In the short history of Google+, Google has made a number of changes to its business listings offering, and confusion has crept in for brands and businesses looking to optimize their local presence. But whether local marketers are stuck with an old Google+ Places page or have the updated Google+ Business page, they can use these Elite Eight Tips for Google+ Local listing optimization.

8. Don't Spend Unnecessary Time on Google+ if Customers Aren’t There

The social aspects of Google+ (+1's, comments, fan engagements) can be incredibly powerful. Google uses the interactions as an indicator of relevance, and they trump the usual relevance indicators associated with search.

For example, if a searcher has a restaurant in a Google+ circle and has recently interacted with a post, when they search for restaurants in their location, Google will prioritize this restaurant in the search results as it knows the searcher enjoys it.

But in some instances, a business’ customer base may not be active on social networks like Google+. For these businesses, a basic presence including an accurate address, phone number, and website should be sufficient. Why spend time building an expansive social profile for an audience that isn’t there?

7. Get Personal

When the audience exists, more personalization ensures a better experience. By customizing its Google+ Local Page, a business can differentiate itself from its primary competitors.

To do so, marketers should use a banner, pictures, and videos to customize the page and improve click-through rates. The next step should be to tailor content to the local community.

If the business has sponsored a local softball team or participates in community service, highlight these community commitments through page posts, photos and videos. Personal is powerful, and people care about their communities.

6. Create Custom Business Descriptions

Getting as specific as possible with categories for each listing is critical for improving search rankings, but local marketers shouldn’t overlook crafting custom business descriptions to differentiate the business from the competition.

Using primary keywords that reflect the nature of the business helps consumers understand the business, increasingly the likelihood of conversions. But don’t oversaturate the descriptions with keywords.

5. Continue Monitoring and Modifying Listings Depending on Performance

Routine maintenance and optimization can go a long way toward improving search ranking and performance. Once a listing has been updated, local marketers should monitor the performance to determine whether previous optimizations are having a positive impact; if not, then it’s time to revisit the listing and see what can be improved.

Sometimes, a listings’ performance can plateau; if a listing has a top-three position in a local search result and has maintained that status despite recent optimization attempts, further efforts to improve position may prove fruitless and could have a negative impact on rankings.

As with organic search, overthinking on-page, or in this case on-profile, optimization can have a detrimental effect on performance.

4. Cultivate Reviews

Recent consumer reviews are incredibly powerful, especially on the local level; positive reviews can propel waves of new business as consumers put more trust in “unbiased” reports from their peers. Turns out, Google loves them too and uses review frequency as an indicator of relevance.

If a business has received five reviews in the last month, Google is likely to prioritize it over a business which has received five reviews in the last year. Businesses should be sure and ask customers to provide a review at every opportunity and consider ways to reward them for doing so.

3. Optimize for Customers, Not for Google

Remember when I said not to flood a business description with keywords? This is why: optimizing a business page for customers involves writing with natural language.

Consumers don’t want to read jumbled descriptions crammed with keywords that lack insight into what the business does. Instead, provide clear and concise copy that defines the primary focus of the business.

More consumers will click through and engage, and Google will see these engagements as a sign of relevancy, boosting the likelihood of improved local search ranking.

Image Credit: Google

2. Be Patient; Don’t Manually Merge Local and Business Listings

In the midst of all the Google+ changes, many businesses ended up with a listing on both Google+ Local and Google+ Business (Places). Of course, businesses then flooded Google with requests to merge the two, which Google tried to accommodate.

A year ago Google has asked that businesses hold off on their attempts to merge these pages manually as Google began automatically merging them. For those with two listings, the wait can be frustrating, but attempting to manually merge the listings are creating major data issues. So it’s best to be patient and hope that Google will sort the remaining listings out soon.

1. Remove Duplicate Listings

I just said not to manually merge Google+ Local and Google+ Business listings, and I stand by that! But that doesn’t mean local marketers shouldn’t remove duplicate listings in Google and other local sites like Yelp. Listings accuracy is the most important factor for online searches – if a business’ address or phone number isn’t correct, it’s missing out on potential customers.

On many of these sites, users can input data for places they visit; unfortunately, this often creates duplicate or incorrect listings. These “zombie” listings need to be removed or they’ll eat traffic from the official/accurate page.

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Budget constraints put local businesses in a tough position when it comes to marketing. The situation gets worse with inbound tactics like SEO, where it's difficult to determine ROI beforehand. This was less of a problem two or three years ago, when cheap/predictable SEO was possible (even if such spammy tactics inevitably posed a threat to brand reputation).

But times have changed. How Google works has changed. The major algorithm updates Panda and Penguin have completely transformed the way that many perform SEO. Pulling significant traffic from the search engines on a limited budget is almost a nightmare.

People such as Neil Patel are saying content marketing is the new SEO. If the mainstream SEO opinion is to be believed, without a content marketing strategy in place, you might as well forget about Google doing you any favors.

That's what everybody seems to be saying, anyway.

Except, that's not really true. There's much more to do in SEO than content marketing. What follows are other things that you can do as a local business to make the most of the search engines.

1. Pick an Alternative to Content

Before we dive into some SEO techniques that can help you get that much needed search traffic, we need to address this question:

"Why would people link to/share/talk about my site?"

Everybody's answer these days seems to be "compelling content." We're arguing that this isn't a necessity by any means. Still, Google is obviously looking for editorial links, and a website with just a company backstory, a sales pitch, and driving directions isn't going to earn many of those.

So what do you do instead of content?

You look at the most successful sites on the web, and you realize that most of them aren't really content sites either. They're:

• Utilities
• Communities
• Games

So the goal isn't really to create "compelling content." It's to give people something useful, entertaining, interactive, or all of the above.

What kinds of problems do your target customers have to deal with? Is there a way you could build an application that would help them solve that problem?

True, the resources involved in creating a web utility are certainly more extensive than the resources involved in creating a single blog post. But the amount of resources it takes to build a blog into something that attracts and retains business is often more than the resources necessary to do the same with an online tool.

Do you have a loyal customer base? If so, would they be interested in joining an online community devoted to their needs, or the inside jokes of a specific subculture?

If you're better at getting people together and getting them to talk about things than you are at creating "content," building an online community like a forum might come easier for you than running a blog. It's also easier than ever from a technical standpoint with free, modern tools like Discourse and Moot. Also, forums are actually more popular than blogs.

Creating interactions is more important than creating content. You don't need "great content" to earn editorial links. You just have to offer something of value to the web.

2. Skip the Exact Match Domain Name

SEO pros know this one inside and out by now. If you're hoping your local business site is going to rank because your domain name matches the keyword people will be searching for, it doesn't work that way anymore. In fact, Google had an update specifically to fight this issue.

Using a good brand name for your domain is smart for more traditional marketing reasons, but it actually offers SEO benefits as well.

Here's why.

Google analyzes search behavior as a way to determine which sites are authoritative. With millions of people searching for "Amazon" every day, and clicking on the link to Amazon.com, Google knows these people aren't looking for info about a river in South America. If people search for a product name along with the word Amazon, you can bet a huge portion of the search results will be product listings on Amazon.com.

But what happens when you search for [ecommerce store]? Well, you get search results for places like Shopify.

Here's the thing. There are plenty of sites with the name "ecommerce" in the URL. Those sites aren't turning up on the front page of Google.

If you name your site after an already popular search phrase, Google will never be able to tell whether additional searches for the phrase are attributed to your business, or to a growing general interest in that phrase.

If, on the other hand, your domain name is uniquely branded, Google can attribute those searches to an interest in your brand, and it will likely give you a boost in the search results for several other queries as well, just like Shopify did in our little experiment.

You want to be Nike.com, not RunningShoes.biz.

On a related note, it's a bad idea to use your city name without the domain. Not only does it take users more time to type in the address, it also creates an obstacle to future growth if you ever decide to sell online to a global audience, or expand into new locations.

3. Build an Intuitive, Responsive Website with Rich UI and UX

The average local website offers a sub-par user perspective. This is because most local businesses fail to properly anticipate what people are looking for when they visit.

Here's what I mean. Take a look at most local restaurant's websites. Here's what you'll often see:

• A slideshow of happy people eating food, because slideshows are so chic.
• A long-winded history of the restaurant and it's values.
• Upcoming events.
• Shameless calls to action on social networks.
• A photo gallery.
• Irritating Flash, PDFs, etc. that are inconvenient to work with.

And all of this is usually cluttered and above the fold. The user often gets "banner blindness" on the entire homepage, because there are so many competing messages and most of them are completely out of sync with the user's intentions, which come down to:

• What kind of food is here?
• How much does it cost?
• How do I get there?

All of this is made worse by the fact that most of these sites look terrible on mobile phones, even though finding local businesses is one of the main things people use mobile internet for.

UI and UX are important for SEO. Here are a few of the reasons why:

• Responsive design is a must. You need the site to look good, and be easy to use, on mobile devices, not just because mobile is set to overtake desktop, but because people often look for local businesses while they are on the go.
• Split test your landing pages, starting with core concepts. You can measure the effectiveness of your landing pages by offering a different coupon code for each.
• Run usability tests to determine what users want to use your site for, and how to make it easiest for them to do it.
• Understand consumer psychology, and build it into the site.

All of these things are necessary in order to make the most of your site's presence in the search results. People who fail to find what they are looking for quickly and easily will simply look elsewhere, making your presence in Google meaningless.

Here's what you can usually expect users to be looking for:

• Prices and products.
• An address and phone number, plainly visible.
• A quick contact form.

Other things they might be looking for, but that should take up less visual space on the landing page, include:

• Your blog, tool, community, or other primary source of "linkbait".
• Video testimonials.
• Unfiltered consumer reviews (You can and should embed Google+ reviews on your site).
• Trust-building icons, memberships, certifications, "featured in" mentions, etc.

Finally, the lowest priority things will be the business story and history, a photo gallery, events, and so on. It's not that these are unimportant, it's that they are not the primary things your users are looking for, and they shouldn't be allowed to obstruct their flow.

Usability and design are also the first things people notice when they visit a site. Ninety-four percent of users point to design-related issues when they conclude that a site isn't trustworthy.

And, of course, Google isn't interested in ranking sites that people feel aren't trustworthy.

4. Optimize the Most Important On-Page Factors

On-page SEO is still very important, and this is probably even truer for local businesses than for general websites.

For starters, you'll need to decide on which keywords to target. While it's true that "long tail" keywords are becoming more important, and that Hummingbird is allowing Google to interpret queries better than before, keyword targeting is still a very important part of SEO.

While Google killed the old AdWords Keyword tool, the new Keyword Planner is still a good way to discover keywords. Moz has a great guide explaining how you can use it to find keywords for local search.

The most important thing to understand about keyword research in the wake of Hummingbird is this: only the highest traffic keywords matter. Here's what I mean by this. You can't find a niche by targeting a more obscure phrase if it means the same thing as a more common phrase. Hummingbird simply replaces the low traffic query with the higher traffic query.

It used to be the case that if the front page of Google didn't list any pages with the exact keyword phrase, you were basically set. This isn't the case anymore.

With that in mind, here are a few on-page things you'll want to try to optimize (but never to the detriment of user experience):

• Title: Use the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) principle here. Don't try to jam it full of keywords. Try to use the city name and keyword (or a variant of the keyword) if possible. However, it's important to keep CRO in mind, and choose a title that will entice people to click through.
• Meta Description: The meta description isn't used to rank pages. Don't stuff this with keywords. Use it as a call to action. The meta description should clarify the purpose of the page, but leave enough mystery so that people will click through to see the page. It is a good idea to include your city name in here, however, so that users know the result is relevant to their location. Try to keep the description under 160 characters. Google will omit anything after that.
• Heading Tags: Use a heading tag like a newspaper heading. You want this to read as natural as possible and use it to pull users in. Don't try to be too "clever" with the title, however. Focus on making a value statement that users can relate to.
• Images: Use a relevant keyword as the alt attribute for your images.
• Interlinking: Make sure that every page on your site is accessible from at least one link elsewhere on your site. Do not link together all of your pages from the sidebar (unless your site is very small). This looks very manipulative and offers no clear hierarchy. Organize your pages and links naturally so that the navigation is streamlined for visitors.
• Google+ Authorship: It's important to implement Google+ authorship on your site so that your image will appear next to the listing in the search results. This draws the user's eye to your listing, increasing the likelihood that they will click through. You can sign up for authorship here.
• Schema markup: You can use Schema.org markup to add geographical information to your site, to add star ratings to the search results, to identify events, etc.
• Page loading time: Slow loading time is one of the main reasons why visitors will abandon your site, and it also has a negative impact on your visibility in the search results.

Straightening these things up will give you an advantage over most of your competitors.

5. Verify Your Business Listing in Google+

You absolutely must get your business verified in Google+ in order to make sure that you show up in Google Maps properly, and to increase your chances of showing up in the search results. Social Media Examiner can walk you through this process.

Take care to fill out your full profile, add photos, and make your Google+ listing almost as valuable as your website. Google+ reviews will influence your visibility in local search results. A large number of natural reviews can get you listed closer to the top of Google Maps results, even if other businesses are closer to the searcher than you are.

This is also true for links pointing to your site, and your Google+ page, assuming the links are editorially given.

6. Build Local Citations, and Ensure Consistency

Citations are huge when it comes to success with local SEO. A citation is when your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are listed on the web. Citations from authoritative places help boost your visibility in Google Maps and local search results, and the more of these you have, the better you can expect to perform. In this way, they serve a role similar to links.

It's important to ensure that your listings are consistent. Inconsistent listings can hurt your visibility in the search results, or even mess up your location in Google Maps.

It's worth investing in a tool to help you build citations. Here are four worth investing in:

• Moz Local (formerly GetListed.org)
• Whitespark's local citation finder
• Yext.com
• BrightLocal.com

7. Earn Natural Reviews

Reviews are nearly as important as citations when it comes to your rankings in local search results, and they are clearly extremely important as far as converting skeptics into buyers. It's important to encourage your customers to publish reviews on Google+, as well as other business listings like Yelp, SuperPages, Foursquare, UrbanSpoon, etc.

As mentioned earlier, you can embed Google+ reviews on your site as well. This can be helpful not only as a way to send more people to your business, but as a way to encourage reviews.

Where possible, train your staff to remind consumers to leave a review on Google+ if they are especially pleased with the service. It's best to avoid requesting reviews at every possible opportunity, since this can encourage negative reviews, and Google+ has rules against specialized booths or kiosks that exist specifically to request reviews.

Don't offer financial compensation for reviews in Google+.

8. Social Media

While you don't necessarily need to fully invest yourself in all of these platforms, it's a good idea to at least set up profiles on not just Google+ but Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, and Instagram.

As mentioned in the first section, communities can be a powerful way to drive business, and can even be the main draw when it comes to linkbait. For this reason, it's worth investing yourself wholeheartedly in one of these social media platforms as a way to create that sense of community.

When it comes to social networks, visual updates are always best. Pure text updates are usually a waste of time. The type of updates that tend to get shared and talked about on social networks is also usually funny, inspiring, cute, practically useful, and "mind-blowing," but more important than anything else, it is interactive. The goal is to get a conversation going.

Conclusion

Content marketing is by no means a must if you want your local business to succeed online. By switching the focus from content to usability and community, and understanding a few important things about how local SEO works, you can beat competitors who invest heavily in content.

Hopefully you learned something helpful today, and I'd appreciate it if you passed this along to somebody who could benefit from the knowledge. If you have anything to add, let me know in the comments.

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Whether international or local, link building is the all-important SEO topic.

Anyone at least moderately familiar with SEO best practices has a good understanding of both the importance of link building as well as the fundamentals of the approach, but for those who are just getting up to speed, here's a quick synopsis.

What is Link Building?

Link building is a tactic or series of tactics that increase the number of websites linking to a particular page or domain. Some factors in this approach include:

• How many links are pointing to a specific page or a domain from other unique domains?
• How are the links positioned and what text is included in the hyperlink on the page they live on?
• What are the unique characteristics of the site(s) linking to the page or domain?

A website with a large number of inbound links to pages can enjoy a boost in rankings when a search engine deems those links as valuable. The value is determined by authority, relevance, popularity, and other ranking mechanisms that make up the algorithms of Google and other search engines.

Think Like an International Search Engine

To take this approach to an international campaign means building upon the foundation of domestic link building practices and beginning to think how a non-domestic search engine might look at it.

Here are a few questions to ask, using India as an example:

• Is the information on your page relevant to visitors from India?
• Are people in India writing about the topic on this page, and do they consider this particular site a good resource when they do?
• Are other popular sites and authors in India linking to this website?

Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs)

Whatever your target countries are, you should make sure that you have websites that are based in that country linking to your pages and domain. Target specific regions for link building efforts by soliciting and acquiring links from target ccTLDs that match the country or region you are targeting. For instance, if you were targeting India, you would want to make sure that several websites with the domain .in are providing backlinks.

To help with your efforts, there are several SEO tools that allow you to analyze your backlinks by location and/or ccTLD, which should make this easier, especially if your SEO campaigns are targeting multiple countries.

The Media Relations Component

A good link building campaign has a lot of similarities to a media relations or PR initiative. You want to get reputable sources to write about you, and ultimately link to you. Not all news outlets will hyperlink to your site, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

Find popular sites in the country you are targeting and create a plan to solicit links from them. This applies not only to larger news sites, but also to bloggers who are often more likely to provide a link to your pages.

Don't forget directory sites as well, many of which can be country-specific.

The methods to acquire these links are similar to a domestic campaign, but the individual outlets are sure to vary from location to location.

Conclusion

One thing that you shouldn't do is to assume that your link building strategies can be exactly the same as they are for your domestic efforts, even if some of the tactics do bear a striking similarity. Make sure you invest the time and effort to truly understand the media culture of the countries and regions you're targeting.

To put this in perspective, consider the effort you have invested in local link building efforts and remember that the same type of research and education will be required in each region you target.

Finally, remember that, like any other SEO effort, link building needs to be real and genuine if it is to be truly successful. If you don't have anything valuable to offer audiences in your target country, you need to rethink your objectives. With a solid value proposition, however, it is really just a matter of getting up to speed on your new target country.

Source Link:-  Search Engine Watch

Looking for a restaurant menu? Now you can search Google and never leave the search results.

You can search [show me the menu for (insert restaurant name)] and Google will display their full menu directly in the search results, without you needing to click through to an additional page, whether on the restaurants homepage or on a third-party website that displays menus, Google announced.

The results also have multiple tabs, so if the menu was split up in section (e.g., appetizers, main courses), you can select any of the tabs to view that particular menu section.

It isn't known exactly where Google is getting the menus from, although they are reportedly getting it from a third party. There are multiple websites that do have menus for a wide variety of restaurants, such as AllMenus.com, Gayot.com and Zagat. There are reports of some of the data is outdated, but I expect it will improve, especially once the third-party source becomes known and restaurants can ensure that site has their most recent menu.

There is also schema.org markup for restaurants to use for their menus, although it seems to be not well known by webmasters or restaurateurs. However, it's still unclear if Google is utilizing any of this information at this time, or perhaps to defaulting to that when it's available. But it seems as though this might be an easy way for Google to verify that the menu is current and up-to-date, and direct from the restaurant's site.

This new feature, which started as a small test, is definitely be seen as a potential competitor to sites such as Urban Spoon, since many of those site's visitors are looking for easy access to menus. But it will also keep traffic off of restaurants webpages, when someone is looking for a menu and might have otherwise gone directly to the restaurant to view it.

There's also the potential that this could be updated quite frequently, once restaurant owners know how they can do this. They could potentially update their menus to show specials of the day or special menus for occasions such as Valentine's Day or Mother's Day.

The feature is available only in the U.S., and not all menus are available this time. Hopefully Google will release more detailed information to help restaurants ensure that the menus Google is displaying are current and updated.

Source Link:- Search Engine Watch

It's no secret that people think Google Places for Business listings are primed for spam. But the latest debacle making headlines involves an example of just how dangerous those spam listings could be. 

Network engineer Bryan Seely intentionally created fake listings for the FBI and Secret Service that showed up in Google Maps, then he showed how easy it was to cause potential damage. The results have since been taken down, but a reporter at Valleywag grabbed screenshots before they were:

When these listings were live, unsuspecting citizens called up the fake numbers in the fake listings, and here's what happened next, as reported by Valleywag: 

The callers that Seely recorded thought they were speaking directly to the government agencies because they looked up the telephone number on Google Maps. What they didn't know was that Seely had set up fake listings for the San Francisco FBI office and Secret Service in Washington, D.C., displaying numbers that went to a phone account he set up rather than the federal offices. After Seely's numbers received the calls, they were seamlessly forwarded to the real offices the callers were trying to reach, only now the audio of their conversations with real federal agents was being captured by Seely.

Seely said Google had known about this problem for some time, but ignored his request to fix the issue. So he marched over to the Secret Service offices in Seattle one day to show just how vulnerable this loophole could make the FBI and Secret Service.

But after routing a few calls through the fake listings to the government organizations, it didn't take long for the Secret Service to figure out something was going on. While at the Secret Service office, he “got a notification on his phone that a call had just been intercepted: It was a Washington, D.C., police officer calling the Secret Service about an active investigation,” reported Valleywag.

Seely was read his rights and interrogated that day, but after just a few hours, was released and even reportedly called a "hero" for discovering the loophole.  

Creating those fake listings wasn’t particularly hard, Seely told Valleywag. He said he used a combination of Google’s Map Maker tool and Places for Business. And, when he was at the point of verification, he opted for the phone option because “the way that these people build these computer systems is assuming that no one wants to do more work—assuming everyone wants the easy way out. So if you choose the easy way then we don't trust you, if you choose the harder way and verify by phone immediately, 'Oh you must be a person and you must be legit.'"

Google told Gizmodo it had made updates since then to help combat this problem:

“It was brought to our attention that an individual was creating fake business listings in Google Maps. Although these listings do not appear prominently on the map, we take problems like spam very seriously, and appreciate when the community flags issues so we can quickly resolve them.” 

But will Google be able to fix the whole problem once and for all? Seely told Gizmodo that there are more than 100,000 fake listings for locksmiths alone. Here, Gizmodo paints of picture of how these fake listings can be played out:

So say I'm a locksmith and I want a little more business. My ranking is too low when you search "locksmith near [my neighborhood]" on Google Maps; no one ever clicks on me. If I find the right scammer, I can boost my presence with a couple more (non-existent) locations. Or even better, I can have a scammer change my competitors' numbers so that the calls forward to meinstead. All I have to do is pay a scammer $50 or so per call. But hey, that's just the cost of doing (shady) business.

Seely told Valleywag that the small business is the one suffering here, but that he suspects Google won't make cleaning these listings up a priority. Whether or not that's the case, the high-profile nature of this particular instance of spam and the involvement of the government may just make this loophole a primary focus for Google. 

Source Link:- Search Engine Watch

Google Places for Business has updated its quality guidelines to allow a descriptor of a business to be listed in conjunction with the business name ... but not everyone thinks this update is quality. 

From the Google Places help files, the changes are reflected below: 

Business Name:

• Your title should reflect your business’s real-world title.
• In addition to your business’s real-world title, you may include a single descriptor that helps customers locate your business or understand what your business offers.
• Marketing taglines, phone numbers, store codes, or URLs are not valid descriptors.
• Examples of acceptable titles with descriptors (in italics for demonstration purposes) are "Starbucks Downtown" or "Joe’s Pizza Restaurant". Examples that would not be accepted would be "#1 Seattle Plumbing", "Joe’s Pizza Best Delivery" or "Joe’s Pizza Restaurant Dallas".

Mike Blumenthal of Blumenthals.com had this to say of the change: 

Obviously for Google to make this change, they must think that they can control the inane and insane abuse that is likely to occur. Either business name is no longer so important in defining search results or the descriptor (which can only be added via the dashboard) is ignored or Google is so confident that they know what the business name is that they can penalize abusers.

Comments on Blumenthal's blog also show a slightly cold reception of the update, with many believing this will open up listings to spam that won't be easy to detect and control. 

What do you think about the update?

Technorati Code:- HVKJ3SBPRGRD

Source Link:- http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2330342/Google-Places-Updates-Quality-Guidelines-to-Include-Business-Descriptor