enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 10 years ago

t 9 min read

Since 2014, local SEO has been adapting at an alarming pace. It fits with Google’s relevancy mantra—delivering the best search results to users based on their location. But that means businesses and marketers have to keep up with the changes—especially brick-and-mortar shops that rely on local traffic. Outside of the formal algorithm rollouts, we’ve seen fluctuating local SERPs and changes to Google My Business. The carousel was replaced with the local pack. The local pack was trimmed from seven results to three items. Local directories were evaluated heavily for their quality guidelines.

More recently, it’s become vital for a business without a storefront to define its service radius. It’s also become more difficult for brick-and-mortar businesses to target cities too far outside their physical address. Think about what you search for when you have a specific local intent. The verticals affected most by this ever-changing landscape are the ones you’d think of first—the restaurant, hotel, and travel industries. The biggest change to local SEO has been, of course, Google’s own local algorithm update, Pigeon.

Local Algorithm Updates

Google’s Pigeon update wasn’t the first step toward hyperlocal search, but it was a turning point for SEO strategy moving forward. Released in 2014, the update aimed to tie local search results more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. Google’s intent in rolling out Pigeon was to improve and fine-tune their current ranking signals in terms of distance and location. Although it’s not a penalty-based algorithm, the introduction of Pigeon also meant the usual scramble in regards to traffic and rankings. The use of local packs allowed Google to establish authority within a query for local businesses with a good search presence.

The rollout of Pigeon tried to eliminate duplicate results—businesses were less likely to show in both organic and a map pack—so those featured prominently in the pack were seeing favorable results. In order to give the best possible results, Google’s Pigeon reduced the search radius for local queries as much as possible. This continues to have an effect on businesses that used to rank for their closest metropolis—now without a physical address in the query city, you likely won’t rank high in organic search and probably not at all in the local packs.

Good news for mom and pop shops—Pigeon affected how universal brands showed in local results, and mostly negatively. Local businesses, even without a strong search strategy, continue to rise in the ranks of organic and pack results—think Amy’s Pizza vs. your local Dominos chain. But there were industries that took a hit after the Pigeon roll out—real estate and insurance in particular. BrightEdge’s Data Cube saw a significant drop in Google Places results from those queries.  

Google’s Local Goals

Google’s local ranking emphasis and ongoing local efforts contribute to the overall goal of Google—personalization and relevance. Someone searching for a local product or service, whether they’re at home on a desktop or walking down the street searching on mobile, should see the best possible result. In order to deliver on this, Google aimed to define the parameters of local search as precisely as possible. Instead of general city targets, geolocation was further dissected into neighborhoods. This gave new emphasis to the importance of a correct NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) and a shift in how successful local marketing would be. How Google Ranks Local Listings

With the new algorithm and Google’s local mission statement in play, it’s important to understand how this changes rankings for the SERPs. In order to understand how local rankings fluctuate, you have to monitor your brand and keyword targets at a local level, instead of just US. BrightEdge can help you determine your geo-targeted market and create specific localized campaigns for your brand or service. The local search ranking factors are important to monitor on a yearly basis.

The existing ranking factors are present here, albeit with a local focus—on-page optimization for local terms, link signals with local relevance, social signals. There is also a heavy focus on specific local factors—Google My Business signals, NAP consistency across citations, and the strength of your review portfolio. Most sites saw a positive or negative effect of these signals, depending on their local strategies before Penguin. Whereas sites rose or dropped for the existence (or lack of) NAP, reviews, and a Business page immediately following the rollout, the signals have become more defined over the past two years. Now quality is favored over quantity, and the search radius continues to shrink with laser-like precision to the business’s storefront address and neighborhood. In addition, signals like reviews and citations are also becoming more refined under the Google microscope. Accuracy and relevancy can enhance citation signals along with the quality of the directory or aggregator used. Just a large volume of reviews isn’t enough to rank either—the timing, consistency, and the quality of review sites are all factored into the local ranking algorithm.

Content Marketing for Local SEO

The world of “content is king” was hardly expected to escape the impact of local search. For local businesses targeting specific neighborhoods, it’s important to tailor your content strategy to fit these needs. In addition to your existing strategy that targets your brand, products or services with high-volume keywords, you’ll need almost an entirely different strategy that targets your local neighborhood, or to at least weave some local elements into your existing content. First you want to identify your radius and your local audience. What neighborhoods do you want to reach, and who makes up those neighborhoods? What are they searching for, and how can you help them? This is where your content strategy can go outside the grid when it comes to your brand. If you’re a maternity clothing store in Astoria, you want to build content for new moms and maternity clothes. But you can also hone in on your local keyword targeting by writing about the best day cares in Astoria and your surrounding neighborhoods—relevant and hyperlocal.

In order to identify your audience and their needs, you can use the tools already at your disposal—Google Analytics demographic information and interest categories, Facebook Insights, AdWords Keyword Tool and more. It’s important to monitor your content performance for your local SEO strategy. Identify the goals you want to achieve—do you want more traffic from your surrounding neighborhoods? Do you want to rank for local queries? Do you want more sales from your immediate location? Once you’ve identified your goals, your local content strategy should be tailored to achieve them. In addition to just creating content, make sure you are optimizing it. Craft local-focused meta titles and descriptions and optimize your images for local search. Pay attention to your industry. If you’re in real estate or hospitality, you can corner the local content market with neighborhood guides, local landing pages, and “best of” lists. The key for local content is to be useful to your market. That can mean promoting events, news, sports teams, or little-known spots and becoming to go-to resource for your neighborhood. Best Practices for Local SEO If you’re looking to ramp up your current SEO strategy, or if you’re starting from scratch post-Pigeon, there are best practices to consider for your local SEO.

1. Consistency

Both on and off site, your Name/Address/Phone Number listing needs to be consistent. It’s worth spending the time to update anywhere your business might be located on the web to match exactly how you’re listed on your website.

2. Citations

Speaking of your business listings, check to make sure you’re listed everywhere that’s relevant to your business and seen as a quality site. Sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and of course:

3. Optimize your Google Business Page

Update and optimize your Google My Business page with your NAP, categories, keyword-targeted description, photos, and more.

4. Optimize on-page for local

Your content and site architecture should reflect your local strategy. Make sure your city and neighborhood targets are present in your copy and meta data. Take advantage of Schema markup to boost this content.

5. Manage your reputation

Your online reviews can make or break your local business—and Google knows this too. Review signals are quickly climbing the ranks as part of the ever-changing local algorithm. A local content strategy and citation building strategy should be ongoing. Make sure to start with your site foundation to create an optimized local template for copy and meta data. Don't Overlook These Crucial Parts of Local SEO

Mobile and Local

The increase in mobile queries was skyrocketing during Google’s rollout of Pigeon, and it’s easy to see how the two go hand in hand. If you’re a brick-and-mortar shop, your potential customers are walking around the neighborhood, searching on their mobile for the closest fill-in-the-blank. In fact, the percentage of mobile searches with local intent is as high as 60%. If you don’t have a mobile presence, they might not find you at all. According to Google’s Smartphone Insights:

• 94% of smartphone users have looked for local info and 84% have taken action as a result
• 57% of smartphone users look for local info at least once a week
• 25% of smartphone users look for local info daily

Of smartphone users who searched for local info:

• 65% visited the business they looked up
• 47% looked it up on a map and/or got directions

So how do you optimize for mobile in a hyperlocal world? First and foremost, your site should be mobile-friendly. Google has started displaying this quality under each site in the mobile SERPs, so users don’t even have to visit your site to know the mobile experience they’re facing. Since many mobile searches are being done on the go, you want to be prepared with the information they need. This falls back on consistency across citation sites and your mobile site—especially when it comes to your address, phone number, and directions. Important details like parking or hours of operation should be prominently featured. Again, on the go searchers don’t have time for slow loading sites or Flash-heavy web pages. Make sure your mobile site is not only friendly, but optimized for page speed. Finally, if someone is comparing you to your competitors, the first thing they’ll look for on mobile (and desktop) will be your reviews.

Reputation Management and Local SEO

Reviews are crucial to your local SEO strategy. Not only are they considered a ranking signal, but managing your reviews should be extremely important to you as a business owner. Why? Because it’s extremely important to your customers.  

Earning favorable reviews on the top sites—Google My Business, Yelp—will help that first interaction that local searchers will see on their desktops or mobile phones and tablets. The process of getting reviews is tricky, and one that is monitored more and more by Google. Here are some key takeaways for reviews:

• Whenever possible, acquire naturally
• Speed and velocity of reviews are monitored—keep track of your requests and promotions to avoid an influx of reviews
• Responding to negative reviews is easier than trying to remove them

You can get creative with asking your customers to post reviews, but you should always let them know where you’re listed and how to leave a review—especially in the case of a favorable sale or interaction. The response to negative reviews can’t completely combat the effect of that negative review on a potential customer, but a smart and thoughtful response can negate some of the backlash. In addition to reviews, social media is a great way to maintain your reputation for local SEO. Using and optimizing sites like Twitter and YouTube can help boost your local content and dominate your local SERP presence. Can’t get enough local? Check out our other local SEO blogs.

AnnaFrancis

M Posted 10 years 1 month ago

t 9 min read

People are searching with their mobile devices more now than ever before, so having a good user experience is essential. However, with increased mobile usage (and growing mobile e-commerce) comes an increased expectation for speed and agility, as data has shown that 40% of people will abandon a site after just three seconds if the page they are looking at doesn’t load quickly enough. While a slow load speed is bad enough for the user, it is also bad for the content creator, as it means their content isn’t actually being seen. Google AMP can help. There has been a lot of talk recently about Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and what it means for search and content marketing. Google first announced AMP back in October 2015, saying that AMP content loaded around four times faster, using ten times less data than non-AMP content. So, what is Google AMP and how will it affect content?

High-speed content

AMP is an accessible framework that creates fast-loading mobile webpages. AMP is designed to easily improve the speed of content displayed on mobile and subsequently enhance user experience. Currently, Google, Twitter, and some other companies have rolled out AMP, and it comes not long after Facebook launched Instant Articles and Apple launched its News service. It basically works by using a new version of HTML, a streamlined version of CSS, and a JavaScript framework for mobile pages – thereby ensuring fast loading times and smooth readability.

AMP HTML

A new stripped-down version of HTML, AMP HTML has a new set of properties and limits existing styles and tags. If you are familiar with HTML, then you will have no problem understanding and adapting your pages to AMP HTML. It’s a good idea to have a look at all the required markup your AMP content will need.

AMP .JS

Third party JavaScript is out when it comes to AMP, but it does offer a JavaScript framework specifically for mobile pages. AMP .JS makes the loading of external resources asynchronous, stopping any external scripts from blocking page rendering.

AMP CDN

This optional content delivery network will cache your AMP-enabled pages and optimize them where necessary, making them instantaneously accessible on a mobile phone. Images only load as they scroll into view and will use the amp-img element, and Google will cache and host your content so it no longer needs to be fetched from your server. Currently, only available to publishers, Google AMP will be available for all content marketers before long, so it’s best to get up to speed on how you can prepare your site and your content for the change.

Examples

Examples of AMP pages live in Google’s search results can be seen when searching for any topical search query on a mobile that is likely to return results from publishers. One such example is a search for ‘Sharapova’, after the tennis star was recently embroiled in a doping scandal. The grey lightning symbol indicates an AMP result, and clicking on one of these instantly opens up the result within the browser. The blue bar at the top then gives the user the opportunity to swipe between related articles, all structured around the AMP framework.    

How to use Google AMP for your website

The first thing you need to do is build alternative AMP pages for your site that adhere to all the new specifications. There are quite a few different elements that AMP does not allow, including lead forms and on-page comments, so you may need to completely re-write your site template to accommodate these new restrictions.

Code Implementation

The BBC has been quick to adopt Google AMP across all their news content and are a great example to follow if we want to learn how a page should be structured. The content in the above example is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35751916 as well as http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/35751916 - one for desktop search and one for AMP search. The important element is the <link> tag in the source code of each page that indicates to Google about its respective equivalent. On http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35751916, we find: And on http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/35751916, we see: This allows Google to serve the correct URL dependent upon the query and device, without seeing the two as duplicate content.

And further down, we find this: This is the JavaScript code that makes everything work – loading all custom AMP elements and managing resource loading and prioritization (such as image lazy-loading). In terms of structure, this tag must be the last element before the closing </head> tag.

Schema

In order to get your content to appear for relevant keyword queries, you must include the correct schema markup. This gives further information to search engines about the content and helps them display it correctly in AMP search. On the BBC article, the following schema is applied using the JSON-LD implementation method: There’s a lot of information being presented here, but it all has a purpose. For more information about schema and its implementation, read the official documentation: http://schema.org/. In terms of multimedia, there is a whole separate range of AMP tags that can be employed, including amp-video, amp-carousel and amp-image-lightbox. Extended components can also be used for GIFs (amp-anim) and YouTube (amp-youtube). The main social media networks also have their own extended components.

Plugins

Luckily for WordPress users, there is already an official Google AMP plugin. All you need to do is download it and voilà: all your future posts will be AMPlified. It’s important to remember though that the plugin does not support ‘pages’ or any archived posts. Here are Google’s guidelines to getting your AMP pages to properly display in Google Search:

• Design: Create webpages in line with the AMP HTML specifications.
• Discovery: Make your AMP pages discoverable by linking to them from other indexed pages and listing them in your sitemap.
• Validation: Check your AMP pages are valid so that they work properly for both Google and the user.
• Structured Data: Your content will be presented more prominently if you have the correct structured data markup.
• Status: Check the AMP status report to find a list of successfully indexed Google AMP pages on your website and any errors that may have been found.

Benefits of Google AMP

There are several different benefits to using AMP on your website:

• User experience
• Speed
• Increased engagement
• Publisher control

1. User Experience. Speed is a crucial element of user experience when it comes to browsing the web on a mobile device. People can quickly lose interest if a page doesn’t load fast enough and studies have shown that pages that are just one second faster experience a 27% increase in conversion rate.

2. Speed. The speed in which a page loads could also have an effect in terms of SEO. Page speed is one of the many ranking factors Google uses, so if your page loads too slowly, there is a chance it will have a decreased level of visibility.

3. Increased Engagement. Faster web pages mean higher levels of readership and, therefore, better engagement. Users can quickly search for a blog topic, click on an AMP search result and instantly see a responsive piece of content that is easy to read and share.

4. Publisher Control. AMP gives publishers more autonomy over their content, increases the reach of content produced, and makes content distribution easier. It also allows for effective advertising across the mobile web by supporting a range of ad formats, networks and technologies.

Does Google AMP Affect Rankings?

In short, no. John Mueller at Google said only recently that AMP is not a ranking signal – yet: “At the moment, it is not a ranking signal. It is obviously one way to make mobile-friendly pages, so that might be an option where you do that. I’ve already seen some websites where they’ve moved the whole website to the AMP format. Obviously, that is mobile-friendly setup, so it kind of picks up the mobile- friendly thing. But just AMP itself is not something that we have a ranking signal at the moment.” Considering the amount of investment that Google is putting into AMP, it would not be a surprise to see this happen in the future, and the words “at the moment” definitely suggest this may be the case. Google is obviously promoting AMP articles within its search interface due to the prominence of the news carousel. The majority of content available in this section of the search results is now AMP, so despite it not being a direct ranking signal, you can achieve greater SERP prominence by adopting the new framework. In the future, AMP could become part of the existing mobile-friendliness algorithm, or it could simply become a ranking factor in its own right.

Conclusion

With mobile search levels continually on the rise, the introduction of Google AMP will give publishers and content creators a flexible platform on which to promote their articles. AMP officially launched at the end of February and is currently being displayed at the top of Google’s search results in a carousel of top stories, but it could move into other areas too. Dave Besbris, Vice President of Engineering at Google, said at SMX West that “everywhere we use content, we want to embrace AMP.” At the moment, only news and editorial content will appear as Google AMP results in the carousel, but the type of content displayed could vary from query to query (and day to day). For brands that want to increase their organic visibility and stay at the front of the ever-changing competitor landscape, AMP is a no-brainer. There is no point in creating amazing content if it takes five times longer than your competitors’ content to load on mobile. Pages that load faster will provide a better user experience and may also have a positive effect on SEO down the line, so Google AMP is definitely something to keep an eye on. Anna Francis is a Content Manager at the BrightEdge agency partner Search Laboratory, based in Leeds, UK.