Search Results for: cities

10 Types of Ninja Pages You Can Sneak up the Local Search Results

December 31, 2018 by Phil 16 Comments

People who do local SEO are pretty resourceful at rubbing keywords all over pages they want to rank. They’re less creative with the types of pages they try to get to rank.

Often those pages are limited to the homepage, a few “service” pages, and maybe some doughy “city” pages. Those types of pages matter – as do other good standard types of pages – but other kinds can surprise you. “Ultimate guides” and infographics and other kinds of theoretical link-bait are fine, but even if they rank well, the people who click on them tend not to be local to you.

Here are 10 kinds of pages that can rank better (and maybe more easily) than you might think, and that you might want to create on your site:

1. “Service Areas” or “Location Finder.” Don’t just plop down a list of cities and ZIPs. Also describe your service area in at least a couple of paragraphs, describe your experience in some of the communities on the list, link to your pages on specific services, link to any “city” pages you might have made, maybe include reviews from a few customers, and see if you can work a “near me” angle.

2. “About” or “Bio.” Usually you can optimize them for “Attorney” or “Doctor” or “Agent” or “Master Carpenter” or “Expert” or similar local search terms. Describe in detail the person’s experience, and exactly what makes him or her at whatever line of work, and link to relevant other pages on the site. Don’t just describe hobbies and preferred breakfast foods.

3. “Certified” or “Licensed.” In some fields certification or licensure isn’t applicable, or nobody cares about it. But if you’re a home inspector, a hypnotist, an arborist, an electrician, or pretty much any kind of contractor (to name a few examples), the chances are good that at some point some of your customers will search for who’s qualified – not just for who’s nearby.

4. “[Service] for [person].” Think “massage for pregnant women,” “divorce attorney for men,” “cosmetic dentist for kids,” etc.

5. “Reviews.” Some people add “reviews” or “reviews of” to whatever local search term they type in. You’ll want to create a page that shows off your reviews anyway, so you might as well try to get it to rank for something. (Note: this page should be different from your “Review Us” page.)

6. “Voted Best.” The catch is you probably need to win some distinction first. But if you do, you can probably snag some “best ____ in [place]” rankings.

7. Photo gallery. Depending on your niche, you may be able to get some rankings for “photos of ____” or “examples of ____” terms, but I mention photo galleries here because if you play your cards right you might make one that ranks for broader search terms, too. Especially if you don’t only slap up photos, but also describe what’s in the photos.

8. “Bilingual ____” or “[Language]-Speaking _____.” If you or someone who works for you speaks more than one language, and whips out that language when helping customers / clients / patients, create a page all about that.

9. “Discount” or “Coupons.” You could have one for each service, if you wanted to. It could be paltry. Or if it’s not paltry, maybe you don’t offer it to everyone. (Maybe you only offer it to veterans, or students, or seniors, for example.)

10. “Commercial” versions of “residential” pages, or vice versa. Let’s say you’re an electrician who offers 20 different services. You’ll want a page on each specific service, of course, but if you also serve business owners and if a residential customer has different needs from those of a business-owner customer, you’ll probably want 20 pages on your residential services, and another 20 on your commercial services. Each can be your secret weapon.

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Can you think of other “ninja” pages that can quietly climb up the local search results?

Any good examples of ninja pages that seem to work well for your competitor(s)?

What’s an overlooked kind of page that’s worked well for you?

Leave a comment!

Google My Business Shakes up Service-Area Businesses: What Has Changed and What to Do

October 31, 2018 by Phil 26 Comments

Using Google My Business long has been a murky matter for owners of service-area businesses. Most people have wondered what kinds of addresses are eligible, how many GMB pages they can have, whether to “hide” their addresses from showing publicly, and how big of a “service area” to specify (or whether to specify one at all).

Google just made some changes that may make things simpler for service-area businesses long-term, but that make things even more confusing for now. The changes appear to have happened today. (Thanks to Tim Colling for the intel in his forum thread.)

What’s changed?

1. The entire “address” field now appears to be optional.

If you’re creating a page for the first time, it’s not clear to me whether still you need to specify an address to get the verification postcard sent to you. Even if you need to specify an address initially, you can wipe the address after you’re verified.

2. Radius-targeting is gone. No longer can you target everything within a specific distance from your place of business.

Now you have to specify cities, or states/provinces, or ZIP/postal codes, etc.

Google’s updated rules read: “You can no longer set your service area as a distance around your business. If you previously entered a distance around your business, you won’t be able to edit it. Instead, you’ll need to specify your service area by region, city, or ZIP code.”

3. Now you update the “Address” and “Service Area” settings separately, in two separate fields, rather than mess with your service-area settings in the “Address” field.

4. Certain businesses in service industries no longer have their addresses showing in the local 3-pack, even if those businesses never chose to “hide” their address from showing publicly. It’s not clear to me whether that’s because Google doesn’t want businesses in certain industries to have their addresses show up in the 3-pack, or because (more likely) those business owners simply haven’t gone into Google My Business today to mess with their address and service-area settings.

My (early) take and suggestions

It’s not yet clear (to me) why Google has made those changes. Nor is it clear whether they’re only the first in a series of changes. Often there is another shoe to drop.

My tinfoil-hat theory is Google wants to make it easier for more businesses of a certain type to have a Google My Business page that doesn’t break a rule or three, so that more of them can use Local Services Ads and get into a PPC bidding war with each other. Guess we’ll see.

For now, I don’t see a downside to your specifying an address AND a service area, assuming you’re not the owner of a home-based business and are concerned about revealing your address. If you do run a home-based business and have privacy concerns, there doesn’t appear to be a drawback to scrubbing your address out of the “Address” field of your Google My Business page.

When Google makes a big change like this, business owners are slow to adapt (and many never do) and Google knows that. This is a good time to experiment, while your competitors don’t even know there was a change.

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Any early observations?

Any bugs or problems you’ve run into?

Leave a comment!

Want to Guess How Many Local Businesses Use Google My Business Posts?

September 5, 2018 by Phil 20 Comments

Google My Business posts have been around since mid-2017. They seem to have caught on – more than many of Google’s “local business” features have – mostly because the payoff is clear: GMB posts stick out in your brand-name search results, and can nudge people toward the next step you’d like them to take.

Should you use Google My Business posts – for your business? On the one hand is the “Why not?” argument. You can give GMB posts a try for a few months and see if they’re worth the (small) effort.

On the other hand, the “Why bother?” argument also has merit. To wit:

If most businesses use GMB posts already, won’t customers tune them out?
If few businesses use GMB posts, have most business owners just concluded they’re a waste of time?
If few businesses use them, will Google retire GMB posts soon?

You probably don’t need another distraction – another thing to keep you from focusing on the stuff with clearer payoff to your local visibility.

This is where it helps to know specifically how many businesses use – or ever have used – Google My Business posts. I couldn’t find any numbers on that, and when possible I like a better understanding than, “Umm, not many” or “A lot, I guess.” So I did some research.

I looked at 2000 businesses in the Google Maps results, in 100 local markets. Those 100 markets covered 10 cities across the US, and focused on 10 categories of businesses. (More on my methodology in a minute.) I counted how many businesses had created a GMB post recently – within the last 7 days – and how many businesses had ever done a GMB post.

Here’s a summary of what I found – the numbers on businesses’ adoption of Google My Business posts:

Q: How many businesses have ever created a Google My Business post?
A: About 17%.

Q: How many businesses have posted recently and seem to post regularly?
A: About 4%.

Q: How many businesses posted at least once, but seem not to keep up with it?
A: About 13%.

Q: Of the businesses that do post on GMB, how many seem to do it regularly?
A: About 1 in 4.

Q: In how many local markets has at least one business (in the top 20) ever tried GMB posts?
A: About 91% of local markets. In only 9% of markets (that I looked at) nobody had ever posted.

Q: In an average first page of “Maps tab” results (20 local businesses), how many have ever tried GMB posts?
A: About 3 businesses.

Q: How saturated do local markets get, in terms of how many local businesses post on GMB?
A: The most I ever saw was 10 businesses out of the top 20. There were a few nines and a few eights. Again, the vast majority of businesses I looked at have never posted.

You can download my spreadsheet here. If you look at it, I’d love to hear any insights you glean that I didn’t mention.

Methodology and limitations

1. I looked only at businesses in the US. I imagine the adoption of (or dabbling in) GMB posts is a little lower outside of the US, but of course it just depends on the local market.

2. I looked only at larger and medium cities in the US. In some cases Google Maps drew results from the suburbs, but I didn’t search there or in less-populated areas. In my experience, adoption of Google My Business features (and the like) is lower outside of the larger cities.

3. I searched in Google Maps – in the “local finder” – so I could look at a larger sample of businesses. The alternative was to look at the top 3 businesses on page 1 of Google’s main search results, but Google’s main search results don’t show who’s using GMB posts. I’d have to click on each listing anyway. In the “Maps” view, I could pull up a list of 20, and very quickly check each business and see whether it had any GMB posts.

4. I focused on 10 industries, by way of 10 search terms: “dentist, “family lawyer,” “auto repair,” “roofing,” “animal hospital,” “preschool,” “electrician,” “real estate agent,” “music lessons, and “plastic surgeon.” Could I have looked at 100 industries? Sure, but I’d still be missing some categories, because there’s an infinity of them. So I chose to focus on the more-competitive spaces, with a bent toward the brutal markets. I’ve been in local search for 10 years, and picked the least-bad core sample I could. (If you do a study like this one, but look at different categories, I’ll be your biggest cheerleader.)

5. What about the red search terms on my spreadsheet? Those represent cases where the search term I originally chose (e.g. “Boston animal hospital”) didn’t produce a full page of 20 businesses in Google Maps. That would have shrunken the sample size a little, and skewed my data a little, so in those cases I just picked a different search term – one that did pull up 20 businesses on the first page of Maps.

6. Over time the number of businesses with a “fresh” GMB post (i.e. posted within the last 7 days) may decrease, or just not grow as quickly as the % of businesses in the “stale posts” column. The reason is simply that most businesses don’t stick with posting on GMB. Today’s business with a fresh post is next week’s business with a stale post.

7. Which categories of businesses post the most? I don’t know, because I’d need to have looked at all or at a couple hundred industries. But I can say that, of the categories I looked at, dental practices seemed the most post-happy.

8. How closely does GMB-posting activity correspond to rankings? I don’t know, because that wasn’t what I set out to find out here. That’s a discussion for another day. In any case, it would be tough to say, because a business owner who bothers to post on GMB probably has other local SEO irons in the fire.

9. What about the businesses that didn’t even make the first page of Maps results – the businesses ranked #21 and lower? I didn’t look at those. I suspect they post a little less than do businesses on the first page of Maps.

Observations (beyond the numbers)

Most businesses don’t keep up with Google My Business posts. Of the businesses I looked at, only 4% had posted within the past week, versus 13% that had posted at one time or another (less recently than within the last week). They don’t keep the posts coming. Google’s mother-hen reminders don’t work too well, apparently.

Because Google sends you a reminder every time your post is about to “expire,” my guess is business owners think that creating a new post is a big chore and a pain. Maybe they have few good photos to share, or they think a GMB post needs to be like a Facebook post. Or maybe they choose to post every 2 weeks. In any case, Google should add a “re-post this post” feature, or something like that.

Customers aren’t drowning in Google My Business posts (at least not yet). Do some businesses post too often? Yes. Are most posts well-done and worthy of searchers’ and customers’ attention? No. But most businesses haven’t overdone GMB posts, because most businesses (over 82%) haven’t used GMB posts.

Given how hard Google is pushing GMB posts, if there’s ever a time to give them a try, I’d say that time is now.

Enough businesses seem to use Google My Business posts that Google probably will keep the feature around, and maybe add to it over time. 17% may not sound like a high percentage. But if my cross-section of 2000 businesses is at all representative, then many millions of business owners have tried GMB posts at one time or another.

Google often kills off products and features both popular and unloved, so we can’t assume GMB posts will be around forever. But when I think of how slowly most business owners adopt new features, and how (relatively) new GMB posts are, I’d say the chances are good GMB posts will stay out of the Google graveyard.

Good further info on GMB posts

How to Create a Google My Business Post That Will Win You More Customers – Ben Fisher

12 Things to Know to Succeed with Google Posts – Joy Hawkins

Do Google Posts Impact Ranking? A Case Study – Joy Hawkins

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Any researchable numbers or facts you’d like me to cover?

If you’ve looked at my data, did you reach any different or additional conclusions?

What’s the lowdown on Google My Business posts in your local market?

Any success stories?

Leave a comment!

Generic, Local-SEO-Friendly Business Names: the Pros and Cons of Using One

July 12, 2018 by Phil 9 Comments

You’re considering a change of one size or another to the name your business, in the name of better local rankings. The basic plan is to get a “keyword” and city or other place name into your name.

To make that change you might feel the need to keyword-stuff your Google My Business name, to use a fake name on your Google My Business page, to register a “doing business as” (DBA), to rename your business entirely, or to name your new business with local SEO in mind from the get-go.

The first two options aren’t wise, and the others may be wise. Depends on your situation and on how you’ve weighed the pros and cons. Here are the pros and cons you’ll want to weigh before you mess with your name:

Pros of a generic, “local-SEO-friendly” name:

You may rank for that search term (and maybe similar terms) more easily and quickly. The name of your Google My Business page affects your Maps rankings more than it should – partly because Google often isn’t good at telling brand-name searches from broader searches. Your name also matters to your organic and non-Google rankings, to a lesser extent.
More-relevant anchor text in links. Any time the text of a link to your site is the name of your business, the link will contain a “keyword” and maybe your city naturally. You won’t need to resort to shenanigans.
Some customers’ reviews will contain that search-engine-friendly name. The content of reviews can help your visibility, in my experience.
For some search terms you might be the only business that appears on the local map (in a “local one-box” result, as it’s called).
Maybe you just can’t think of a good name.

Cons of a generic, “local-SEO-friendly” name:

It’s easy for your competitors to do the same. Most will not bother or simply will keyword-stuff their names but it may take only a couple of like-minded competitors to end your fiesta. Easy come, easy go.
You may get competitors’ bad reviews. Their angry customers may confuse you with your competitors.
Competitors may get your good reviews. Your customers can get their wires crossed, too.
In general, more people may think you and your competitors belong to the same organization (maybe you’re part of a chain). That can lead to confusing phone calls, annoying emails, mixed-up coupons, bad press, and more.
You may be mistaken easily for spam. Competitors and do-gooders may submit Google Maps edits to your name. Don’t assume Google will make the right call on whether to apply those edits.
You may be pigeonholed. Maybe you want to rank for other search terms and in other cities. Then you’ll be at a crossroads as to how to do that.
Citation audits may be tougher. You (or a third party you work with) may find listings that aren’t yours, and miss listings that do belong to your business.
Google may have a harder time identifying searches specifically meant for your business – AKA brand-name searches. Because of your generic, broad name, Google likely will hedge its search results with businesses other than yours, just in case the person wasn’t searching for your business. When in doubt Google includes junk.
You probably can’t trademark your name.
You miss out on the benefits of having a sticky, memorable name.

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How has the name of your business helped (or hurt) you?

To what extent did you think about the search-engine-friendliness before picking it?

If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Leave a comment!

The Perfect Stack of Online Reviews: How Does Your Local Business Measure up?

February 28, 2018 by Phil 4 Comments

“I picked you because of your reviews” is nice to hear, especially it’s often. But how do you achieve that?

Having “good reviews” isn’t always enough. Plenty of businesses have good reviews, but don’t attract enough business, or rank well, or beget the kinds of reviews that beget more customers who beget more reviews. That’s one reason local SEO and review strategy are so connected (if you’re doing it right).

What’s in a “perfect” pile of reviews? More than you think. Possibly more than you can get, even if you do everything right. As someone who’s helped business owners on that for many years, I’ve got a long list of boxes you should try to check. More on that in a minute.

To keep the checklist to a reasonable length, I’ve got to assume two things about you:

You want reviews from real people, and not from friends or Fiverr merchants.
You know your customers well enough to know how important it is for your business to have reviewers from “different walks of life,” and that you don’t need my advice on that.

For my list to be of much use, you probably need to keep at least a little influx of reviews from customers / clients / patients. See this post.

Now, what should that stack of reviews look like? No one review will meet more than a few of these criteria, but your stack of online reviews as a whole should contain as many of the following as possible:

Reviews on a wide range of sites.

Plenty of 5-star reviews.

A stinker or two. For one thing, they’re a reality-check. We don’t live in a 5-star world.

Recent reviews. Make it clear you’re still in business.

Old reviews. In time you’ll want a few Mick Jaggers in there.

Excruciatingly detailed reviews. Happy, yappy customers who don’t seem to have an “off” button can make great reviewers.

Funny reviews. Maybe you can skip this one if you’re a bankruptcy lawyer, urologist, or funeral-home director.

Sloppy reviews. Some people just don’t think in terms of paragraphs or complete sentences. Doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from a belch of approval.

Photos included with the reviews.

Mentions of your business by name.

Mentions of specific people in your organization (you, partners, employees, etc.).

Reviews on less-trafficked or niche review sites. Don’t necessarily fixate on Google and Yelp.

Reviews by one-time skeptics. There’s no zeal like the zeal of the convert.

Reviews by former customers of your competitors.

Reviews by longtime / repeat customers of yours. “I had a great experience” is only weak when compared to “I’ve brought my wallet here for years.”

Reviews by farther-away customers – people who maybe had to drive a little, or who are on the outer edge of your service area. Great tie-in with “city pages,” by the way.

Reviews by almost-customers. When a near-miss speaks up, it shows you’re willing to turn down business if it’s not the right fit.

Mentions of relevant cities / places. May help your rankings. Of interest to would-be customers either way.

Mentions of specific services. People like crunchy little bits of detail. Google sure seems to.

Reviews that explain how the reviewer found you.

Reviews that explain how the reviewer picked you.

Reviews from people who reviewed you on another site, too.

Reviews from shy customers / clients / patients. Maybe they use a pen name or initials. Maybe they don’t go into as much detail as they could, and it’s obvious there’s more to the story. Reluctant reviews can pack a strange wallop.

Comments on other reviewers’ reviews. It can be powerful for customer B to rebut or confirm what customer A said.

Favorable comparisons to a competitor.

I didn’t include screenshots of examples because I wanted to keep it as much like a checklist as possible. But I’m all about real-life examples, so here are a few examples of great local-business review profiles for you to leaf through:

google.com/search?q=Premo+Electric

google.com/search?q=Alliance+Mortgage+Funding%2C+Inc.

google.com/search?q=HomeMove+Removals+%26+Storage

google.com/search?q=Kaehne%2C+Cottle%2C+Pasquale+%26+Associates%2C+S.C.+Appleton

Can you think of any other parts of a perfect pile of reviews? (I know I’ve forgotten something.)

Any real-life examples you’d like to share?

Leave a comment!

Search Results for: cities

What’s changed?

My (early) take and suggestions

Methodology and limitations

Observations (beyond the numbers)

Good further info on GMB posts

Pros of a generic, “local-SEO-friendly” name:

Cons of a generic, “local-SEO-friendly” name:

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