The modern local marketing can be a very intimidating, since indeed, the landscape has significantly changed from the traditional local marketing we are all familiar with.

Here, we will discuss how we should approach local marketing. However, let us begin by discussing the most important thing: the customers.

How Local Customers Have Changed

Every marketing effort should sprout from a thorough understanding of the market—our customers.

So, before we begin, it’s important to understand how our behaviors in learning about local businesses have significantly changed in the past decade.

In the past, we learn about new businesses from billboards, newspaper articles, and direct mails, among others.

Nowadays, there are two primary ways to learn about the existence of a local business: social media (including posts and reviews from influencers), and Google Maps queries—including “near me” search queries—.

Of course, there are other ways like online advertising or recommendations from certain apps/sites, but the fact remains that nowadays, we learn about local businesses online.

So, in this guide, our strategies will revolve around this customer behavior, and capitalize especially Google Maps and social media platforms to capture our audience’s attention.

I. Google Maps Marketing

Also often referred as “local SEO”, there are two main ways people search for local businesses in Google Maps:

1. Straight from Google Maps app
2. Performing location-based search queries (i.e. restaurants in LA) or ‘near me’ queries (i.e. restaurants near me) on Google search.

For the latter, Google will display the top 3 results from Google Maps above the organic results (but below the paid ads).

Depending on your device, you can usually see 2-4 results before you need to scroll while using the Google Maps app.

So, our priority here is to get ranked on the top-3 results according to our location and niche—often called the ‘3-pack’ —.

Before we can learn how, we have to discuss the important ranking factors for Google Maps.

Google Maps Ranking Signals

It’s important to first understand that ranking signals for Google Maps SEO is significantly different than traditional SEO, and here are the top ranking signals we will need to focus on:

1. Google My Business signals

Google My Business is where you list your business to be featured on Google Maps, including various information from your address to the description of your business.

The most important signal here is your business’s proximity to the searcher’s. For example, if your Google My Business listing is similarly optimized as your competitor’s but their business is slightly closer, they will rank higher.

The more complete and informative your listing is, the higher the chance to rank.

2. Backlinks

Your website can (and should) be listed on your Google Maps Listing. Here, Google will take into account the backlinks coming to your site, the quality of backlinks, and so on. Quite similar to what you would see in traditional SEO strategy.

Note: since this will also affect your website, we will discuss this in the website section further below.

3. Reviews

The quantity, velocity, and diversity of (preferably positive) reviews on your Google Maps listing. Google will also consider reviews on third-party major sites (TripAdvisor, Yelp!, Facebook Places, etc.) depending on your niche.

4. On-Page Optimizations

In Google Maps SEO, the most important on-page optimization is the presence of your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information. Keyword optimizations and other on-page signals for traditional SEO will follow.

5. Citations

Local citations are any mentions of your business’s NAP on other sites. The more, the merrier.

6. User Experience signals

Both on your website and Google Maps results. For example, the number of people who calls your business directly from Google Maps results, the bounce rate on your website, and so on.

7. Social Signals

Engagement on various social media networks.

Note:  we will discuss this on the social media section further below.

Google Maps SEO: Step-By-Step Guide

Based on the ranking signals discussed above, there are four key steps in climbing the ranks of Google Maps:

1. Claim, Optimize, and Verify your Google My Business Listing

If your business has been around for some time, it’s possible someone else has claimed your business listing (in most cases, with a good intent). If that’s the case, you can claim the business by simply providing proof of ownership in the verification process.

If your business has a physical address, the verification process usually involves Google sending a postcard containing a verification PIN, so it’s fairly simple. Depending on the type of your business, Google might also allow verification via email or phone.

When optimizing your listing, the most important thing to consider is providing clear information for your human audience. Make sure they will know what your business’s about immediately, what you sell, any unique propositions, and so on by focusing on these areas:

• Make sure all your information (especially NAP information) is accurate, complete, and up-to-date
• Choose your business category carefully. The business category should describe what your business is doing rather than what you sell
• Use attributes to inform about your unique services or value propositions (i.e. if your business has a smoking area or kid-friendly)
• Use well-taken photos, preferably those taken on or nearby your premise. Listings with photos get 35% more conversions.
• Specify your service area, for example, if you provide delivery.

In general, avoid stuffing your Google My Business listing with keywords (Google is strongly against it). Use your keywords sparingly and focus on bringing clear information for your human readers.

2. Get More Reviews

Getting more (positive) reviews both on your Google Maps listing and other platforms are not only beneficial for Google Maps ranking purposes.

Reviews are also important social proofs that will drive conversions.

There are several effective tactics you can try to encourage more reviews:

• Ask at the right time.

Sometimes, that’s all it takes. Timing, however, is important to maximize the chance of getting the best possible review. For example, ask when they just made a repeat purchase.

• Offer incentives

A fairly common practice is to offer incentives in exchange for their review (and social media post). For example, you can offer discounts or freebies after they show you their valid reviews.

• Respond to existing reviews

Including and especially for negative ones. People are more likely to leave reviews for businesses that frequently respond to previous reviews. Address all negative reviews quickly and politely, and fix the underlying issues.

Obviously, the most important thing in getting positive reviews is to actually deliver good products and services.

Thankfully, Google actively encourages you to get more reviews, and nowadays they even send a push-notification asking your visitors for a review automatically after their visit.

3. Building Local Citations

As previously mentioned, citations are any mentions of your business’s NAP information that can be indexed by Google.

NAP information in a standard text format is easier to index than an image, so it’s important to consider.

There are several ways to get a local online citation:

• When other website or an influencer mentions your business’s NAP (i.e., in a review for your business)
• Asking your business partners to cite your NAP on their website
• By listing your business on various online directories according to your location and niche

While the first and second options are fairly limited and harder to control, you can definitely put more efforts on the third.

Do a quick Google search to find online directories according to your industry and location. If you are located in the US, you can also use this list to find online directories by category, and this list for directories by city.

The most important thing when building your local citation is to maintain consistency in information. That is, if, for example, you just changed your business address, you must update your NAP information on all these listings.

II. Optimized Local Website

It’s easy to be tempted to solely focus on the looks of the website rather than its performance and functionality—a common mistake made by many local businesses.

However, your website as a local business is a very important part of your digital marketing strategy. One one hand, it’s your online business card, and it’s where people are going to visit when they want to check out your brand.

On the other hand, when used properly, your website can be a steady source of traffic, prospects, and ultimately, paying customers.

When planning and developing your local-focused website, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1.Mobile-Friendly

More and more people are using mobile devices exclusively, and as mentioned above, many are using “near me” queries on their mobile device to find your business.

So, having a mobile-friendly (or mobile-responsive) site is a must.

2.Load Speed

Studies have suggested that if your site loads in more than three seconds, more than half will leave immediately. Use Google’s PageSpeed insight to assess your current website speed, and make the necessary improvements.

3.Embedding Google Maps API

Embedding Google Maps on your page used to be a major local SEO ranking factor, and thus often abused by marketers. Since mid-2018 or so, Google has updated its algorithm and if you overuse Google Maps API, you can get penalized.

So, use Google Maps API according to its original purpose: providing a better user experience for your audience. Embed Google Maps API with proper location tag in your About Us (or similar) page.

Also, if you have several locations for your business, create different location pages and embed the right Google Maps location for each.

4. Content and Keyword Optimizations

We can divide website content into two different categories: static and dynamic.

Static content is the pages that are relatively “fixed”, you won’t update it frequently, and mainly contain fixed information about your business. For example, your About Us page, locations page(s), product/service page(s), and so on.

Dynamic content, on the other hand, is the pages that are frequently updated. The most common form of dynamic content pages is a blog, but nowadays it can also be videos and podcasts.

When developing your content, there are three main purposes to pay attention to:

• To attract more people to your website, and convert them into prospects and visitors.
• To get backlinks for each content page, which will also help Google Maps SEO, as discussed above
• To target location-based keywords so your page and site can rank on these keywords

III. Social Media Marketing

As we have mentioned at the beginning of this article, social media is now one of the main ways people can learn about local businesses.

It’s worth discussing that social media marketing consists of three different aspects:

• Organic social media marketing. Which is, building organic followers by consistently posting engaging and valuable content.
• Paid social media marketing. Using paid advertising options provided by the social media network, and other paid marketing options to reach more audience.
• Influencer marketing, endorsing an influencer to promote your brand.

The key here is to find a balance between all three: organic social media marketing is obviously important, but it will take time and significant effort before you can build your followers.

Paid social media ads and influencer marketing, on the other hand, can work instantly, but obviously the issue here is budget. Also, influencer marketing won’t be maximized unless you already have a decent organic social media presence.

End Words

We have discussed the three most important channels to focus on in local marketing. All three are long-term tactics, so the most important thing to focus on is consistency.

Evaluate your progress regularly, hire a local SEO expert and reoptimize or adjust your strategy whenever necessary.

The post Local Marketing: 3 Important Areas To Focus On appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

To compete in the overly competitive digital landscape of 2026, you’ll need to focus on twelve specific areas.

While you’ve probably heard about these, how many details do you really know to make each one effective? They’re all the standards for this year and into the coming decade.

Take a look at each one and see how much you really know. Then assess what elements of them you need to hone in on. These all range from SEO to landing pages. In-between, you may learn some new things about local search marketing and the ever-popular format of video.

1. SEO

There isn’t anything more important to digital marketing than SEO, something that might still mystify you in its ongoing complexity. While it’s true Google’s algorithms can still become confusing, you can better grasp how it works when you work more with the concept.

It’s always better to have an expert to manage SEO for you if you want to truly succeed. While you can learn some basics, you’ll want someone who’s worked in it a while to fully help you realize the best strategies.

One recent strategy involves new HTTPS requirements already impacting SEO results. If you’re used to using HTTP pages, Google now suggests you to switch to a HTTPS format. The reasoning behind this is many contact forms using HTTP pages aren’t deemed secure enough.

Now that Google is going to label these “non-secure”, it’s essential to update your website with the HTTPS designation. Otherwise, having a “non-secure” stamp on your site could become a new scarlet letter for your placement on search engines.

An expert B2B SEO services will help you make this change.

2. Search Engine Marketing

If you’re new to search engine marketing, you’ll usually see it abbreviated as SEM. It’s a form of Internet marketing where you increase your SERPs through paid advertising methods.

You’ll want an expert to help you in this field as well, especially one who’s worked with Google Ads and search/display ads. In the case of Google Ads, you’ll want to educate yourself first on how the process works.

What you’ll appreciate the most is Google makes its Google Ads easy to use through their attention to customization. They let you choose whether you want graphic display ads, YouTube video ads, text-based search ads, or in-app mobile ads. All of these are going to depend on your business style and the targeted customers you need to reach.

Google makes it even easier with localized ad capability, plus superior metrics to track how well your ads work.

Don’t forget about other paid ad opportunities, especially Facebook Ads. The latter gives you ample opportunity to customize to multiple ad formats.

3. Local Search Marketing

You’re seeing a lot more attention on local search marketing in the last few years. It’ll continue being important far into the coming decade as local businesses realize the value of being found by local consumers.

To get started with local search marketing, you can again utilize more gifts from Google. Through Google My Business, you’ll be able to have your listing turn up the second someone does a Google search based on the user’s keywords. This includes your business appearing on Google Maps.

Google makes it easy to update your listing as well so nothing becomes out of date.

Don’t forget about how important online reviews are, as well as your social reputation. You’ll want to inspire customers to write positive reviews on places like Yelp. On social media, starting conversations and posting targeted content helps you utilize inbound marketing. Inbound techniques attract customers to you rather than you seeking them.

4. Content Marketing

As a connective string to inbound marketing above, content marketing is a big part of attracting a targeted audience. What’s essential about content marketing is that you need to make your content valuable, relevant, and consistent to make it worth the time of those consuming it.

In today’s time, you need to focus on creating content that can solve pain points and stay evergreen. Using shortcuts or black hat SEO tactics just to move to the top of search engines won’t work thanks to Google’s all-seeing eye.

So always keep “content is king”, as many like to put it. To make content marketing work well, you need to focus on mobile content, native advertising, influencer marketing, and marketing automation.

Think seriously about mobile content because smartphones are already making up 50% of all global devices. This is going to affect digital advertising, and how influencers promote your brand.

Automation tools send content to prospects on their mobile devices at just the right times.

5. Remarketing

Another critical aspect of digital marketing is going after prospects again with marketing content if they didn’t respond to your site’s banner ads the first time. This works by tracking these visitors through cookies and creating new ads on related sites.

You can also create new ads on your site to better target your prospects. The information you get from your site visitors gives you valuable data to tweak your ads to their pain points.

Ultimately, remarketing helps you stay more engaged with prospects, aids in brand awareness, and increases conversions. You can also gain the customers of your competitors, helping pay back any investment you place in creating new ads.

6. Responsive Web Design

Reaching customers by mobile is more or less the standard now, and that’s going to go on into the coming decade. Making your website conform to mobile screens is one of the most essential parts of digital marketing. The only way you can make this work successfully is through responsive web design.

With responsive programming, you can make your website automatically conform to all mobile screens. This is going to mean more than one format, including tablets and increasing use of smartwatches.

While you’ll have to work with a web designer to make this work, you’ll want an SEO expert for another aspect of RWD. AMP (or Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a new open-source code helping to make mobile web pages load faster.

Google gives precedence to websites using this, so take it seriously. It’s especially useful if you have a publishing site or post content to your website on a regular basis.

7. Email Marketing

No doubt you’ve done some email marketing, but how effective is it in reaching your intended targets at the right times? Email marketing is already a great tool for generating more leads than possible through any other marketing method. You can also increase your sales and conversion rates.

If you’re already suffering from overspending on other digital marketing, email marketing is one of the most affordable methods out there. In some cases, it’s free, unless using outsourced services.

Since you can combine it with other media, it’s also one of the most integrated marketing methods. You can add social share icons, plus referral reward systems. Email marketing ultimately helps you shorten your sales cycles when using compelling content.

8. Social Media Marketing

No doubt you’ve posted content to social media already. Yet, what can you do to make it more effective this year and the next?

To capture today’s audiences, Forbes notes various things, including automation to post your content when you know your audience is reading. Using tools like Hootsuite for post scheduling helps immensely when reaching users in other time zones.

You’ll also want to curate some content if possible to prove your clout. Don’t be too proud to do this since it adds luster to your expertise and brand. When you curate content from others, they’ll likely reciprocate.

Plus, don’t forget about hiring influencers to post content for you on popular social media channels.

9. Marketing Automation

As you can see, marketing automation is an important element in a lot of digital marketing techniques. Knowing more about it, in general, should become a top priority as it becomes a standard for businesses around the globe.

With 91% of successful businesses now saying automation is very important to their success, you can get a vision of what the present and future of marketing is.

To become successful with this, try looking for a CRM platform with marketing automation built-in. These can work together well because your CRM already has contact information. Automating marketing content directly to your contact list helps you integrate your marketing all in one place rather than using disparate sources.

What’s most important with automation is to keep your content consistent across all channels to avoid brand confusion.

10. Influencer Marketing

Have you thought about how you can take on a digital marketing campaign without having to spend a fortune? While you can save money doing email marketing and inbound techniques, hiring influencers does the same.

If you think hiring influencers to promote your brand online is all about hiring celebrities, think again. An influential person on social media doesn’t always have to mean being a celebrity. It can simply be someone with a lot of followers and a good track record of promoting products.

Forbes notes you need to identify top influencers first, which is going to involve a little research. You can do this by doing hashtag searches on places like Twitter to see what people are saying about topics related to your industry.

Reach out to these influencers on social media and ask them if they’d be willing to promote your brand. Some may offer to do it in exchange for free products. However, most are going to demand a fee.

Be sure to track your results to assure your ROI. Keep in mind those with fewer followers can have just as much influence as those with ten times the amount of followers.

11. Video

Over the last decade, we became a more visual culture attracted to imagery in the digital realms. A lot of this comes in various forms, but there isn’t any question video rose to the top.

We’re at the point now where more consumers of content prefer video above any other visual medium. Recent statistics show 87% of all online marketers now use video content of some sort.

A lot of this comes from massive viewership on places like YouTube. Regardless, where you post videos isn’t going to matter without compelling content.

The personalized video has become a norm lately, or at least ones directly addressing pain points of targeted viewers. The same goes with making your business look more human.

Successful video marketing can mean behind-the-scenes tours of your business, or testimonials to show the human side of your brand.  This means paying attention to one major trend in video marketing: Storytelling.

When you can tell a compelling story about your business and prove you can solve the pain points of customers, you have a can’t-miss formula.

It’s also smart to keep your videos as short as possible, if not in a series. Attention spans are as short as ever, and you’ll need to tell your story in a compact way with a compelling hook.

12. Revisiting Your Landing Pages

If you’ve already created a landing page as part of your digital marketing campaign, are you sure prospects who visited before are going to come back?

This is a question that should become the central core of your digital marketing efforts. All marketing experts reiterate how landing page traffic is the nucleus of successful inbound marketing.

The problem is your landing page perhaps isn’t very enticing at the moment. Solving this (in part) comes down to web design, including where you place your Call to Action and advertising.

It goes beyond what you place on your website, though. You’ll want to invest in PPC advertising (pay-per-click) consulting services to place ads for your site on related digital channels.

Other options include buying sponsorships with other companies, or just simple email marketing. In the latter case, placing a link that takes the reader to your landing page for further content is a common strategy.

For CTA’s, be sure to include one on your homepage to avoid complications. Even a CTA at the end of your blog gives a connective string to your content to entice another visitation.

Plus, pay attention to the “above vs. below the fold” debates. Kissmetrics once noted that CTA placement depends on the length of your landing page. A shorter page means you should place the CTA above the folder.

Final Thoughts

Follow these twelve steps, and you’ll be off to a good start in digital marketing strategies for the rest of the year. Expect these to stay relatively the same well into 2026 as well.

Don’t be afraid to work with inbound marketing consultants (especially in SEO) so you don’t make mistakes after weeks or months of hard work.

The post 12 Effective Digital Marketing Tactics and Strategies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

There are two ways to market your business on Google Maps.

First, is to invest in Google’s local search ads. When people search for local businesses both in Google Maps or Google search, this local search ad will be displayed on top of other results. Local Search ads use Google’s standard CPC (Cost Per Click) model, so there’s not much strategy besides bidding more money according to your location and niche.

The second, which will be our focus in this guide, is to rank organically on Google Maps. It’s important to note that Google ‘only’ displays the top 3 Google Maps results for any local queries (including “near me” queries) on Google search results. Yes, they are placed below the local search ad, but organic results will always provide more value for users.

Why Google Maps Marketing Is Important

In this advanced age of social media transparency, there are three main ways how people find out about local businesses:

• Through content, including social media posts from influencers and their friends/family, YouTube videos, and so on.
• Via Google search and Google Maps, often accompanied by checking out reviews on platforms like TripAdvisor and Yelp.
• Through advertisements. Not as effective as it used to be, but it’s still there

With Google Maps marketing, we are effectively capturing one of the three main sources of traffic. By being on the top 3 results on Google Maps—according to our niche and location—, we can get three main benefits:

1. Building awareness: the Google Maps result will link to Google My Business listing, which will give various information like photos, store hours, address, what we are selling, etc.
2. Get more calls: Users can directly click the “Call” button on the search result, giving them an easier time to call your business
3. More store visits: Users can ask for directions immediately from the search result.

Google Maps Ranking Factors

Before we can optimize our listing to rank higher on Google Maps, we must first learn about the important factors that will determine our ranking.

According to Google’s Guidelines for local ranking, there are three main factors:

• Relevance

How relevant your listing is to the searcher’s intent. In practice, this is mainly about your Google My Business (GMB) listing (will be discussed further below). How complete and relevant your Google My Business information is, the usage of keywords in business title and information, whether your listing is verified, etc.

• Distance

How close your business’ location is to the location specified by the searcher, or the searcher’s location (for “near me” queries). For example if restaurant A and B have similar relevance to the searcher’s query, but restaurant B is closer, restaurant B will rank higher than restaurant A. There’s not much we can optimize about this factor besides providing correct and complete information about our location.

• Prominence

In short, how well-known a business is according to Google’s algorithm. This is why, for example, an established, well-known restaurant usually ranks higher than a fairly new restaurant with more optimizations.

In practice, Google collects various information from the internet to determine a business’s prominence:

1. Articles talking about your business
2. Backlinks to your website (since your website URL is included in your Google My Business listing)
3. Mentions of your business’s NAP (Name, Address, Information) on the internet. This will include if you list your business on various online directories
4. More reviews and positive ratings on Google Maps and other review sites
5. Social media mentions and engagements

So, our optimizations for Google Maps Marketing will focus on these factors.

Step-By-Step Guide To Google Maps SEO

Step 1: Claiming Your Google My Business Listing

Claim your business

Google Maps’ results are based on Google My Business listings, so it will only make sense that this first step is also the most crucial one.

First, do a quick Google search for your brand/business name to check whether there’s already a GMB listing for your business. If your business has been around for some time, there’s a good chance that there’s already a GMB listing that you can claim. Alternatively, you can check here and make the claim directly.

There’s also the possibility that others have claimed your business listing, but don’t worry that Google provides an option to request ownership here. Just follow the required steps, and as long as you can verify ownership, you’ll get the claim.

Step 2: Optimizing Google My Business Listing

The next step is to provide as complete and accurate information on your Google My Business listing.

Important: focus on providing comprehensive information for your human audience, and not to please the search engine’s algorithm. Don’t emphasize keyword usage too much here, use the target keywords sparingly and make sure they occur naturally.

Make sure all information details are accurate and grammatically correct, including proper capitalization for your business name and address.

Choose the most relevant category for your business. There are a lot to choose from, but remember that it is about what your business is and not what you sell.

Also, depending on your business, make sure to provide the correct information about your service area. If you provide delivery service, state so. If you business operates at the customer’s place (construction companies, home services, etc.), state the correct information.

Make sure to enter your business hours accurately, and update them whenever there’s any changes. If you have different business hours during the weekends, holidays, or other events, there’s an option to customize your information.

Step 3: Adding Photos To Your Google My Business Listing

According to Google themselves, listings that include photos get 42% more requests for directions on Google Maps, and 35% more website visitations.

Important note: if you can, take photos on or near your business’s physical location. Google will extract the metadata information from the photos.

Make sure your photos are well-taken, can represent what your business is about, and are with the correct format and size.

Step 4: Verifying Google My Business Listing

Google will send a postcard with a verification PIN to your business’s physical address

Once you’ve provided all the correct information, it’s time to verify your Google My Business listing.

Unverified listing will affect ranking performances, and you will be locked out from some Google My Business features (i.e., the ability to use https://posts.withgoogle.com).

Generally, the verification process is done via mail, where Google will send a postcard with a verification PIN to your business’s physical address. (Thus, it’s important to provide a correct address and not a virtual office). The verification process is typically done within a week.

For some business types where not having a physical location is possible, verification via email or phone call is also possible.

Step 5: Local SEO Link and Citation Building

Link building in Google Maps marketing is different than organic, traditional SEO.

In general, here are important link types that will affect your local SEO performance:

1. Citation (NAP mentions), including online local directory
2. Industry-related sites in your area
3. Local websites
4. Local press sites
5. Local chamber of commerce sites

Building Citations

Citations are the most valuable links in the world of Google Maps SEO, and there are two main ways to get citations:

1. Get you NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information mentioned completely by a reputable local site (i.e. bloggers, reviewers, other relevant sites in your industry).
2. Listing your NAP in various online directories according to your location and niche/industry

For the first, there is no other shortcut besides building your own reputation (both online and offline), and build relationships with relevant local sites, especially those with close ties to your industry/niche.

The latter, however, is more important (and more accessible). A quick Google search will help you find online directories according to your industry/category and location. Alternatively, you can also use this list by Moz for online directories by city (U.S. cities), and this list for citations based on category.

There are two things to keep in mind during the citation building process: first, make sure to include accurate and complete information. Second, maintain consistency of information across all the different listings, especially the NAP information.

Meaning, if you change your business’s location, you’d have to update your NAP information across all these listings. Google treats misinformation very seriously, and inconsistent information might cause penalty or permanent ban, so make sure to carefully pay attention to this aspect.

Local SEO Link Building

There are three major areas to focus on in link building for Google Maps marketing:

• Local sites that are related to your industry, like local newspapers, schools & universities, local chamber of commerce and other government entities, etc.
• Your business partners’ sites
• Local influencers and important figures

Remember that quality is more important than quality. In fact, Google discourages excessive link exchanges between businesses, and you might get penalized if you get too many backlinks in a short period of time. In general, focus on ‘just’ getting two or three high-quality backlinks every month.

Step 6: Get More (Positive) Review

Positive reviews are not only important as a major ranking signal, but as a social proof, reviews are also important to build awareness and encourage conversions.

Focus on getting more positive reviews on your Google Maps listing, but reviews on third-party sites, especially major ones like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Facebook Places, among other platforms, are also important for Google Maps ranking purposes.

Regarding reviews, there are several factors that will affect your Google Maps ranking:

1. Listing on major review sites (Yelp, Glassdoor, BBB, TripAdvisor, etc.). It is worth noting that Google My Business/Google Maps listing is still the most important
2. Number of positive reviews, pretty self-explanatory: the more, the better
3. Keywords and location usage on reviews. When the reviewers use the city name or keywords, Google will perceive that you are a trustworthy local business.
4. The number of responses are also important. On the other hand, negative reviews not responded to will negatively impact your ranking

With that being said, here are some tactics you can try to encourage more positive reviews:

• Offer incentives

A common, but effective practice is to offer incentives to your existing customers in exchange of (positive) reviews. For example if you have a restaurant, you can offer free desserts or discounts after they showed your staff a review on your Google Map listing.

• Respond to existing reviews

People are more likely to leave reviews on businesses that frequently respond to existing ones, including and especially the negative ones. Above, we have also discussed that Google took account on the number of review responses as a ranking signal.

• Use social media

Share, retweet, and pin positive reviews so that more people can see it. This will also encourage them to leave theirs. Also, resolve negative issues publicly on social media.

End Words

Google Maps marketing or local SEO, as you can see from the six steps we have discussed above, isn’t exactly rocket science. Anyone can do it with limited technical knowledge, but the key is consistency.

Consistent in your citation building efforts, keep encouraging customers to leave positive reviews, and especially maintain consistent and up-to-date information. Do this for 6 to 12 months, and you’ll see your Google Maps listing steadily climb up the ranking.

The post Your Ultimate Guide to Google Maps Marketing appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, it’s fairly obvious that if you are a local business, having a strong search presence is a must.

However, another aspect we will need to consider is to actually know how we can track conversions from the search engine. Here, we will show you how.

Below, we will discuss how we can track how many website visits and phone calls are generated from your Google Maps results. This data will show us what is working—and what needs further optimizations— on the Google My Business listing.

We will also learn about useful data such as how a specific user found your business, the user’s location, and what time of the day they are interacting with your business, among other insights.

All of these analytics will be done strictly from the Google My Business (GMB) dashboard. So, if you haven’t claimed your Google My Business listing, check out our previous guide to help you with this aspect (as well as optimizing your listing for better ranking).

Let us begin with the first step.

Step 1: Google My Business Location Dashboard

Sign in to your Google My Business account. Then, you can click the menu (the three bars on the top left corner) and select “All locations”. Keep in mind that you will need a verified listing, so if you haven’t already, you can check here on how you can verify your Google My Business listing.

After you’ve clicked the “All locations” button, you are now taken to the locations dashboard. Select the location you want to view (if you have only one location, this will be selected by default).

Step 2: Using Google Insights

In your Google My Business location dashboard, there’s the “View insights” button under the insights section. Here, you can monitor the different kinds of information about your business.

You can check Google’s complete guidelines about the insights feature here, but generally there are six main categories:

• How customers search for your business
• Customer actions
• Where customers find your business on Google
• Photo views
• Photo quantity
• Phone calls

Since here we will mainly look to find information about phone calls and site visits, we can go to the “customer actions”.

Step 3: Tracking Quantity of Website Visitors

In the “Customer actions” tab, we can track information about website visits, request for directions, and the number of phone calls made by clicking on the “call now” button on your Google Maps result or Google My Business listing.

Here, we will specifically track the number of customers who visited your site by clicking on your GMB page. It is important to know that this insight won’t show your website visitors from other sources (from links on social media, etc. )

On the “Customer actions” page, you will be shown a graph showing the three metrics, and you can view data from the last 7, 30, or 90 days.

You can also click on the “How customers search for your business” tab to analyze this result further. Here, you can find out how many site visitors directly searched for your brand name (so, they are already aware about your brand). You can also find out how many people found your business while searching for specific keywords (for example, “restaurant in NY”).

You can also check the “Where customers find your business on Google” tab to find how many visitors are coming from organic search versus Google Maps. This will give you an insight on whether to optimize your organic search or improve your Google Maps ranking.

Step 4: Tracking Number of  Phone Calls

It’s time to track how many people are calling your business. Again, this will only track phone calls that are made directly from Google Maps results.

This, for example, won’t track phone calls that are made by viewing your Google Maps results and punching the number manually on the phone. This is actually done by many people who searched on desktop devices. So, since mobile:desktop searches are now almost 50:50, it’s fairly safe to assume that you get double the number that’s listed on Google Insights.

For example, if your Google Insights shown 10 phone calls over the past 30 days, we can safely assume that you actually get around 20.

Within this “Phone calls” tab, you can check more detailed data, for example by breaking down phone calls in the specific time of the day, phone calls on the weekends, and so on.

This data will be useful when you implement time-specific campaign like Google Posts, or when you are about to run ad campaigns. You can either optimize specific times where a lot of people are already calling your business, or improve your weaker areas.

End Words

Tracking how your Google My Business listing is performing can give you better insights of your audience’s behaviors, how they are making their purchase decisions, and how you can capitalize on this data to grow your business.

Tracking your performance will also especially help in maximizing your marketing campaigns, where you can save costs and maximize.

Here, we can help you in performing a site audit to check various performances of your marketing campaigns and if you want a free consultation from us where we can show you how to get more local customers, you can check out local SEO services that will help you get more calls and customers.

The post Google My Business: How To Track Phone Calls and Website Visitors You Get From Google Maps appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, this guide will attempt to answer that question, specific to local SEO strategy. As with general SEO, there are hundreds of factors that will affect your local SEO ranking. However, the principle remains the same: it’s not about doing every single thing right, but making the right priorities.

Thankfully, there are several respectable studies that have discussed the relevant local search ranking factors, such as this one by MOZ, and this one by Local SEO Guide.

Below, we will discuss several factors you should prioritize on, and how to optimize each of them.

Let us begin with the first one.

Google My Business Factor

Not surprisingly, several factors related to Google My Business are crucial for local SEO rankings. According to MOZ’s report discussed above, these signals account for 19% of your local SEO success.

There are many important factors related to Google My Business, from proximity to keyword inclusion in your business name. Yet, here are the top three most important ones:

1. Be a Verified Account

Although this is seemingly an obvious step, creating a verified Google My Business account can be tricky, causing many business owners to neglect this step.

Yet, if you are a brick and mortar business, you definitely need to invest a little time to figure out the process and get verified. Here are several things you will need to focus on:

• Write the right description for your business. Not only the description must be unique and thorough, the length must also be proper.
• Upload at least 5 unique photos
• Make sure all the details are correct and up-to-date
• Choose the right categories. Be as specific as you can. This tool by Mike Blumenthal can help.

2. Proper Photos

The number of photos on your business page matters a lot to your local SEO ranking. Invest a little bit of your time to take proper pictures, or hire a photographer if necessary.

What kinds of pictures should you focus on? Here are a few ideas:

• The location itself, including the retail area, parking lot, the building of your business (if any), etc.
• Your products or services. If you are a restaurant, you should know the importance of beautiful food pictures
• Key staffs, and depending on your approach, you as the owner
• Your customers

3. Reviews

Off all other factors, the number of your Google reviews matters the most to your local SEO and Google Maps rankings. Let me repeat: reviews are the most important ranking factor for local SEO.

You will need at least five reviews before Google start showing them on your Google My Business page, and you should focus on growing the numbers (as well as tackling bad reviews).

How to attract more reviews? Here are a few ideas:

• Before anything else, read Google’s guidelines for reviews thoroughly
• Ask your customers for reviews, and offer incentives when necessary. For example, you can offer discounts to your restaurant customers
• Make it easier to land a review, such as generating a direct link to your Google My Business page.
• Reply to negative reviews, as fast as you can
• Focus on delivering the best customer experience. This might seems like a cliche, but it is still the best way to gain positive reviews

Links

One common misconception is that for local SEO and Google Maps rankings, backlinks aren’t important. However, after the Pigeon algorithm update, links and other traditional SEO factors are now also important.

So, what should you focus on out of all the backlink factors? Here are the most prominent ones:

1. Number of Linking Domains

As with traditional SEO, the quantity of your link is the most important factor regarding backlinks. So yes, you will also need to do link building for your local SEO.

2. Link Quality

Again, as with traditional SEO, not only the quantity that matters, but also the quality of your links. Try to get as many relevant links as you can, and remember that Google won’t account repeated links to their Maps ranking. This guide will help you to assess and build high-quality backlinks.

Notable Local On-Page Factors

Keyword

Although both traditional and local SEO isn’t solely about keywords anymore, they still matter. Keywords occurrences in your content, as well as HTML tags, will also help you rank in local SEO.

A common myth in local SEO is that you will also need to focus on the name of the city and state as keywords. However, studies suggested that using the name of the city and state in title tags, URLs, and body of the pages won’t make any significant contribution to your Google Maps ranking.

Instead, focus on natural keyword occurrences that will also appeal to human readers.

Word Count

The length of your content will also matter, the longer the content, the better for your ranking. In fact, it is one of the most important on-page factors for local SEO.

However, that doesn’t mean you can simply stuff more words on your pages. Your content will also need to appeal to human readers. As a general rule of thumb, do a little research on how high-ranking competitors fare with their content length. Aim to have a similar length, and you should be good to go.

Tools like SEO Powersuite will help with comparing keywords and the respective content analysis.

Notable Local Off-Page Factors

Citations

Consistency in citations, especially in Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) plays a significant role in your local SEO ranking. Focus on getting citations from reputable directories, both from your local side and niche side.

Total Number of Reviews

Google loves not only Google reviews, but also looks at other sites and directories. Refer to the tips we have discussed above on how to attract more reviews and respond to bad ones.

Bottom Line

As with general SEO, the most important thing with local SEO strategy is consistency and tracking your progress. The principles behind traditional SEO and local SEO remains the same in a lot of ways, you just need to focus on different things.

Ther are many tools that can help you track your progress, BrightLocal, Whitespark, and SEO Powersuite being some of the good examples.

In a very competitive brick and mortar business, doing your local SEO strategy right can be the major differentiator from your competition.

The post Local SEO Ranking Factors to Help Your Business Rank on Google appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Pair this with the fact that more and more people are now using their mobile devices to make a search, a huge part of them using “near me” search queries to find local businesses near their location. So, especially for businesses targeting the local audience, optimizing for local search is a must.

Local SEO, however, can be quite complex, requiring both on-site and off-site efforts to work together. So, here we will present you with our checklist for local SEO optimization, so that you can start a systematic effort to optimize your site and business listing(s).

Let us begin by discussing the most important ranking factors affecting local search, especially for Google Maps results.

Local SEO Top Ranking Factors

So, what are the most important ranking factors affecting Google Maps ranking? Based on our own experiences, as well as various studies, here they are:

• Location: specifically, how close is your business’s location(that is registered on your Google My Business listing) to the searcher’s location. If for example, two buinesses have similar optimizations on other factors, the one closer to the searcher will rank higher.
• Reviews: the number of positive reviews on Google Maps, as well as on third-party platforms (indirectly).

• Website Optimizations: especially, domain authority. However, this factor is not as prominent as in organic B2B SEO, as citations and your Google My Business listing’s optimizations will matter more. Things like internal linking structure, anchor texts usage, backlinks, and technical factors (loading speed, mobile-responsiveness) belong in this category.

• Local Citations: any mention of your business’s NAP on the internet. The keys here are quantity and quantity. You’d want to have as many citations as you can, but you have to maintain consistency of information.

• Keywords Usage: natural inclusion of keywords on business names, descriptions, and so on can be beneficial, keep in mind that Google frequently checks for over-optimization. If you can include a keyword in your business/domain name, this is a great long-term strategy.

• Category: in this case, how you use the “category” within your Google My Business listing. Choose a proper category that represents what your business does. You can also use sub-categories to further optimize your listing and attract a wider audience.

Local SEO Checklist For 2020

Based on the ranking factors discussed above, here are the key areas to optimize when aiming to improve your Google Maps ranking:

1. Mobile-Responsiveness and Load Speed

Nowadays, Google prioritizes recommending mobile-friendly sites on its search results. Also, a slow page load speed can lead to a high bounce rate, which can affect your ranking.

So, here are the things to consider in this aspect:

• Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to assess your site’s current state. You can also check manually by opening your site on at least several mobile devices.
• If you use forms, don’t include too many fields. Make sure your it is easy to type in these fields.
• Make sure all buttons (especially CTAs) are easily clickable on a mobile device.
• If your site is WordPress-based, you can change your theme into a mobile-responsive one.
• You might want to check out this guide on how to improve your site’s speed.

2. Optimizing Internal Linking Structure

Improving the internal linking structure is very important for any SEO efforts, but is often overlooked. In general, internal linking has three main benefits:

• Improving website navigation, which can translate to people spending more time on your site. This can bring various other benefits from conversions to ranking improvements (by improving your site’s dwell time).
• Distributes page authority throughout the site, meaning, more pages will have better chances to get ranked.
• Improving your site’s architecture, so Google can easily index your site. This can lead to a huge benefit for ranking purposes.

With those points being said, you might want to check out this guide by Neil Patel on how to improve your internal linking structure

3. Optimizing Your Google My Business Listing

Your Google My Business listing is the core aspect if you are aiming for a higher Google Maps ranking. The more optimized your GMB listing is, the more relevant Google will perceive your business.

Optimizing your Google My Business listing is, admittedly, fairly complex with various different areas to focus on. So, here we have compiled the key steps:

• Claim your GMB listing. Fairly obvious, you can click here to get started.
• Verify your listing. Unverified GMB listing can be locked out from several useful features (i.e., Google Posts), and obviously Google will prefer verified listings to rank higher. You can check here on how you can verify your GMB listing. However, generally Google will send a postcard containing a verification PIN to your physical business address. (So, make sure to use a valid address).
• If you have multiple locations, remember to claim one listing for each.
• Pay extra attention to your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number), make sure to use a complete and up-to-date physical address. Make sure the NAP information matches the one displayed on your site, as well as any other online listings of your business. Consistency is very important here.
• If your business has a service-area (i.e., if your business deliver the products to your customers), specify that information (you can specify your service area in miles). This way, Google will not display your business address but will inform your prospects about your service area.
• It is better to use local phone number instead of nation-wide or regional number. Avoid using tracking numbers or toll-free numbers.
• Enter the URL of your site accurately. If you have multiple business locations, you can create specific pages for each location, and link each GMB listing to the specific page for that location.
• Choose a primary category that represents your business. You can also choose subcategories to attract a wider audience.
• Add photos. Google will track your photos’ location metadata, so it is better to use photos taken in your premise, or at least, nearby. You can also upload videos of up to 30-seconds long to engage your audience.
• Make sure to include accurate business hours. You can customize this information by adding business hours for the holidays and weekends.
• Use attributes to highlight unique features provided by your business, for example, if you are offering an outdoor area or unisex toilet.

4. Local-Focused Content

Content is everything for SEO, and we must first understand that “local content” is not only about stuffing your content with city or location names. Instead, the main goal is how you can attract more local audience to these pages.

There are various approaches you can use here. Obviously the most common practice is to create a content informing that you provide your product or service to a specific location (for example,
“restaurant in New York”). However, let’s face it, everyone is doing this, so this type of content will rarely bring you a boost in rankings, just a mandatory practice.

Instead, here are the key principles in building a local content repertoire:

• Create different content pieces if you have multiple locations. The content of each should be absolutely unique.
• Longer content pieces tend to perform better, aim to have more than 500 words of content per page with more than 1000 words being ideal
• Be creative. You can, for example, create a content covering local events or what’s happening in the target location. Don’t solely aim to sell your product or service, but be the informative authority of your target location
• Use local customer testimonials for each specific location. If you can get local celebrities, elected officials or other prominent figures to talk about your brand, even better.
• Make sure to use keywords naturally. Your aim is to have a comprehensive, valuable content for human readers.

5. Embedding Google Maps

Above, we have discussed that you should create different pages for each location, if you have multiple locations. Embedding a Google Maps location on each of these pages will be a huge plus, not only for Google Maps ranking, but so that customers can have an easier time in finding your business.

Embedding a Google Maps location is a fairly easy process, and you can check out Google’s guide on this topic here.

6. Optimizing NAP On Your Website

There are two main things to consider about displaying your NAP information:

• Make sure it’s well structured and comprehensive. Also, while using a properly designed image to display your NAP information might be pleasing, aesthetic-wise, Google will have a harder time parsing it. Use a well-structured text-based information instead
• Make sure it’s easy to find. You can experiment with different placements and track their performances.

Again, it’s important to always maintain consistency with your NAP information anywhere it’s listed. If, for example, you just changed your business address, you’ll have to update all of your listings, starting with your site.

7. Optimizing Descriptions

There are two types of descriptions we will discuss here: the description section on your Google My Business listing, and meta descriptions on your website.

You will need a meta description for each page on your site, especially those dedicated for specific locations. There are two main principles to consider here:

• Focus on attracting and engaging human readers. So, use the local keywords sparingly and naturally.
• Keep your descriptions within 130-165 characters while including the keywords naturally. Be clear, specific, and accurate. Consider including a call to action phrase within the description

8. Optimizing Title Tags

The title tag is what will be displayed by Google in the search results page when someone searches for your keywords.

In the past, we can get away with including exact-match keywords in the title tags to get ranked quickly and effectively. However, nowadays Google is very concerned with over-optimizations, and it is better to use semantically-related keywords instead.

For example, if your target keyword is “best steakhouse in Toronto”, you can use “where to find the best steak in Toronto” or similar phrases.

The main principles when optimizing title tags are:

• Keep your titles below 60 characters. This way, your title will be displayed correctly on the SERP.
• Write unique titles for each page. You should especially focus on location-specific pages.

The main goal when optimizing title tags is to ensure both Google and your searchers can know exactly what the page is about. So, make sure it’s clear, concise, and comprehensive.

9. Optimizing Heading Tags

Use similar approaches as title tags when optimizing the heading tags of each page. Include semantically-related keywords, preferably on the front of the heading. Use H2 and H3 headings as necessary. You can also optimize H2 and H3 for keywords, but it’s not the main priority.

Again, focus on making these headings informative for your human readers.

10. Structured Data Markup

Structured data markup, or schema markup, is in essence, adding attributes and properties (the markups) on your site so Google (and other search engines) can understand your site better.

One of the main benefits of implementing structured data markups on your site is that your site will be eligible for rich results. Although rich results won’t directly benefit local SEO, it will benefit your overall search marketing efforts in general.

In local SEO, you can use structured data to help Google index your site (and the specific location pages) better, which can affect your ranking in the long run. You might want to work with SEO experts on implementing structured data markup for local SEO.

11. Getting More Online Reviews

As discussed above, the number of online reviews is one of the most important ranking signals if you want to improve your Google Maps ranking. Besides, we all know that most people nowadays read online reviews before deciding on any purchase, with 97% of shoppers surveyed said that reviews influenced their buying decisions.

In short, you’d definitely want to get more positive reviews, or else you are missing out on huge opportunities.

There are three main ways to get more reviews from your existing customers:

• Ask. Sometimes all it takes is to ask a particular customer for a review. You can ask in person when they visited your business, over an email, or other approaches. The key here is timing. For example, ask for a review when a customer has just made a repeat purchase.
• Incentives. You can offer incentives to encourage your customers. For example, you can offer discounts or even free products in exchange for this review. The key here is the incentive itself: give too little and you might not get any interest, give too much and it might hurt your profitability (and lower the quality of customers and reviews).

• Respond to existing reviews. People are more likely to leave reviews on businesses that frequently respond to previous reviews (including and especially the negative ones). Make sure to respond quickly and politely, and avoid offering false promises.

You should focus on getting more reviews not only on your Google Maps listing, but also on other review sites (major and minor ones). Develop a system where you can encourage more people to leave reviews based on the three approaches above.

12. Building Local Citations

Local citations are technically any mention of your business’s NAP information on the internet. In local SEO, we can generally get more citations by listing our business on online directories:

• Google My Business is technically an online directory, and also the most important one in regards to local SEO.
• Start with major online directories (Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.). You can use this list by HubSpot to find these directories
• Last but not least, there are a lot of local online directories according to your niche and location. You can use this list for directories by city (if you are in the US), and this list for citations based on category.

Here are the main principles you should consider when building local citations:

• If you have multiple locations, you will need to build citations for each of them, each with their own NAP information.
• Maintain consistency of NAP at all costs, including details like zip codes and abbreviations. If you used 5-digit zip codes on one listing, do so on other ones. If you use St. instead of street, use it consistently.
• If you don’t have control over a listing or another, contact the webmaster to fix inaccurate information. Again, maintain consistency.
• Generally, avoid using PO Box addresses. Use a valid physical address where your business is located.

13. Local Link Building

Backlinks won’t directly affect your Google Maps ranking, but will affect organic search rankings and traffic. If you have more traffic to your site, this can actually help with Google Maps ranking.

In link building, we shouldn’t aim at solely quantity, as the quality of backlinks is more important. Also, for local SEO, if you can get backlinks from authoritative sites in your target location, including famous local celebrities, etc., it’s going to be a huge plus point.

Here are some approaches you can consider when building backlinks for local SEO:

• Guest posting can be a great way to get more backlinks when done properly. Reach out to local sites and blogs, build relationships, and pitch your topic ideas.
• Attend local events and connect with other businesses, you can give each other backlinks or guest posts.
• Join local trade and commerce associations, this can be a good opportunity to build relationships.
• Build relationships with local press, submit press releases and ask them to cover your business.

In short, the key to link building is to actually relate with other businesses, local sites, and social media profiles.

The post Local SEO Checklist: Optimizing Your Google My Business Account appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

There are many ways to enhance your SEO that businesses and articles have focused on, but it’s also just as important to be aware of the most common mistakes that are made towards SEO so that you can avoid them no matter the cost. Indeed, a bad SEO strategy could actually damage your ranking and your business’s presence in search engines. Read on for the biggest SEO mistakes made so you can fix them and avoid them, thereby improving your site’s ranking.

1. Not developing a Google My Business

There is no doubt about it, your business absolutely requires a Google My Business profile. When people Google generic businesses like ‘clothing store’ or ‘bakery’ near them, the results that appear at the top of the page in list and map format come from Google My Business. If you want yours to be on the list, you need to set up this profile. It’s free to set up, and you can even verify it so no one else can use your listing in the future, so you can keep your customers for years and years.

This strategy for local search engine optimization is a quick win that you can do today. When you set up your Google My Business page, it’s important to fill it out with as much information as possible, and don’t forget to verify your listing.

2. Wrong or missing NAP information

NAP, which means Name, Address, and Phone number, is also crucial to get right online. In every place that your business is listed online, the NAP information needs to be the exact same everywhere. If it’s not listed, please add it as soon as possible, and if it’s incorrect or outdated, it should be updated right away to show the correct business information. It should also be consistent across all listings because potential customers may attempt to reach out to your business, and if they can’t reach you due to wrong information listed, you’ve lost a client.

3. Not focusing on the content

It’s necessary to have original, high-quality content that is consistently reviewed and updated if you want to have a good SEO strategy. If your content is weak, or repetitive of other sites, or out of date, it will have a negative impact on your SEO. Below is a compiled list of tools that will help you optimize your content.

• Study demic and Academ advisor – These are great websites to get copywriting guides and you can get guidance on improving your writing.
• Academized – This is an online editing tool as mentioned here, that will improve the quality of your post or content and allow you to add more regular content.
• Mywritingway – You can use this to check your grammar and make sure no mistakes or typos are sneaking in there.
• Paper Fellows and Australian help – These two sites are the places to go for online proofreading tools, with great forums to discuss editing in an SEO context.
• Via writing – Check this site for help coming up with content ideas, to generate keywords, SEO-friendly titles and descriptions and more.
• Big Assignments – This site, which has been mentioned by Australian reviewer, is the top site to consult for formatting tools and guidelines.

The first thing your potential customer will see on your website is your landing page. If it’s out of date, full of mistakes or irrelevant information, then you’ll not only lose a customer but the quick bounce will negatively affect your rating. There’s more on how you can avoid this in point 6.

4. No relevant backlinks

Another common mistake is forgetting or disregarding backlinks. If your website doesn’t have any authentic backlinks referring to it, it’s just negatively affecting your site and business. Having real and secure backlinks is a good step for your SEO, but it can be hard to line up for some businesses. It is worth investing the time and making connections with other businesses that can help.

Some suggestions to help you along would be to look for local business listings that work with your area of expertise, or local sites in your region that would accept a guest posting as a trade for a backlink. You can also speak to your suppliers and distributors for a backlink on their websites, and reach out to local media to be used as a source for their stories.

5. Not having local reviews

Don’t dismiss the importance of listing reviews on your site. The more reviews you have that are good quality, the better your site will rank on searches. Consider developing a system to make sure that you receive a constant stream of reviews that you can publish.

Todd Wallace, a digital marketer at Stateofwriting and Oxessays, provides some ideas for businesses to add to their strategy: “contact customers you’ve had in the past and clients and ask if they can leave a review, send an email to your current client base requesting the same, or post on social media asking for feedback. You should also ask customers to review your business immediately after a visit as a regular follow up.”

6. Having a low-quality website

If a site is low quality, it won’t get ranked by Google. They have built-in indicators of poor quality sites, such as high bounce rates and if people spend only a short amount of time on the site. Review your site design and landing pages, especially with the help of a professional website design team to make sure your site doesn’t have issues which may cause visitors to leave quickly. Customers who have a good experience on your site will spend longer on it and this will rank your business higher in search engines. Don’t forget to optimize your website for mobile users as well since many people are now accessing key information about businesses on the go on a mobile device.

Your focus as a business owner or manager should be growing and improving your business, and not wasting your time optimizing for SEO. With the assistance of SEO experts, develop a good SEO rankings strategy so you don’t need to worry about it anymore and you can focus on what matters. When you think about an SEO strategy, it’s not enough to think about what to do, but also consider what to avoid doing. By avoiding these common traps you’ll be able to see your SEO strategy pay off.

Nora Mork is a business and marketing journalist at Ukwritings and Boomessays. She helps brands create effective marketing strategies, and contributes tips to blogs and magazines, such as Essayroo.

The post Common Local SEO Mistakes That Are Negatively Affecting Your Business appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

If you are a brick-and-mortar business, or a business serving a local niche, not optimizing your listing on Google Maps is, put simply, missing out on a huge chunk of market, but yet many marketers are neglecting Google Maps marketing for one reason or another.

In this guide created by local SEO expert Mike, we will discuss how to easily -and effectively- implement Google Maps marketing with a simple checklist. When implemented correctly, this can lead  to more traffic, more prospect, and ultimately, more revenue from your Google Maps listing.

Let us begin.

Register and Verify Google My Business Account

To have a listing on Google Maps, we will need to have an account in Google My Business. There are two things to consider when registering your Google My Business account: first, make sure you are providing a complete and accurate information of your business (we will discuss the important elements in detail below).

Second, make sure to verify your account. Although there are various possible methods to do this, mainly Google will send a mail to your physical address, containing a PIN you can use to verify your account

Name, Address and Phone Number

Name, Address, and Phone Number, which are referred as NAP in the world of Google Maps marketing and local SEO, are the three most important aspects of your listing.

So, make sure all three of them are up-to-date and complete. If your business is located in the U.S., make sure you use the address as used by the USPS. In general, if you are using the same address used by your local postal service, you are good to go.

Also, you can set whether to display or not display your NAP information to customers in your Google My Business setting. In general, you should always enable them.

Business Category Information

When registering your Google My Business account, you will be given the opportunity to specify your business categories. Remember, your objective with these categories is no to describe your product or service, but what your business is. (i.e. “pizza restaurant” and “pizza delivery service”, not “pizza” or  “pasta”).

Use this opportunity to optimize your listing: don’t only state your primary category, but every possible categories your business is relevant in. Doing this can also lead to more traffic from people who are searching for various related categories.

For example, if you are a digital marketing consultation, you can set “digital marketing agency” as your primary category, and you can include “content marketing consultant”, “SEO service” and other related categories. The more the merrier, but make sure all of them are relevant.

Optimizing Introduction

Your “introduction” section is similar to your website’s META description, and so the principle is similar: here, you have the opportunity to showcase your business, your products or services, and your unique value propositions. Google will also use this introduction to determine your business’s relevancy for ranking purposes.

Focus on writing a comprehensive and compelling introduction for your human audience. You can include relevant keywords and location-focused keywords here, but make sure they are included naturally. You can also include links to your site and social media channels, but don’t include too many.

Soliciting Positive Reviews

Positive customer reviews are not only important as a Google Maps ranking signal, but is also important social proofs to drive more prospects and customers.

So, soliciting positive reviews is a very important aspect of Google Maps marketing, while you also need to properly manage the negative ones.

You can offer incentives like discounts, free products, and other offers to encourage more positive reviews. Ask your existing customers to leave reviews on Google Maps and other relevant review sites (Yelp!, TripAdvisor) in exchange of something valuable.

Properly determine whether a negative review is valid, or fake. If it’s fake, you can ask for a removal by providing proofs. You might also want to pursue legal actions.

If the negative review is valid, address it quickly and politely. Don’t deliver false promises and address the underlying problems, if any.

There are also many different tools available to help you monitor reviews. Use them to help you in this aspect.

Optimizing Photos

Google Maps is a visual platform, and listings with photos will gain more traffic compared to those who don’t. Add at least one professionally taken photo. Again, the more the merrier, especially if you are a business relying on ambiance.

Photos are also great optimization opportunity in improving your Google Maps ranking. You can optimize images by adding metadata using various third-party apps. You can include these in the metadata:

• Your keywords
• Your address, and/or latitude-longitude information
• City, town, country tags
• Your products and services

Building Citations

Citation to local SEO is similar to backlinks or inbound links to “traditional” SEO.

There are three different types of local citations:

• Listings on major platforms like Google My Business, Yahoo! Small Business, TripAdvisor, and others
• Local directories or industry-specific directories
• Mentions from reputable press, high-quality sites, etc. (in a nutshell, backlinks)

There are two main principles in building your local citations: First, the more the better, list your business in as many directories as possible.

Second, make sure to keep consistent information across all listings,especially your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number).

End Words

As you can see, implementing Google Maps marketing is actually pretty simple once you’ve got the hang of it. By following the checklist and maintaining consistency especially in building your local citations and soliciting reviews, you will see your Google Maps listing slowly climbing up.

Generally, you should expect at least 3 to 6 months before you see your business on the top 3 results. Regularly monitor your progress, evaluate it, and keep optimizing your strategy.

The post How To Grow Revenue using Google Maps Marketing appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Local SEO can be an effective solution for that problem: by ranking high on Google Maps, we can get more traffic, prospects, and ultimately, visitors. Yet, how can we effectively implement it? In this guide, we will learn how, from registering your Google Maps listing to optimizing your listing.

First, however, let us begin by discussing the concept of local SEO.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO, in a nutshell, is optimizing your business listing on Google Maps. Quite recently, Google implemented a major change on their Google Maps search results page: while previously Google listed 7 top results on the first page, now they only show 3.

Meaning, if your listing is outside this top 3 results for your specific industry and location, you will get significantly less visibility.

Is local SEO different than “traditional” B2B SEO then? Yes, and here are the main differences:

• First, obviously “traditional” SEO is targeting the Google search engine as opposed to Google Maps for local SEO.
• While traditional or organic SEO relies on backlinks or inbound links, local SEO relies on citations (we’ll discuss it more below)
• Traditional SEO is mainly about developing content, while it’s also true to local SEO, it’s less prevalent

A common misconception we should first address is that local SEO is not about targeting local keywords like “restaurants, Toronto” on your content. It’s a common practice in the past, but no longer relevant nowadays.

Why? Because for keywords that are tied to locations (try searching for “restaurants in Toronto” now), the Google Maps results will be on top of any other sites, usually followed by list articles like “Top 10 Restaurants in Toronto”. So, optimizing your site to rank organically for this keyword is very difficult.

Local SEO, in a nutshell, is optimizing your business listing on Google Maps. Quite recently, Google implemented a major change on their Google Maps search results page: while previously Google listed 7 top results on the first page, now they only show 3.

Why Is Local SEO Important?

We all know how more and more people are now using mobile devices as their main way to search and browse the internet. We should also consider the rise of smart home assistants in recent years from Amazon Alexa to Google Home to Apple HomeKit, among other products.

With these devices, near me” queries became more common,, especially when we are using voice search. If you are a brick-and-mortar business, not optimizing for these queries simply means missing out on a huge market.

Also, a Google Maps listing can effectively encourage prospects to purchase from your brand, with Google Maps reviews being very relevant social proofs nowadays.

Long story short, if you rank high on Google Maps, more people will be aware of your business and more people will trust your business. In turn, this will translate to more traffic to your listing and more visitors to your actual location.

Let’s use a fictional restaurant, the X Bistro as an example. If X Bistro can get the top 3 spots for the “restaurants near me” query when someone is near Toronto, there is a high likelihood this person will click on the X Bistro listing. If the review for X Bistro listing is also good, there is a high chance this person will visit our restaurant.

How To Rank on Google Maps

There are two main factors driving your ranking on Google Maps listing: proximity and relevancy. Before we can optimize our listing to rank better, we should learn these two different factors.

• Proximity

In a nutshell, the closer you are to the searcher’s location (or the location specified in the search query), the better you will rank.

• Relevancy

If the X Bistro is deemed more relevant than Y Restaurant by Google, X Bistro will rank higher. Yet, how does Google determine relevance? There are three main factors: how complete and up-to-date your listing is (including photos), your reviews, and your local citations.

So, Google Maps ranking is based on these two factors. Obviously, we can’t optimize proximity (unless somehow you have an unlimited budget and can build a location on every inch of the planet), so our main focus to rank better in Google Maps is to optimize the relevancy of our listing.

For the rest of this guide, we will learn how with a step-by-step approach.

Implementing Local SEO: A Step-By-Step Guide

Above, we have discussed that our local SEO efforts will be focused on optimizing the relevancy of our listing. Yet, how can we do that? Here, we will discuss how in just five simple steps.

Step 1: Register and Verify Your Google My Business Account

To optimize your listing, you should first have a listing. It’s fairly obvious, but still a very important step. There are also several details you might have missed when you registered your Google My Business account, and so make sure not to skip this part.

Here are some important considerations in this step:

• Make sure your address is complete and accurate. A good approach is to use the exact same address used by the USPS
• Specify your service area, if you can deliver your product/service to nearby towns or even cities, you can specify it in your listing
• List all possible categories related to your business. For example, since our X Bistro is specializing in steaks, we can list “restaurant”, “steakhouse”, “steak restaurant”, and so on. The more information you can provide Google, the better, but make sure they are all relevant.
• Optimize your introduction. You can include the relevant keywords here (i.e. “restaurant in Toronto”, but your main focus is to make sure this section is well-written for human readers.

Also, make sure to verify your Google My Business listing. Usually, Google will mail a postcard containing a unique PIN to your physical address, where you can use the PIN to verify your listing. Verifying your listing is very important, so don’t neglect this step.

The main principle of this step is, the more complete and accurate your information is, the better it will be for optimization purposes. Take your time to fill out all the necessary information including business hours, payment forms accepted, and so on.

Step 2: Optimizing Photos in Your listing

Google My Business and Google Maps are essentially visual in nature. What’s the first thing you see when looking at a Google Maps search result? Most likely it’s the photo(s).

Including and optimizing photos in your Google My Business listing has two different benefits:

• Obviously, having nice, well-photographed photos on your listing can drive more customers
• You can optimize your listing with photos, in relations to local SEO

With that being said, consider including at least one professional-looking photos in your listing. If ambiance or design is a crucial aspect of your business, you might want to include more pictures.

So, how can we use photos to optimize our listing? the answer is by optimizing the EXIF metadata of each picture. You can use various third-party tools to do this, some of them are free. Here is some metadata you might want to add to your images:

• Your geographic location tags (city, country, etc.)
• Your physical address
• Latitude and longitude details
• Your target keywords
• Details about services offered by your business (business category data)

Step 3: Building Local Citations

This step might be slightly more complicated than the previous ones, and so we will first explain the concept and main principles of local citations.

A local citation, in a nutshell, is an online mention of your local business which must include three important aspects: your business Name, Address, and Phone Number, which is often abbreviated as the NAP. There are three different types of local citations:

1.Major Local Business Platforms

These platforms include Google My Business (which we have covered), Infogroup, and Acxiom among others. Major social review sites like Yelp! or Facebook can also be included here.

2.Location and Industry-Specific Directories

There are sites and online directories that are focused on listing businesses in a specific location or businesses that belong to a specific industry. For example, Toronto Business Directory is focused on Toronto area, while the Toronto Dining Channel is focused on listing restaurant businesses in Toronto.

3. Other Citations

Other citations such as mentions from publications, blogs, relevant sites, and relevant apps can be valuable. In this case, the approach is similar to building backlinks for traditional SEO.

Our focus in this step is more about the first and second type of citations, while for the third type, we will discuss it further when discussing content development below.

Now, your main job in this step is to find all the relevant directories (both major and local platforms) according to your industry and location. Let’s go back to our example, the X Bistro. In this case, we would want to find local directories for Toronto (location) and restaurants (industry).

A quick Google search will help you find these relevant directories, and here are the important principles when building your citations:

• Make sure all your information are complete and up-to-date, as complete as your Google My Business listing discussed on step 1
• Pay special attention to NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number), make they are always consistent across all your listings
• The more the merrier, but the more listings you have, the more you will need to invest your time and resources, especially if the citation also features reviews. We will discuss this further below.

Your citations are one of your most important assets when talking about local SEO. Pay extra care to the effort in building your local citations, and evaluate your listings regularly.

Step 4. Driving Positive Reviews

In this era when social proof is extremely important,, soliciting positive reviews have two major benefits: first, obviously the more positive reviews you have, the more credible your business will be perceived by customers. This will translate to more prospects and eventually, more customers.

Also, positive reviews on your Google Maps listing, as well as relevant review sites like Yelp!, TripAdvisor, and Facebook, are a strong ranking signal for Google Maps.

So, how can we get more reviews? One of the most effective ways is to incentivize your existing customers. For example, you can offer discounts, freebies, or other special offers for those who leave positive reviews on your Google Maps listing.

Here are some important considerations for this step:

1. The best way to get more positive reviews is to offer service excellence and delivering an excellent product. There’s no shortcut around this.
2. You can use various monitoring tools to keep track of your reviews, as well as your competitors’. This can act as an effective market research method.
3. Also, an important factor is how you should handle negative reviews. If it’s a valid negative review from those who have purchased your product/service, handle it quickly and politely. Don’t ever deliver false promises.
4. For negative reviews coming from fake users, especially those with clear malicious intent (using harsh languages, etc.), you can ask Google Maps or the review platform to remove this review with sufficient proof. Consider taking legal actions if the attacks are serious.

Step 5. Developing Content

Content marketing is a pretty broad subject on its own, and we won’t give it much justice discussing it here. However, here are some key principles in implementing content marketing for local SEO purposes:

• The most important part here is targeting the right keywords (i.e., “restaurant Toronto”). Find keywords with enough search volume but manageable competition. However, focus on writing for human readers: write naturally, don’t overstuff keywords, and make sure the content is unique, valuable, and relevant.
• Aim to get more backlinks from relevant sites, which can act as a citation. Promote your content with social media, influencers, and other channels.
• Guest posting for relevant sites can be a good approach if you do it right.

Conclusion

While local SEO can be terrifying at first, it is actually quite simple once you’ve got the hang of it. With the five steps we have shared above, you can start working with local SEO consultants and see your listing climb higher on Google Maps ranking.

The key to a successful local SEO is consistency: local SEO, as with traditional SEO, is a long-term game, and you should expect to invest at least 6 months before you see significant results. Monitor your progress, constantly evaluate and optimize, and be patient.

Getting that top spot on Google Maps can dramatically improve your growth. So, although the process can be long, it will be totally worth it in the end.

The post How to Create a Successful Local SEO Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Google Maps results are based on Google My Business listings, and on this guide, we will learn all the ins and outs of optimizing our Google My Business listing to rank higher. Without further ado, let us begin with the first one.

1. Make Sure to Include Complete, Up-To-Date, and Comprehensive Information

The pieces of information you put on Google My Business will be used by Google to determine your business’s relevance and credibility. Make sure to input accurate and up-to-date information at least for these:

• Your business’s Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP), the most vital pieces of information not only for Google My Business, but for all business directories and listings.
• Your website address, Google will “crawl” your site to determine your Google Maps listing’s relevance, so this is also very important
• Description: remember that this should be a description about what your business do, and not what you sell (i.e. “a bookstore” not “books”). Your description serves two main purposes: you can include your focus keywords here to optimize your ranking, and you can also optimize it to attract human audience. Provide clear, engaging information about your business.
• Category: similar principle to the above, your categories should be about what your business does. You can use more than one categories, and this can be a good opportunity to tap into all the possible markets.
• Attributes, here you can inform your customers about your business’s special attributes, for example, if you have “outdoor seating”, you can check the available attribute. This can be useful to highlight unique values of your business.

You will especially need to pay extra attention to your NAP information. Google will index your NAP across the web. If someone mentions your NAP on their site, it will be regarded as a local citation, which has the same value as backlinks in regular SEO. So, make sure your NAP information is consistent with what is currently listed on your site, as well as what’s listed on other listings and directories.

Information inconsistency can significantly impact your local ranking negatively. If you have any changes to your NAP, make sure to update it not only on Google My Business, but also on all your listings and citations.

Also, here are some tips and tricks you can use when optimizing these pieces of information:

• Make sure your listed address matches the correct coordinates on Google Maps. Also, check your zip codes and make sure they are consistent across all your listings. For example, if you use 5-digit zip code on one of your listing, use it on all. The same will apply if you use 9-digit code. However, most listings will only allow the 5-digit zip code, so it’s a safer bet overall.
• For phone number, it is actually better to have a local number listed instead of your national or regional number.
• Description, category, and attributes are good opportunities to optimize for keywords. However, make sure they are not over-optimized and make sure all these keywords occur naturally for human readers.
• For business categories, this is a great guide listing all the different categories available, and you can use it to determine the proper category(s) for your business.
• For both categories and attributes, the aim is to be as specific as possible. If you are a pizzeria, specify that you are a pizzeria instead of just “restaurant”. If you offer outdoor eating areas, specify it in attributes.

In short, take some time to optimize the basic information on your Google My Business listing. Now, let’s move on to the next aspect.

2. Optimizing Reviews: Encouraging Positive Ones and Handling Negative Ones

Reviews are a really important aspect for local SEO, as well as for your business’s growth in general. Not only good reviews are an important ranking signal for Google Maps, positive reviews will attract customers to your business while negative ones can significantly hurt your revenue.

Nowadays, 86% consumers read reviews before making any purchases, especially when considering local businesses. So, if your business doesn’t have a lot of positive reviews, you can miss out on a lot of opportunities.

So, the big question is: how can we get more reviews? It is actually fairly simple. Ask your existing, happy customers. Google Maps and Google My Business actually encourage you to get positive reviews, as you can send your customers a link with just a few steps.

To encourage your customers, you might want to offer incentives, which actually is a common practice for many local businesses. For example, you can offer a special discount or even a freebie for customers who left a review for you, or posted something positive about your business in their social media.

However, we shouldn’t only focus on reviews on Google Maps. Although it is never confirmed by Google, many have agreed that reviews on third-party sites—especially major ones like Yelp or TripAdvisor— are also accounted by Google as ranking signals. In fact, quite recently Google encourages placing reviews from Yelp and other sites on your site.

In short: encourage as many positive reviews as you can on as many platforms as you can.

Now, how about handling negative reviews? The basic principle here is to respond to ALL reviews, both positive and negative ones. A lot of consumers prefer businesses that respond to negative reviews, but obviously we will need to respond properly. Here are the key considerations when responding to negative reviews:

1. Understand that there are at least two different kinds of negative reviews. First are the valid ones coming from real customers with real issues. Second are the ones coming from fake customers, often with malicious intents. Recognizing these two will be very important here, so you won’t make any false accusations.
2. Don’t ever deliver false promises when responding to negative reviews. If you don’t have the solution for a specific problem, simply tell them “we are working on it, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible”. If you say you’ll be back with them within 24 hours, do so.
3. If you have sufficient proofs that a negative review is fake, you can ask Google Maps (or other review sites) to take it out. Depending on the case, you might also want to pursue legal actions to discourage similar cases.
4. Remember that for valid negative reviews, there are always the underlying issues. For example, if you received a lot of negative feedback about the long queue on your premise, there might be actual issues with your queuing system. Unless you address this problem first, you’ll keep getting similar reviews.

3. Optimizing Images and Photos

The first thing that should be addressed is that images and photos are not direct ranking factors for Google Maps. However, according to Google My Business itself, businesses with photos get 40% more direction requests. In short, you’ll get more conversions, which can indirectly affect your ranking (when a lot of people request for directions to your business or call your number directly from Google Maps result, Google will see your listing as relevant, which can boost your ranking.

Your profile photo is the first thing a prospect will notice when they are searching on Google Maps, and in Google My Business, you can upload four kinds of images:

• Regular photos: you can upload any kinds of photos here, but Google may review your photos for quality. Your customers can also tag your listing with a photo, which will be under “Photos tagged of your business”.
• Profile photo: self-explanatory, you can choose one photo to represent your identity. You can also choose photos tagged by other people as your profile photo.
• Cover photo: a landscape photo on the very top of you page. You can use it to set the mood of your listing, or to show interesting qualities of your business (i.e., your restaurant’s ambiance)
• Videos: everyone is streaming videos nowadays, and this is a great opportunity to attract customers by investing in engaging videos.

To optimize your images, here are some quick tips to follow:

• The image’s format should be in JPG or PNG, with a size of between 10KB and 5MB
• 720px tall and 720px wide minimum resolution
• Make sure your photos are in-focus, well-lit, and don’t use excessive filters. Google prefers images that represent reality, and as mentioned, Google might review your images for quality
• Optimize the metadata of your images by optimizing the EXIF data, and you might want to check out this tool to help you.

4. Use Google Posts To Engage Your Customers

Google Posts is a fairly new feature of Google Maps and Google My business, and was just introduced in late 2017.

As the name suggest, with Posts you can post content related to your business such as:

• Informing your audience for new products or services, complete with interesting photos
• Inviting people to join an upcoming event
• Announcing various news, for example, if your business just received an award or even a good review from reputable reviewer
• You can use interesting gifs to attract your audience.
• You can also include CTA buttons like “Buy”, “Learn More”, “Sign Up”, and so on.

Again, Posts is not a direct ranking signal, but the more engagement you get, the more Google will perceive your business as relevant and credible.

Creating a Post is fairly simple, the “Posts” option should appear on the left-hand side of your Google My Business sidebar. If not, probably you haven’t verified your Google my business account, and you can check here to learn how.

You can then add texts and images to your post, and here are the important things to consider:

• When adding images, keep in mind that Google uses a 4:3 ratio (so your minimum size should be 400×300 pixels). Google will crop your image to fit the aspect ratio, but make sure it’s high-quality, a proper representation of your business.
• The maximum words allowed in a post is 300. However, if you use a CTA button, only around 70 characters will show on mobile devices. The entire texts will be shown if you don’t use any CTAs.
• Content is everything. Don’t always aim to sell, but you can engage your audience with various creative ways. Your goal here is engagement.
• Google offers a very useful insights feature, so track your posts’ performance and adjust your tactics accordingly
• A post will stay for seven days, but you can set a shorter time period. A week is not a long time, so it is very important to be very specific and time-sensitive with your posts.

Posts can be a very effective way to engage your audience on Google Maps, so you might want to plan ahead and create a content marketing plan specific for Google Posts.

5. Building Local Citations

Local citations are the equivalent of backlinks in regular SEO. A citation, by definition, is when an online entity (website, blog, social media profile) mentions your NAP. The more citations you have, the more relevant your business will be perceived. According to a report by MOZ, citations account for 13% of ranking signals.

The most important thing to consider when building local citations is consistency. Your NAP information must be consistent at all times. Not only inconsistent NAP won’t bring value to your business, Google might downgrade your ranking if there are too many variations of you NAP.

So, how can we build local citations? We can start by listing our business on major business directories like Yelp, Facebook Places, TripAdvisor, and so on. Then, we can continue building citations on specific online directories according to your industry/niche and location. A simple Google search can help you with this, for example, if you are a restaurant in Texas, do a quick Google search for “Texas business directory”, “Texas restaurant directory”, and other similar search phrases. You can also check these lists to help you further:

• Moz’s top local citations list (by category)
• Moz’s top local citations list (by city)

So, the keys to success here are quantity and consistency, and there will be a lot of hard work involved. Not only you will need to build as many citations and possible, you will need to check whether all citations are consistent. Then, in cases when your business change address or phone number, you will need to update all listings manually.

This can be a massive work, so it might be a good idea to hire a local SEO service especially to help you with building your business’s local citations.

End Words

The keys in optimizing your Google My Business listing are accurate information, quantity of local citations, and consistency. It is technically not difficult to execute, but will require a significant time investment as well as hard work.

This is where an SEO expert/consultant can help you, especially to maintain consistency in building your local citations.

The post Tips To Optimize Your Google My Business Listing appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.