Local SEO in 2019

It’s amazing how rapidly the digital universe and online search have evolved. Think about it, not more than 10 years ago black hat SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing, link farming and content cloaking were effective, however shady, at getting a website fast organic rankings, and just a few years ago mobile-friendly websites were a rare commodity. Today, thanks to hundreds of algorithm updates and Google’s standardization of SEO quality guidelines, online search, for the most part, is no longer polluted by spam, nor is the user experience hindered by non-mobile websites or any major technological inconveniences for that matter.

It’s important to keep pace with the times and remain up to date on the latest digital marketing trends, especially when it comes to local SEO. As a business owner, it’s important that you stay informed so you are able to market your organization accordingly, keeping abreast with the most effective strategies that work, in addition to ditching or avoiding any that may no longer be relevant.

Looking ahead into the new year, we want to keep you informed by highlighting a few of the most important factors that will make or break your organization’s SEO campaign in 2019. Top SEO experts at SearchEngineWatch.com have identified 14 ranking signals that cannot be ignored come 2019, but I will narrow it down to a handful that I believe to be the most critical for local SEO.

Go Beyond Standard Keyword Targeting & Optimize for Semantic Search

Targeting a set of keywords is no doubt one of the most important aspects of SEO; always has been and always will be. But building an SEO campaign entirely around a keyword set is no longer enough. In addition to your business’s most relevant keywords (short-tail and long-tail keywords) you must also identify key phrases which will optimize your website for semantic search, which aims to capture the essence of what a person wants or needs when they are searching online.

Methods of semantic search optimization will vary significantly from industry to industry, but overall the goal is to understand what your customer’s intent is when searching online for products, services, information or advice. Google’s number one goal is to provide users with the highest quality, most relevant results based on their search query, and what better way to please Google, i.e. rank on page 1, than to cater to any and all of your customers’ specific needs?! Optimizing for semantic search not only better serves your customer base, but it’s more advantageous to your business as well because it tends to lead to higher click thru rates (CTR) and higher conversion rates because you’re targeting very specific needs as opposed to simply casting a wide net of generic keywords.

How to Optimize for Semantic Search

Start by drilling down to the core of what problems your customers may encounter or questions they may have. I’m sure many business owners could easily recite at least one or two questions that without fail nearly all their customers ask. Answer those questions in your site’s content before they even have to ask. Doing so will position your business or organization as the expert and a helpful resource, which will increase your chances of capturing that lead and gaining a customer. FAQ pages are a great way to optimize a website for semantic search. Addressing common industry problem/solution scenarios, blogging about your experience and industry know-how or simply providing your target audience with good, useful information that can be applied to real life are all very effective semantic SEO strategies.

Bounce Rate

A website’s Bounce Rate calculates how often people visit your site from a search results page then immediately click the back button or navigate away. It’s a ratio (%) in Google Analytics and the lower the bounce rate the better because it means people find your website useful or interesting. If a user immediately clicks away from a website without navigating through any other pages on that same site, Google assumes it’s because the site did not serve that user’s needs or was irrelevant to what they were actually looking for. The longer a person stays on your website the better it is for your bounce rate, which will indicate to Google that your website is providing useful and relevant information. Bounce rate is a very important ranking factor to keep track of because it could significantly help or hurt your SEO rankings. Strategies that can help keep your website’s bounce rate low are:

• Semantic search optimization
• Providing useful and informative content that captivates site visitors.
• Calls to action and value propositions that encourage people to navigate through multiple pages on the site.
• Videos
• Entertaining or inspiring content.
• Surveys and/or contact forms.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Your site’s CTR is a ratio (%) that’s determined by the number of clicks your website receives from organic search results. The higher the CTR, the better because it indicates to Google that your site has proven to be a relevant result for a user’s search query. Conversely, a low CTR is indicative of an irrelevant or low quality website because no one is clicking it. CTR is not only important for SEO ranking purposes, but business economics in general. When someone finds your website in search results and clicks it, that’s a lead for the business, so a high CTR can also help evaluate how many leads the site is attracting. Strategies to increase your site’s CTR include:

• Semantic search optimization
• Enticing calls to action or value propositions in your site’s meta descriptions.
• Providing useful and informative content that captivates site visitors.
• Positive star rating and reviews displayed beneath your site in search results using schema markup data.

Relevance & Personalization

Maintaining relevance is a no brainer and if your organization is not relevant to a particular audience it has no business ranking page 1 in organic search results. Remain relevant by keeping your organization abreast with industry trends and constantly strive to provide unbeatable value to customers.

But for local SEO, personalization is a key component of relevance. When thinking about personalizing your brand, look at it from a consumer perspective: Are you more likely to engage with a bland website with cookie-cutter content or a website with enticing calls to action and informative content that serves your needs? Even something as little as your logo and pictures should be personalized. Sure a stock photo would be fine and your SEO won’t suffer for using stock photos, but having real photos that are unique to your business humanizes your brand by painting a clear picture of your business and illustrating the quality of products or services you provide. Strive to make a personal connection with your customers by any non-invasive means necessary and you’ll be better for SEO and more importantly for creating a unique user experience (UX).

According to Moz, in terms of local SEO, personalization accounts for roughly 5-10% of total ranking factors; and this is all encompassing to anything related to your organization’s brand including but not limited to site content, pictures, reviews, social media engagement, advertisements, customer service and community involvement. Personalization has emerged in recent years as an SEO ranking factor and it’s impact on organic rankings will continue to grow in importance. I would highly recommend putting this at the top of your list when discussing marketing strategy for 2019.

Competitive Analysis

To state the obvious, SEO success involves upward movement in organic search rankings for any and all search queries that your customers or target audience may type when performing an online search. But before doing so, your website will encounter obstacles along the way, the most obtrusive being other websites that must be hurdled in order to rank higher in organic search.

Industry competition and market competition are often the most difficult barriers to overcome in organic search, so I cannot stress enough the importance of competitive analysis for local SEO success. Your organization’s website is literally battling for page 1 placement, so you must follow the guidance of Sun Tzu who declared that when you know your enemy and know yourself, you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.

In general, understanding your competition is a marketing concept that must not be neglected, but for local SEO studying your competitors will not only give your business a competitive edge, it will also let you know what you’re up against as well as what it will take to surpass the competition in search results. A number of key indicators can be identified from a competitive analysis, but at its core the strategy should evaluate:

• Size of industry and market.
• Domain authority of top competitors.
• Keyword research and development.
• Relevant Google My Business categories.
• Quality and quantity of reviews.
• Social media engagement.
• Organic search landscape assessment. In other words, what do the top ranking websites have in common and why is this pleasing to the search engines?

Linking Structure Profile

As we head into the new year, linking structure and link profile quality will continue to be an important ranking factor for SEO as well as one of the best ways to develop brand authority. Now the depth and breadth of your brand’s linking will vary based on marketing goals and industry competition, but a few rules of thumb remain:

1. The quality of your links is more important than the quantity of your links. But having a large quantity of relevant, high quality links is best!
2. It’s important to have a fine balance of link types, e.g. external, internal, outbound, followed links and rel=”nofollow”.
3. Utilize a variety of anchor text types, e.g. keyword, key phrase, page title, branded, domain name.

Now, I don’t want to downplay the importance of backlinks for SEO, because having quality backlinks to a website can significantly improve organic rankings as well as build domain authority. But for local SEO, backlinks become less of a concern because they aren’t as imperative as they are for national SEO. For the most part local SEO is less competitive, so a website can still develop brand authority without a large number of backlinks. Additionally, certain ranking factors that are unique to local SEO, e.g. GMB optimization and citations, take precedence over backlinking. No doubt backlinks are a ranking factor for SEO of any kind, but most local businesses do not need backlinks to maintain a successful SEO campaign.

But what IS absolutely imperative for local SEO success as it relates to linking is anchor text optimization and on-page linking structure. Anchor text optimization can be a very effective strategy, and it’s a ranking factor that has and always will act as a key component of SEO. Because it’s the word(s) attached to a link, indicating an important pathway for UX, Google will pay more attention to anchor text when crawling a website, thus attributing more authority to that text. Anchor text can also be used to entice user engagement which in turn could help improve bounce rate. As noted above, to maximize the effectiveness of anchor text as a ranking factor, your site should contain a variety of different types which can be strategically optimized using variations of keywords and branding.

Another way to optimize linking for SEO success without having to aggressively build backlinks is by creating a user friendly linking structure using internal and outbound links on your website. This strategy requires at least a few content rich internal pages on the site to achieve optimal interlinking. Side note: Avoid having too many links to a single page on your site because that is considered spammy and can actually hurt SEO rankings.

Your website’s linking structure can be implemented any way you see fit so long as it:

1. Improves UX.
2. Uses SEO friendly anchor text.
3. Is relevant to both the page being linked to and the content in which the link is located.

Outbound links from your website to another website should also be included as part of an optimized linking structure. Outbound links can be used to improve SEO as well as derive authority by citing a source. High quality outbound links for local SEO success should:

1. Improve UX.
2. Use SEO friendly anchor text or badge/image.
3. Serve to reinforce relevance, authority or expertise.
4. Contain target=”_blank” HTML attribute, to ensure the link opens in a new tab, preventing the user from completely navigating away from your website.

So there you have it! To maintain successful SEO and page 1 rankings in 2019 and beyond, the aforementioned concepts are emerging as some of the most important components of the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors, which also includes perennial SEO guidelines such as quality content, optimized HTML structure and general white hat SEO best practices. Here’s to SEO success in 2019! “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads!”

Local SEO Success Factors: Competitive Analysis

“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.”
– Sun Tzu

Competitive analysis, i.e. knowing your competitors, is essential not just for SEO, but for any marketing initiative. Really any scenario where success involves doing something better than someone else requires studying the competition. Think about it, to prepare for an upcoming match athletes will watch previous game tape to structure their strategy around tendencies of the competition. Even in The Art of War, Sun Tzu agrees that knowing your enemy will help an army avoid disaster.

Competitive analysis is essential for SEO success, both at the onset of SEO and throughout the lifespan of a campaign. SEO involves improving the rankings of a website in organic search, a major obstacle being the other websites standing (or ranking) in the way. In order to beat the competition we must understand the competition, so if you want to move ahead of other websites in online search results, you must first understand why those other websites are ranking ahead of you.

Local SEO Competitive Analysis

When it comes to SEO for local businesses, evaluating and understanding the competition involves:

• Size of industry and market. Larger markets are saturated with local businesses competing for the same page 1 rankings and competitive industries and markets often slow the SEO process. A business must have authority and a clear competitive advantage to distinguish themselves for SEO success.
• Keyword research and development. What keywords and key phrases are most likely to drive relevant traffic to the website and attract customers for the business?
• Relevant Google My Business categories. Ranking well in Google Map results is essential for local businesses and a lot can be learned by assessing how Google displays Map results in your industry. What categories are most relevant to your business and how do those align with your SEO keywords? Of your local competitors, which ones show up most in Google Map results and what are they doing to get all that exposure? There are a number of indicators that can be identified and used to your advantage for SEO.
• SEO landscape assessment. Who is ranking on page 1 and why? Perform a few Google searches and see who is ranking on page 1 for the key terms for which you would like your website to rank. Click thru the search results and browse websites of businesses you are looking to surpass in the search results. How is their content formatted? How is their keyword density? How is their linking structure? A significant amount of intelligence can be gathered by simply visiting websites that rank well in local search results. Businesses should mimic (not plagiarize or infringe upon) anything that they know is pleasing to Google and other search engines.

SEO competitive analysis empowers businesses and marketers by giving us the ability to understand how Google indexes an industry and market. This enables us to determine the best course of action for any SEO campaign and ultimately outrank the competition by surpassing them in organic search results.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) & Local SEO

In October of 2015, Google announced its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project which aims to improve the performance of the web for people using a mobile device. AMP could potentially increase the rapidity of mobile webpage load times by 85%.

At this point the AMP project nothing more than a universal open-source initiative for anyone to use to create more mobile friendly web pages. But we should have reason to believe that the implementation of accelerated mobile pages on your website will be critical for the future of SEO; even if a website is already mobile friendly. We should certainly expect that websites providing users with AMPs will receive increased visibility in mobile SERPs.

Online Search- We Know Our Goals, What Are Google’s Goals?

As an organization, Google’s mission is “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google’s expansive territory claims 75% of the US search market online, and every month millions of unique users perform billions of searches. As users we have a pretty clear idea as to our goals when typing something in Google, but have you ever wondered what Google’s goals are?

The creation of computing machines was inspired by the desire to enhance the lives of humans, making the completion of tasks easier and the fulfillment of processes more efficient. Since the dawn of the digital age an everlasting goal of technological advancement has been to improve the symbiosis between humans and computers.

It was during his participation in the Human-Computer Interaction Group at Stanford that a grad student named Larry Page became an ardent advocate of the idea that user experience trumped all when it came to computing. He embraced the concept of user-focused design, insisting that computer interfaces should be intuitive and he openly acknowledged that the user is always right (Isaacson, (2014). The Innovators. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster). To this day the concept of user experience influences digital evolution, and it comes as no surprise that 20 years later the co-founder of Google has instilled these ideals at the core of online search.

Google’s Goal: Provide the Best Search Results

Google is universally known as a place to go to find things. Answers, facts, directions, products, services; seemingly infinite information at the tip of our fingers. The word “Google” was even categorized as a verb by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. To the best of its ability Google shows us what we ask for when we ask for it. But why? For what reason does Google give us instant answers to our questions after it sifts through a massive database filled with millions of websites, links, directories and publications just to answer a single question from an individual user? And for that matter how do we know that the answers provided by Google are the answers for which we are searching?

In 1998, a 20 page paper entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” was presented at an international conference, in which Larry Page and Sergey Brin concluded by declaring a single goal at hand: To provide high quality search results for online users (Isaacson, (2014). The Innovators. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster).

It’s simple conclusion aside, the paper detailed technical specifications about organic search rankings, web crawling, site indexing, PageRank and complex algorithms created by the duo that laid the foundation for what we know today as the online search engine, Google.

Google Goal #2: Eliminate Low Quality Content from SERP’s

In its unending mission to provide the highest quality search results, Google is constantly updating its algorithm to meet ever evolving user needs as well as snuff out black hat SEO. Over the past five years we have seen the most significant Google algorithm changes which aim to improve search results so that the best, most relevant content gets the exposure it deserves.

With these updates Google also intends to eliminate low quality content from search results, so penalties are administered to websites that fail to follow quality guidelines. There are a number of reasons why a site may be flagged and sometimes a penalty is deserved.

Google doesn’t penalize sites to be a tyrant and rule the online universe. Google simply rewards sites for offering high quality content and useful information, products or services. When Google rolls out an algorithm update or creates new ranking signals, it’s not to prevent sites or businesses from ranking, but rather to improve the quality of search results. Google evolves when it sees a need for improvement or when it recognizes an opportunity for enhanced UX. General rule of thumb to avoid Google penalties: Provide your audience with unique, useful, informative and relevant content that serves a purpose.

Google Goal #3: Maximize UX

Google does not rely solely on incomprehensible algorithms to determine the highest quality search results. Most would be surprised to learn that much of the daily activity each of us engages in online plays a significant role in how the search engine determines rankings. It recognizes how we interact, what we click, what we share and most importantly, what we DON’T need.

Additionally, people sharing and recommending content online is another way Google determines what’s relevant, factual and informative. This type of user behavior is similar to researchers citing other works and primary sources in a bibliography.

Since its creation and to this day Google has relied upon the study of people’s activity online to further improve the quality of the results provided by the search engine. User behavior as well as user experience have a significant impact on how Google achieves its goal of providing high quality search results.

The primary goal of Google is to provide users with the most relevant, highest quality results based on user search queries, i.e. their wants and needs when performing a search online. Google must trust a website or business before it ranks it organically. Google’s reputation is based on the quality of the information it provides and it’s not going to rank a website or business it does not trust. Google does not care about a website or business’s marketing goals. Google does not care to whom a business wants to be marketed. Google does not care where a business says they offer services. Google only cares about providing users with relevant, high quality search results as fast as possible.

Here are Ten Things We Know to be True directly from Google’s core philosophy to help guide us as well as business owners.

Confessions of an SEO Specialist: Part II

“All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”

As we continue to address client misconceptions and common objections thrown at search engine optimizers, we arrive at a topic of discussion in which difficulty arises not from the explanation of SEO tactics, but how, when and why those tactics are implemented, or in some cases avoided, based on any given client’s industry, market, situation and goals.

Search Ranking Factors

As we very well know there are numerous factors that are taken into account when it comes to acquiring search engine rankings. These factors, Numbering around 200, are evaluated by means of a search algorithm, the exact equation of which is unknown. Though theoretical, SEO has taught us many things about what pleases and displeases this search engine algorithm, including some common SEO success factors.

Confessions of an SEO Specialist: Part I

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Any SEO professional who is responsible for a client’s web presence is well aware of the endeavors that accompany acquiring rankings and search visibility for a business or organization; especially those of us handling multiple client SEO campaigns. These endeavors can be traced back to client expectations and a common misunderstanding of how search engine optimization actually works.

I have to admit that convincing some clients of the value of SEO is often more difficult than actually getting a website to rank page 1 in organic search. Not because I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but because I’m working for business savvy individuals who are either set in their traditional marketing ways, have been burned by an illegitimate SEO company in the past or are unconvinced that SEO is a worthwhile marketing expense.

Google My Business for Local SEO

Now is the time for small business owners and local organizations to really optimize your online presence with a new and improved version of a classic digital marketing tool.

After months of maddening confusion and countless minutes spent on the phone with Google support troubleshooting client Google Place issues- not to mention the formidable task of having to repeatedly explain and resolve client issues (both non-ranking issues and Google Places dashboard transition failures) that I as an SEO Specialist couldn’t even really understand myself, nonetheless identify a solution.