Figment Design

Tag: local search

  • Is Your Business Ready for Local Search?

    Is Your Business Ready for Local Search?

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    Future of Local Search

    Local search is the future of SEO, especially for brick and mortar companies and small businesses. While local search is a different ballgame than traditional SEO, the basic principles are still the same. You want to provide useful information to your customers, make it easy for them to navigate to your company, and provide a high-quality online experience to represent your company.

    Google My Business

    One of the easiest ways to establish authority via local search is by taking the time to properly set up your Google My Business. This allows you to claim your business, upload professional photos of your store or products, and provide directions and hours of operation for your company.  Providing detailed information, a variety of photos, and regular content makes a positive impact on your local rank. It’s a basic, yet essential way to drive traffic to your store, website, and phone number. Take the time to do it right.

    Don’t Underestimate the Power of Reviews

    Although back-links still matter, Google reviews seem to hold the most power. We anticipate this continuing into the next year and growing as time goes on, because Google increasingly is looking at reviews as a signal of popularity, quality, and authority.  Many customers are turning to review sites to read up on a company before making a purchase. In fact, almost 70% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase.  For some perspective, calculate the number of new vs. returning customers that buy from you each month.

    To increase the number of reviews for your company, identify the top five places where your customers read reviews (from Yelp to Google Reviews) and brainstorm ways to encourage customers to share their experience. This could include call to actions from your front of house staff or links on your website.  As long as you’re offering a quality customer experience, you shouldn’t be afraid of reviews. Companies with good reviews and good engagement with the community also tend to get more back-links.

    Utilizeling Structured Data

    User experience is among the most important aspects upon which search engines tend to focus. The purpose of local search is to make it easier for customers to locate your store and understand your products. Structured Data is the method of tagging your website with schema data so that search engines can pick up and display under your results.It highlights and categorizes the most relevant content related to the search query, and it assists search engines in understanding your web content.  Structured data is also an opportunity to take up more real estate in the SERPs and highlight your good reviews. Why would you just want a normal listing when you could have extra lines with store hours and customer reviews? This provides you with additional opportunities to get noticed and win clicks over your competitors.

    Think About the Locations, Not Just the Brand

    All of your locations are important. The purpose of local search is to bring customers into your stores, whether you have two locations or 2,000 franchises across the country.  Optimizing the Google My Business listing for each individual location will allow customers to find each location on Google maps and add reviews to the specific staff that they worked with. Locally relevant content, images, and engagement for each specific location will help send the correct signals to Google in that area.  Facebook essentially should be set up the same way. Along with Google My Business, Facebook is building a focus on local ads to drive traffic into stores and connect users locally. To ensure your customers are reviewing the appropriate staff members or teams, you’ll want to make sure reviews are info about each specific location is separated. Facebook allows you to do this by setting up a parent/child page structure.

    By optimizing the images and hours for each individual location, you’re able to build authority and show customers that you’re invested in your brand. Local and branded SEO work together to drive traffic to your site, and eventually your stores.

    Take Full Advantages of Local SEO for Your Business

    Google has provided the tools to succeed in local search, but we’re seeing relatively few companies are taking advantage of them. If you follow these best practices, then your company — and stores — will soon reap the benefits in traffic and revenue.

  • Leveraging Community Involvement into Online Success

    Leveraging Community Involvement into Online Success

    Leveraging Community Involvement into Online Success

    Online success and dominant organic visibility don’t occur overnight. With limited online real estate available, Google and other search engines reward the sites they believe will provide the most value to online searchers.

    Improving a site’s online visibility the right way — which is to say, by not cheating — takes a significant investment of time and sustained energy. Through online marketing programs, Figment Design will optimize your website, strategy, and online marketing channels to produce the best ROI.

    However, we have found that the more active companies are in their local communities, the more likely they are to achieve their internet marketing goals. This is because Google’s algorithm takes a number of factors into consideration, both online and offline, when deciding how to serve up search results.

    Relevance, Distance, and Prominence

    For service-area-based businesses, including those in the home services verticals, Google uses three main factors to determine if a site should be displayed to a searcher:

    Relevance

    This factor refers to how well your local business listing matches the intent of what someone is searching for. For example, Google is more likely to display a company listed in the service category “air conditioning repair service” for a searcher looking for keywords related to air conditioning repair. The reality with relevance is that all competitors in a vertical essentially tend to be categorized properly, which makes it very difficult to distinguish your company from your competitors.

    Distance

    Distance is the second factor Google uses for local search. While the closest company to a searcher’s location does not always show up first — other factors such as the strength of the site are used to determine which sites are listed — the reality is that companies located closer to the epicenter of a city tend to have better visibility in the local map section than those on the outskirts of a city or in a neighboring city.

    Prominence

    Of these three main local factors, prominence may be the most important one. It allows companies to distinguish themselves from their competitors based on the amount of awareness being generated about their brand. Prominence is defined by Google as follows:

    “Prominence refers to how well-known a business is. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels, or well-known store brands that are familiar to many people are also likely to be prominent in local search results. Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business’s local ranking.”

    Improving Your Local Prominence

    While you surely have heard about the value of online customer reviews, especially Google reviews, improving your local prominence can be difficult. Time and time again, though, we have seen home services companies increase their prominence through offline activities.

    This is accomplished by building meaningful relationships with other businesses and nonprofit organizations in your local community. Here are just a few of the many relationship-building opportunities that we suggest looking into:

    • Sponsorships (local sports team, community events, etc.)
    • Volunteer Work
    • Business Relationships (local vendors, related businesses)
    • Participation with local Chambers of Commerce

    Community involvement ultimately offers many advantages to your business. Often, it naturally will translate into back links to your site, which in turn, generate additional online visibility, site traffic, and ultimately leads. And as we’ve noted in previously on the Figment Design blog, this is just one of the many ways that community involvement can help improve your brand.

    Putting it All Together

    When online strategies are leveraged in combination with offline relationship-building tactics, the results are profoundly powerful. Consult with a Figment Design strategist today if you would like to learn more about how to leverage available opportunities in your area and/or your competitors’ level of involvement with community events and sponsorships.

    For more information on how our company can help your business grow please fill out the form below.