
Find Local Journalists and BloggersThere are lots of ways to find niche and/or local reporters, and at some point you’ll have exhausted all of them and will need to find more. Here are some main sources to get you started: Google is obviously the first source I turn to. Play with all kinds of combinations of your locations (your city, cities and counties nearby, your state, etc.) and anything from [blog] to [magazine]. Then start a spreadsheet and list all the sites that seem active: Twitter is a great way to discover active bloggers and reporters, and the best thing is that you can start building relationships with them right away! Start by following those people, retweeting their tweets and commenting on what they have to say. These activities will help on many levels, mainly:
To find local bloggers and reporters on Twitter, try Twitter’s native search feature: simply switch to the “People” tab when searching Twitter: BuzzsumoBuzzsumo offers several tools to find local bloggers and reporters. Their content search feature allows you to find journalists covering your location. Keep the “Journalists” filter active, and search for multiple locations including neighboring cities, counties and your state: Buzzsumo also has a powerful Twitter search feature allowing you to find tweeting journalists: LinkedIn is one of the most misunderstood social media networks: some people ignore it completely, while some overuse it. I use LinkedIn as a connection discovery tool. You can open your chosen publication profile page and find reporters you are connected to: Take note of your common contacts to get introduced and start building those relationships! Coming Up with Outreach IdeasConnecting to those bloggers and reporters earlier will help you better understand them and what would make them curious enough to cover your business and/or link to your site. So spend some time listening to them, interacting with their updates, and monitoring their content. This will give you ideas on how to approach them in a more effective way. Here are a few examples of community PR opportunities to use in your outreach: Local charities you’re supportingIs your company partnering with or supporting a charity? If you time your outreach to match something trending, you may find quite a few reporters willing to cover your story. Here’s one example I got last year which piqued my interest because of its timeliness: Local success storiesWas your CEO or business awarded for something locally? Is there another success story to tell? Here’s an email I got which definitely stood out: Local events your business is hosting or participating inThese could include local conferences and summits, festivals, or taster events. If you’re organizing or sponsoring an event, use email outreach to get some coverage. One of the most effective ways to use events as a PR opportunity is to give away free passes to press and media representatives. Here’s a good example of event-based outreach that got me participating! Going Outside of Your LocationUse lessons from your local PR to expand to national publications and popular blogs. It’s easier to do when you have some local coverage to mention in your outreach. Nationwide (or even global) outreach takes lots of time because you are dealing with a much wider pool of press contacts. But it can also be really rewarding in the long run. Once your business manages to get featured in a large publication, you’ll see press requests coming through without you having to reach out to anyone. Make the Most of Each EmailWhile not specific to local outreach, this final step is always worth mentioning: make the most of each of those emails. Don’t give up too early and lose a contact! Follow up!There are lots of case studies proving the effectiveness of following-up. One of them states that follow-ups result in 22% more replies. In other words, without following up, you’re losing about one-fifth of your press prospects. If you’re using an outreach platform like Link Hunter or Pitchbox, follow-ups will be automatically included. Just don’t forget to edit the copy! Also, several studies suggest that a magic number of follow-ups is 3 (definitely not more!) Admittedly, I usually use a single follow-up but I think every business needs to find the magic number that yields results and feels comfortable to them. Create additional assetsOffer your press prospects diverse materials for them to cover you! This could be anything from including “insider” photos and media kits to creating entertaining videos. There are lots of tools and easy-to-use video editors to help you out. It’s a good idea to include these on your press page as well as mention them in your follow-up email. Create and track additional CTAs and engagement tactics for your PR leadsIn the ideal world you’d want each and every person you contact to take some sort of action:
Not all people will want to schedule a call with you or request more information right away. You want these people to still hang around and hopefully get interested in your brand in the future. This is where all of those alternative calls-to-action (CTAs) help. Obviously, don’t include all of them in a single email. Instead, spread them out, for example:
Of course, you need to monitor all those CTAs to identify best-working ones:
Finteza makes it incredibly easy to identify best working CTAs and the most effective landing pages. Track your mentions and linksFinally, keeping an eye on your inbound links and brand mentions is important, as not all bloggers and journalists featuring you will reply to your email.
Finally, to organize those links and keep track of them, Link Checker can help you monitor your links as well as visualizes your progress: ConclusionPR outreach is a great way to get your local business known, and to discover new exciting growth opportunities. It takes time and effort to create an effective outreach and local link building strategy, but I do recommend keeping it in-house (at least partially) because all those contacts you build are priceless. Good luck! The post How to Do PR Outreach for Local Businesses appeared first on BrightLocal. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/2UsqG2S Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ Is your Google My Business listing sending out strong trust signals? Levi views trust signals as a double-header. There are the trust signals your GMB listing gives out to potential customers – would someone buy from your business? And, there are the trust signals it sends out to Google – does your business seem legitimate and worthy of ranking? Listen to learn:
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We’ve got some news to shareThis is the last episode of Adventures in Local Marketing… …season one. Sorry if that gave you a fright – we aren’t going away. But, we are going to take a short break to plan out season two. We launched Adventures in Local Marketing around 12 months ago, and we’ve had a lot of fun along the way. It’s been a real privilege to speak to so many smart and talented people in our industry about a wide variety of topics. We had a rough idea of what we wanted the podcast to be when we first launched, and as we went on, we learned more about what really works. We’re going to use this time to plan out how we take the podcast forward. We’ll be revealing more about what season two holds very soon. In the meantime, please head to the comments to let us know what you’d want from the next season: topics, guests, themes – whatever it is, let us know! Before we go, we’d like to give a big thanks to all the guests who appeared on season one, and to everyone who listened along the way. It’s not goodbye, but see you later. The post Building Trust Signals Within Google My Business appeared first on BrightLocal. via BrightLocal https://ift.tt/3zapxLX Check out more SEO posts onhttps://seouk41.blogspot.com/ |
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