Local SEO For Your Business

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local-seo

Local SEO Can Help Your Business Grow

The digital realm is full of tough competitors including internationally recognized brands. This makes competing as a small local business a challenge, however once you start to understand how Local SEO works you’ll realize how it differs from SEO on a global scale.

 

The Most Important Factors That Effect Local SEO

Google and other major search engines are placing a higher importance on localizing your business online. The factors that effect Local SEO are very similar to the factors for international SEO however the manner in which they are implemented is slightly different.

 

  • On-page Factors — On-page factors include titles, descriptions and alt tags. If your goal is to outrank your local competitors within a specific city, region or even a country, it is important that all of these parameters are localized.
  • Keywords — It’s important that any focus keywords are properly localized by including specific geographical locations. Include the names of countries/cities/regions that you intend to target.
  • Citations —  With Local SEO, being listed on relevant local resources is more important than the quality score of the referring domain. Ensure your Local SEO approach includes listings with all relevant local directories.
  • Consistency —It’s important that your business information is displayed consistently across all local directory listings, including business name, phone number and address. Ensure there are no issues with your listings being crawled by search engine spiders and that all business information is accurate and consistent with your other listings.

 

Which Local SEO Method Has The Biggest Impact on Local SEO Rankings?

Although some things certainly have a larger impact than others, the best approach to your Local SEO strategy is a combination of the following:

  • Creating and verifying your Google My Business listing
  • Utilizing local Schema
  • Listing your business in all relevant local directories

This will help layout the ground work for your online presence and act as a good starting point. With the advice above and by utilizing all of the correct ranking factors your business will be able to establish itself locally and begin to shape it’s local online identity.

How Google’s RankBrain Update Impacts Your Business

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Most people have heard of the new RankBrain algorithm and are familiar with previous updates such as Panda and Penguin but this update will be slightly more complex. The new algorithm will impact your business in several ways, so it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with how it works. The RankBrain update launched October 26 of 2015 so it’s still a fresh topic, but a lot of the inner workings have already been unveiled. One of Google’s top research scientists has referred to RankBrain as the 3rd most important factor Google takes into consideration when determining which results are most relevant for a particular search query.

What’s New In The RankBrain Algorithm?

Even though the new RankBrain algorithm update has been live for several months (October 26th 2015). It wasn’t until recently that Google actually confirmed there is a new aspect that incorporates machine-learning in the update.Huge amounts of search queries (Up to 15% according to Google) will be processed through the machine learning with a goal of better understanding the queries so that Google is able to provide faster, better, more relevant results. RankBrain is essentially the code name Google has given for the addition of AI (artificial intelligence) in the latest algorithm update.

Google hopes to gain a better understanding of it’s users and what their searches mean when they use Google and their new artificial intelligence algorithm brings them one step closer to achieving this. The primary focus is to be able to provide the most relevant results to a particular search query and by being the only search engine currently utilizing AI it puts Google light years ahead of their competitors. In a simple comparison test to evaluate RankBrain’s effectiveness several Google engineers were shown a list of websites and asked to estimate how Google’s algorithm would rank them, the engineers were correct approximately 70% of the time  while RankBrain ranked them correctly 80% of the time.

What does this mean for your business?

It means that keywords in particular will hold less value than context. Businesses should start to think about what questions or phrases their audience will use or ask as a whole instead of focusing on the individual keywords. A deep understanding of your target audiences and the triggers that drive them will be at the heart of any  successful digital marketing strategy, the way we look at SEO is changing.