Three key areas for local SEO success

For businesses that want to target customers in a particular geographic location, understanding how to do local SEO is critical. For example, if you own a restaurant serving people in Phoenix, Arizona, you do not want to waste time and energy working to appear highly on the SERPs for people in Chicago. Instead, you want to appear for people searching for restaurants in Phoenix. You can work on your local SEO best practices best with a local SEO company with a robust platform, like BrightEdge. Here is what you need to know about how to do local SEO successfully.

• NAP
• Google My Business
• Local-focused content

1. NAP. The first step to a local SEO strategy is ensuring that your name, address, and phone number are accurately and consistently recorded across the web. Businesses want to get themselves listed in a variety of online directories, including popular review sites, such as Yelp. You want to make sure that your business’s information appears the same on each site. Submit your information in a consistent format, such as always using the ‘&’ versus writing out ‘and’.

When your information appears the same, it helps both search engines and customers connect the different listings to one business and can help customers discover your business and improve your rankings.

2. Google My Business. When it comes to local SEO on Google, few pages are more important than your Google My Business page. When you claim your Google My Business page, you can create a customized experience with images, reviews, and other means of engagement with your intended customers.

Take your time to really fill out your My Business page. Upload quality images that help your organization look welcoming and inviting. Make sure that your contact information, hours, and other important points are accurate and filled out. Improve the discoverability of your page by carefully selecting the industry and other categories that Google offers you.

If you receive questions from potential customers on your Google page, you will want to answer these as quickly as possible. Remember the importance of demonstrating commitment to your users and recognize that the speed with which you answer questions will help improve your reputation and their perception of your responsiveness.

3. Local-focused content. Finally, you also want to create content that targets your specific region and the type of people interested in your business. Create material that helps you to incorporate local landmarks and other features that people might use to find businesses in your area. Also consider the information that your customers might be interested in. A home improvement store might write articles about DIY projects and an organic foods restaurant may write about where to shop or offer recipes for local favorites. Know what will speak to your specific customers, particularly those in your targeted area.

When it comes to attracting and engaging customers within your geographic area, understanding how to use local SEO by focusing on these main points will help your content get the attention it needs.

4 tips to communicate SEO to your manager

Successfully reporting your SEO progress to your manager can have a dramatic impact on the resources and budget available to you and your team. You want to make solid reports that will help your manager understand the progress of your SEO efforts and why your SEO progress has a positive impact on the rest of your business. Therefore, knowing how to report SEO to your manager can help your formulate presentations and documentation that will further help grow your SEO efforts for your organization.

Use the below steps to report SEO to your manager:

• Consider what matters most
• Examine KPIs
• Create a list of data
• Create charts and graphs

1. Consider what matters most. Consider the points that matter the most to your manager. Think about the KPIs that your manager pays the most attention to. This will likely be influenced by who your manager has to report to as well. Consider the past presentations you have given and the KPIs that your manager inquired about the most. Think about the numbers that seemed to have the biggest impact on their opinions of your SEO program. This will help you know where to focus your efforts.

2. Examine KPIs. Examine the KPIs that you have tracked for your SEO campaigns and look at the ones that best demonstrate the progress you have made with your marketing efforts. SEO tends to be a non-linear effort. Often you work in a particular area improving your brand’s presence, but it might take a few weeks for the results of your efforts to begin to appear.

To help your manager and their superiors understand your progress, document that work you have done and the KPIs that help to cast your SEO efforts into a positive light. This will help you present a solid picture to your manager regarding your effort and the progress you make.

3. Create a list of data. Consider the KPIs you examined in steps one and two and combine them to create a list of targeted data that you will present to your manager. Your presentation should clearly demonstrate to your manager what they want to see while also documenting your SEO efforts and the progress you make.

4. Create charts and graphs. Create clear charts and graphs that demonstrate your important data points that your manager can understand at a glance. You want the information to be easily digestible so that they can understand the importance of your SEO program with little effort and pass it on to their superiors. A strong presentation will help you build the case for your needed budget and resources.

Understanding how to present important data to your manager can help you build support for your program and help your company leaders understand the importance of the work you do.

4 steps to determine why your page is decreasing in rank on the SERPs

Understanding why your page is decreasing in rank is an important step to correcting the problem and maintaining your SEO results. When a page begins to drop in the rankings, here is how to find out why your page is decreasing in rank.

• Check for algo updates at Google 
• Examine your content for SEO best practices
• Check whether your content is recent or outdated
• Look at the content that outranks you

1. Check for algo updates. See if the Google algorithm has recently undergone any changes that might impact rankings. Sometimes Google makes adjustments without officially announcing anything, so you want to look at popular SEO news sources instead of just the official Google channels. If you see that others have had similar drops in ranking, then that is a good indicator that an update has been made to the algorithm.

Knowing that your page has dropped rankings because of an algorithm update may give you your first steps to correct the problem. Look for any insights regarding what Google wanted to correct with this update, and use this information to help you improve the content you created.

2. Examine your content for SEO best practices. If there were no algorithm updates, then you want to closely examine your content for SEO best practices to see where you might fall short. Make sure that your target keyword has been used in your title, URL, metadata, and naturally throughout the content.

Look at your traffic and engagement rates for this particular piece of content and examine trends on BrightEdge and Google Analytics. This can help you see if people have lost interest in the content. See if you have had any changes in how your brand promotes this particular piece of content, such as a drop in how often it appears in social media posts or your email campaigns. Google looks at people’s engagement with content when determining the interest of customers in the material. If you have changed your promotions at all, try shifting back to your old strategy.

3. Check whether your content is recent or outdated. Look at how recently your content has been created or updated. Particularly with content that is not evergreen, Google will also likely prioritize content that is fresher and contains the latest information for readers. If your content has become outdated, then you will want to take the time to correct that problem. Freshen up the material and update your publication date so that both readers and Google know that your content has been updated.

4. Look at the content that outranks you. Look at the content that has taken your spot. If none of the other steps have given you a good indication of why your content has lost rankings and what to do about it, you want to take the time to look at the content that has taken your spot. See if you can determine why the search engine might have regarded this content more highly than yours.

Look at the length of the content and its depth on the topic. You might also want to look at the rest of the domain. For example, if this site has a big topic cluster, they thus demonstrate greater authority on the subject. Meanwhile, if you only have a blog post, it will become clear why their content outranks yours.

Particularly for content and keywords that play a large role in your organization, you will want to use this insight to improve your own content. Build up your topic further, consider building a content cluster, and look for ways to demonstrate your authority in the industry to Google and to readers.

When you see your content drop in the rankings, it can cause considerable frustration and confusion. Knowing what to do when you see this arise, however, can help you protect other content from dropping and hopefully regain the old positions for your material.

Learn how to create new content from existing content and generate new traffic

Learning how to do SEO content writing from already existing content makes it easy for brands to repurpose material that they have already developed. This can be particularly useful as often different customers like to consume content in a variety of ways.

To do content writing with existing content as your draft, think first about the persona and the stage of the buyer’s journey that this particular customer likely falls when they are interested in the topic at hand. With this information, you can make a list of the types of content that they might want to consume. This will help you develop a plan for taking your existing material and creating new content types. These steps will help you understand how to do content writing with existing content:

• Transition material between written content and video
• Transition material between a blog post and longer content
• Transition material between blog posts and social media content

1. Transforming material between written content and video. Video has become increasingly popular as customers appreciate the opportunity to sit back and consume content with minimal effort on their part. The visuals of a video also help to engage them.

If you have a blog post you want to turn into a video, read the post through and pull out the most important points that you want to make in the video. Take these parts and use them to develop a script that the person in the video can use for guidance. Publishing a transcript alongside the video can also benefit you from an SEO perspective as it allows the search engines to understand the content of the video as well.

If you have a video that you would like to transition to a blog post, see if you have a transcript or script available of the video. This will allow you to review the material covered and begin to adjust the wording to create a written-content style. With the outline available from the video, this will go significantly faster than creating a blog from scratch.

If you do not have a transcript or script available, then simply watch the video a few times and take notes as you go.

2. Transforming material between a blog post and longer content. If you already have a blog post and you want to create a longer piece of content, such as a white paper or an ebook, then take the blog post and open it in a new word document. Pull out each point you cover in the post and use it to begin brainstorming areas where you can expand the material and dive in deeper. You want to think of the blog post essentially as an outline that you can use to guide your ideas, while also taking your new audience much further in the subject.

On the other hand, if you have a long piece of content that you want to use to create a blog post, you will take this process in reverse. Brands often use shorter blog posts of longer research or white papers because it allows them to build an interested audience and then offer them a link to the more in depth content.

Therefore, sit down with the longform material and identify your key points. See if any of the key ideas can be eliminated to leave something unique for the white paper or ebook. For the ones that remain, look for ways to shorten the details you offer. Your blog post should provide valuable information but offer more of a cursory examination of the topic than your in depth publication.

3. Transforming material between blog posts and social media content. Your blog posts can also provide assistance in the creation of social media content. Pull out some of your main ideas and use them to create short social media posts and teasers that can help you attract attention for the full post. Statistics, for example, can make great tweets that encourage people to want to learn more.

Social media can also help you figure out what topics interest customers the most. If you see that posts on a particular topic build a lot of interest, use your posts on the topic to start putting together a full blog post to explore the topic for readers.