PeaceingBetter

  Except for Twitter, with whom it has a direct contractual relationship, Google has difficulty getting visibility into what’s happening on social platforms. So “being active” on social media doesn’t help your local search visibility. And even if you’re wildly popular on social media, it’s unlikely that popularity will translate directly into higher local search rankings. One way it might translate is if your social profile is frequently linked to other websites due to your popularity. The link you’ve added from your profile to your website then passes additional authority to your website. But that’s a fraction of a fractional increase in authority. Not one that’s worth getting hung up on. You should focus your social media efforts on engaging your customers with exciting content, promotions (if relevant), and polls and conversations that will increase their affinity for your brand. You can promote your website to a degree, but generally speaking, improvements ...

  It’s reasonable to expect Google to track our on-SERP and click behavior online. It has a near-complete picture of our offline behavior through its perpetual location-tracking of Android and iOS users with the Google Maps app installed. We see the outcome of this tracking in the Popular Times section of many businesses’ Knowledge Panels. Popular times and opening hours Google aggregates location data from any person it can — whether they’ve searched for a business or not — and puts that data front-and-center on that business’s Knowledge Panel. It even tracks how long people stay at a given company and whether the business is busier or less busy than usual. This complete offline tracking helps Google offer its advertisers a “closed loop” of data on whether online ads lead to offline visits. To think that Google isn’t using this same closed loop of data for its local algorithm defies belief. Regardless of whether knowing a business’s popularity before you ...

  There’s an endless discussion around Click Through Rate (CTR) as a ranking factor in organic search. The theory is that the more people click on your listing or website in a given search result, the more times it will show up for similar searches in the future. CTR is one step up from a branded search. CTR indicates, if not endorsement, that the searcher thinks the destination listing or website will be relevant to her query. Google has never shared information about the inner workings of this ranking factor — and explicitly obfuscated its usage. But SEO practitioners suspect there’s a mechanism involving CTR relative to the position on the page. After all, the top results will always get the lion’s share of clicks. You can improve your organic CTR with more compelling titles and meta descriptions on your web pages. Your Google Business Profile listings have fewer options, but a superior review profile — both star rating and volume — will help you stand out f...

  Have an intentional review acquisition process in place because it’s an essential element of success for your local search strategy. Knowing the importance of customer reviews, you might be tempted to blast all your customers at once, asking them to leave reviews. Or worse, you might consider buying your way to the top with fake reviews from Fiverr or similar sites. These techniques might lead to success in the short term but dramatic pain in the long term. Google and other review platforms are getting better at cracking down on this behavior. This is pretty trivial to spot algorithmically. Instead, a steady drip of reviews will lead to sustained long-term success. De pending on your industry, this could be a handful per month or a handful per week. Getting Yelp reviews Getting Yelp reviews can be challenging, thanks to Yelp’s overaggressive review filter and historically asinine policy on review solicitation. You’re not supposed to ask peo...

 ll other factors being equal, popular businesses tend to serve more customers than less popular ones. But remember, Google can only “see” what’s represented online. So if your customers leave reviews of your business at a higher rate than your competitors’ customers, your business will appear more popular and stand a good chance at outranking the competition. Content The area in which Google’s algorithm has arguably improved the most over the past years is semantic analysis and neural language processing. One of the earliest datasets on which Google trained its semantic algorithm was local business reviews. So not only is Google looking at the number of reviews when assessing the popularity of local businesses, it’s looking at what  people are saying about local businesses in those reviews. For example, doctors whose patients frequently mention a particular treatment in their reviews will likely rank better in searches for that treatment. Contractors w...

  Although they weren’t part of the initial release of Google Maps, reviews have been a fixture on Google’s local properties for over fifteen years . The reason is obvious: consumers love reviews. A considerable amount of consumers use reviews to evaluate local businesses. Many of them trust reviews just as much as a personal recommendation! So it’s no wonder that Google features them so prominently. It stands to reason that if consumers love reviews so much, Google’s ranking algorithm does too. Businesses with robust review profiles on Google – and beyond – tend to be rewarded with higher rankings. Reviews create a virtuous cycle. More reviews lead to better visibility, which leads to more customers, which results in more reviews. Simply gathering and encouraging customer reviews is one of the most sustainable marketing techniques your business can engage in. How Google evaluates reviews Only the engineers know, but local search experts have theorized t...

  Unless you’re blatantly spamming, there isn’t a bad website on which to acquire a citation. But as with inbound links, specific citations are more valuable than others. Let’s take a look at the most valuable citation types below. Data aggregators Google has licensed existing databases in most countries to build its local business index rather than starting from scratch. In many cases, the licensors are the most prominent traditional yellow pages companies in each market. See how this local search ecosystem is connected. The local search ecosystem in a graph Consumer directories In addition to licensing data, Google searches the internet for local business citations. Citations from authoritative consumer directories (such as Foursquare, Yelp, or YP.com) carry more weight in helping your rankings than those from weak directories you’ve never heard of, like USCity.Net or ABLocal. Whitespark has put together great resources that uncover the top con...

  You probably have colleagues in related industries to whom you refer business and from whom you’re referred regularly. Make sure these referral relationships are represented online in the form of links. That way, Google knows that your companies vouch for each other just as you do offline. Interviews and guest columns Local publications like newspapers and alternative weeklies or monthlies are terrific places to get your business featured. And the chances may be better, especially in smaller towns or tightly-knit neighborhoods, that a friend of a friend works at one of these companies. The future of links and rankings SEO professionals have been predicting the demise of links for many years. But there’s little evidence to support this trend, even though Google’s John Mueller recently hinted at a future where they might rely less on links. Google has gotten better at penalizing low-quality links through various algorithm updates. Still, if anything, h...

  Are you a member of your local chamber of commerce, business association, or neighborhood association? Most groups like these operate a member directory, and you want to ensure that the directory is online, visible to the public, and Google’s spiders. If the websites of these groups are not showing up in your backlink profile, bring up the issue with the director or marketing manager of these associations and ask them to create a webpage that links to each member. Regional/national certification boards and industry organizations Depending on your industry, you may also be licensed by, or participate in, a regional or national organization. Don’t just display your certification on your website. Link to your business’s online profile on the websites of these certifying boards and industry organizations. This increases your business’s credibility with potential customers and helps Google’s spiders discover and crawl your profile on these highly-trusted ...

  You’re probably thinking, “hey, I want to rank #1, just tell me what to do!” But understanding why Google values links so highly can help you assess the strength or weakness of your link profile. This can help you determine your link acquisition strategy. Googlebot crawls the Internet by following one link after another. They discover new pages and websites as part of that crawl and store the content of each of those pages in a giant database. In addition to storing the content of each page, Google also stores how its crawlers arrived on the page. In other words, it remembers the pages and websites linking to it. A link from one site to another is like a vote or endorsement for the credibility of the second website. Sites with the most endorsements rank better than those with few or no endorsements. Especially links from websites that are heavily endorsed themselves improve your ranking. You need endorsements to get elected and links to rank well. ...

  Your title tags are the most important places to put your keywords. Remember, though, that Google might rewrite your titles when it thinks it can do a better job. Note that title tags and the page or post titles you enter in WordPress are different. Title tags are the SEO titles in Yoast SEO. Perform the site:yourdomain.com search we mentioned earlier to see your existing title tags. The blue link text associated with each page in these results is the page’s title tag. An example of a title on Google Yoast SEO helps you edit your SEO title tags. Pull up your target keywords and add them to the corresponding pages. Take some time in crafting each title , though. Don’t just stuff your keywords in and then tack on your city, state, region, or county at the end. Remember that in addition to conveying to Google the terms for which you want your business to be relevant, these are the phrases your prospective customers will see when searching. So make these ...

  A tutorial to higher rankings for WordPress sites This is the original WordPress SEO article since 2008, fully updated for 2022! WordPress is one of the best content management systems for SEO . But even though it gets a lot right “out of the box,” there’s much more that you can do to improve your performance. It’s time to focus on WordPress SEO! Optimizing your site using the tactics and best practices outlined in this article will help you improve your rankings, gain more subscribers or sales, and have a better website . Because you should ingrain proper SEO in all aspects of your online marketing and PR, this guide covers quite a lot of ground! It’s a long read, so feel free to use the table of contents below to jump around. Before we start… This article assumes that you’re using our Yoast SEO plugin , which adds more features and SEO tools to WordPress. If you’re not already using it, you can set it up right away with our beginner’s guide...

  What are local search and local SEO? Local search refers to all the activity in search engines that results in a local-oriented result. In the context of Google Search, local search engine optimization (local SEO) aims to improve the visibility of a website or business in Google’s Local Pack, Google Maps, and other local search results. Local SEO uses various techniques, including creating and optimizing Google Business Profile listings, incorporating location-specific keywords into website content and meta tags, and obtaining positive customer reviews to improve visibility in local search. Local search optimization is an important aspect of improving a website’s visibility in search engines for users searching for businesses or services in a specific area. An important distinction: organic vs. place You might say it’s all Google, so how different could the local results be compared to the regular, organic ones? And it’s true, at its core, Google has a...

  This category might come as a surprise to you, but ageism is a real problem. But what is it exactly? To quote the World Health Organization (WHO), ageism “ refers to the stereotypes (how we think), prejudice (how we feel) and discrimination (how we act) towards others or oneself based on age .” Let’s look at an example of non-inclusive writing first. We’ve bolded the non-inclusive word:  I was just on my way to the grocery store when a group of seniors decided to visit too. At first, I was worried I’d have to stand in line for ages. But as I walked in, I got to talking with one of the women. She was very lovely, and explained they were actually here to do some volunteering! The bolded word could be potentially harmful to older adults, unless they actually use these words to refer to themselves. Here’s what you could do to write more inclusively: I was just on my way to the grocery store when a group of older people decided to visit too. At first...

  Meet your new SEO best friend With Yoast SEO , we’ve always focused on building the best WordPress SEO plugin out there. We worked on the features first while forgetting the experience for a bit. So a new interface for Yoast SEO was a long time coming. It’s not hard to give an interface a new coat of paint, but thoroughly rebuilding it from the ground up is a lot of work. It means rethinking what goes where, what we want to be able to do in the future, and what this all should look like. Luckily, we pulled it off! The new user interface we introduce in Yoast SEO 20.0 A better interface for you and us We’ve worked hard to bring you this great new setting UI for Yoast SEO. For us, it’s the end of an era and the beginning of a beautiful future. This new interface makes it much easier for us to incorporate new features and improve Yoast SEO while giving you a modern experience that is a joy to use. Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast, explains: “We f...