Local SEO Tips

I’ve had a number of calls from local businesses who are
upset that their website is not ranking for “their keywords.” Sometimes it’s a case of where they had a good ranking and the competition has knocked them off.

More often it’s the result of a couple Google searches for what they think are the best search terms and their hated rival is occupying the top place in the search results.

After talking to a few companies about this, here’s how it plays out. The owner does a search and they see the most hated competition owns the top places. They call their web developer and ask, “Can you get me to number 1 for such and such a keyword?”

So the web team gives it a crack. In my experience some of them have good SEO people; more often than not though, SEO is just another hat that they wear along with design, graphics, copy, css and flash coding, maybe some database coding, wordpress setup and customization, website conversion and testing… oh and we do SEO too!

The owner pays the web team to get a higher ranking for the competitive keywords and after a few months of poor results, the owner ends up at my door. They are gun shy and thinking that SEO is all snake oil, smoke and mirrors.

Here’s the problem. The owner and their web development team are targeting the wrong keywords. Often, the obvious keywords have lots of traffic that does not have a high commercial intent – they are lookie loos (so would not be worth having in the first place).

We use a different and proven methodology. We do systematic and thorough keyword research for our local clients where we discover a “basket” of keyword phrases that usually numbers in the hundreds, if not more. From there we also look at the competition and the online commercial intent of these phrases.

Accurate local keyword research data is still hard to get. We know that the local search numbers that are reported by Google are far less than the actual local search volume. No one in local search has an answer for this yet. What it means is that we have to be very meticulous in our research in order to uncover all the areas and terms that people use for local company searches.

Once we have gathered this data, we analyze and sift through it looking for the low hanging fruit. It’s always there (so far…) and it means that we target phrases that have less competition, convert into business at a high rate and have decent traffic.

Often these are so called “long tail” terms and phrases. Most of them are high converting phrases. While the traffic numbers are not as impressive as the most popular terms, a basket of these produce far more business both short and long term for a company.

Here’s How to Find the Low Hanging Fruit.

1. Start with the Google Keyword Tool

A little R&D to start… Click on the website content radio button and put in a high ranked, competitors website. Select which country you want to get results from (…I wish this drilled down further!) Check the box to “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL” and hit the “Get keyword ideas” button.

Google will pull keywords off of that website that you can analyze. Expect a lot of related keywords. For local search purposes, many will not be targeted.

2. Select appropriate results
You will have to reject some keyword phrases and obvious misses. I also filter the selection to “exact match”.

3. You can download your selected list as a .csv file after you “Add Exact” to the right hand column. Alternatively, just choose the keywords that first grab you and do a Google search. Here’s where I like using the spreadsheet, because the task is to record which keywords, which competitors are ranking for.

It will probably play out something like this, for example:

High Traffic keyword phrases = wedding photography
Medium Tail keyword phrases = wedding portrait photography
Long Tail keyword phrases = Vancouver wedding portrait photography

As you dig through this list you will start to find the keyword phrases that they all are targeting. You will also note the ones they missed.

4. Often you will note that there are other websites that are focusing on the medium tail keyword phrases. They are going after less competitive keywords, that have less traffic. Note the sites and the keyword phrases that they rank well for out of your total basket of phrases.

The long tail phrases are the ones you want to start with. These will start to form your target keyword phrases since you can optimize your site and content for and then rank for them quickly. A good strategy is to pick the highest traffic, local targeted search term (or two) and optimize your home page for them.

Then target the longer tail phrases on other pages through your site. Use our “11 On Page SEO Tips” article to do it right. Once you have page one ranking for the Long tail phrases, you can start optimizing other pages for the medium tail phrases.

Again, once you gain good ranks for the medium tail phrases, tackle the high traffic phrases. All of this takes time, but this is a proven plan of how to gain and continually grow paying traffic for your business in the near, medium and long term.

Your site gets noticed by standing out for the lower traffic but high converting terms; which also brings business fairly quickly. Once you have established that beachhead, ranking for the other terms is an easier task.