Use Local SEO to Rank Your Website in the Google Maps Area

A citation is a business address listing that appears on a website. It usually includes the name of your business, your company address, and company phone number. Another name for a local citation is “NAP.” Citation listings for your business should all contain EXACTLY the same information (in addition to being accurate). Search engine algorithms compare every detail on a citation listing. Our Citation Audit will review the listings we can find to ensure that you have no typos or other disqualifying information that might impact local SEO efforts.

Location Citations

Meta Tags

Link Structure

Google+ Page

Backlinks

Website Speed

Local Schema

Google Analytics

OUR APPROACH: We check NAP information on website directories that list your physical address details. We also look on Google for these NAP items:

Phone number variations. Examples include: (###) ###-#### and ###-###-### Business name variations (ex. with Inc. and without Inc.) Searches for business partners who work together in the same company Check that your NAP listing on Google and Google MAPS is correct. Validate that your Google My Business is tethered to your website.

We also look for your business listing on top citation and niche or local directories such as Google, Yelp, Yellowpages, CitySearch, Superpages, and DexKnows. This is another way you can get your local citation listings validated.

If your business listing has not been officially registered (“claimed” on a website directory, we can claim the listing for your business. You will then have the ability to edit and update your listings if details change (such as moving locations).

Do you monitor customer reviews and ratings on popular review sites such as Google, Yelp and Facebook?

There are tools you can purchase to aid in this process, including Trackur, Synup and Social Mention.

We can also help you respond to reviews and questions online.

We review your website Meta Tags for conversion purposes since they are often displayed on the listings of Search Engine Results Pages (also known as SERPs).

A second test is to validate that your main keywords appear in the Meta Title Tag.

We also want to make sure that what appears is at least human readable – i.e., not just a list of keywords.

Location-specific pages should include city and state references.

Your Meta Description should be written in sentence format and up to a maximum number of characters.

There should be a unique Meta Title Tag and Description for each unique page.

We generally use Google Webmaster Tools to identify duplicate content in your meta tags.

We review your website content to avoid duplicate content (both inside your site and on other websites too). Your web pages should contain unique and original content with keyword phrases naturally appearing inside the content.

We use tools like SiteLiner and CopyScape to discover content that has likely been copied from other websites.

Because you need to insert relevant keyword phrases into your web copy to attract search engine rankings, we apply a few tests to determine if your writing methods will trigger any content penalties. We advise clients to alternate the use of similar keywords by varying syntax and applying synonyms.

If you are struggling to come up with keyword phrases to embed into your content, we can do keyword research and competitor website analysis to create a keyword library for your internal usage.

URLs (i.e., website addresses) should be keyword rich. If you are using WordPress, make sure you activate Permalinks.

URLs should be human readable because it will reduce higher bounce rates, which occur when people click the wrong link.

We use a sitemap tool like XML-Sitemaps.com to create a list of all your website URLs.

This is a great tool to keep in your SEO arsenal.

URLs with multiple words should be joined together with dashes (-) rather than underscores or no spaces at all. Underscores are used in coding language; Google doesn’t treat underscores as word-separators but does for dashes.

Consider using a “Flat Link Architecture” for your site links so that you don’t have a sitemap that includes many levels of pages. Think of this as NOT having a file cabinet with folders inside even more folders.

If we are doing a backlink audit, we will first assemble a list of the web pages that link to your website.

We will then check the quality of those backlinks to see if we can identify low-grade websites that we should tell Google to disavow.

Google Webmaster Tools can also help in this regard if you use the Search Traffic feature.

Google wants fast loading pages – often under 4 seconds.

Google’s page speed insight tool is useful in our process to validate page speed.

Schema is web coding on each page that tells Google about specific parts of your page content. We will review schema architecture, which also has an impact on Google’s Knowledge Graph.

We also use Google’s Webmaster Tools’s Structured Data Testing Tool during this audit step.

We will make sure your site has the Google Analytics code on each page you want to track. Check the configuration at http://www.gatective.com.

With advanced tag implementation, you can monitor how your site performs with lead generation, sales activity and high performing pages.