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Improve Google Ranking-Don't Settle For Anything Less Than #1

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I was just checking some rankings and was pleased when a site I have been working on reached page 1 for its main keyword.  This keyword has just under 1 million competitors and receives about 30,000 searches per week.  Last time I checked this site was ranked 16th.  Today it is ranked 4th.  This is a national campaign-not a google local campaign-and I realized that most people would stop here and consider this a success.

However, ranked 4th a site will typically have a CTR (Click Through Rate) of roughly 6%.  So in a given day if 100 people search for the term only 6 or so will click on this site.  If it was third the CTR would more than double to 15%.  The CTR for 2nd is just under 25%.  And the first site receives just over 50% of all the traffic.  Now, you can improve your CTR with some compelling copy in your title tag. Something that makes the visitor wants to click to read more.

This post is just a reminder that unless you are number 1 your work really isn’t done.  I have seen clients income double (more than 2x earnings) by moving from 3rd place to 1st place.  There can only be 1 champion and it should be you or your client.

Local SEO Competition Citation Analysis

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KFC Vs Auntie Ji (His Chinese Rival)

Businesses have been spying on one another as long as business has existed.  Everyone wants to know what the competition is doing, especially if they seem to be doing it better.  The internet has revolutionized how businesses find and attract customers.  Local business searches have made it necessary for a business to be listed online if they hope to corner their share of the market.  Now it’s just not enough for Joe’s Pizza Parlor to know what newspapers Fred’s Pizza Shop is using to attract customers or where Fred gets his ingredients.  Joe must also know where on the virtually endless World Wide Web any mention of Fred’s Pizza Shop exists.  This is where new age competitive analysis comes in while doing local search marketing.

In its simplest form, competitive analysis simply means finding out exactly what a competitor is doing and how that competitor goes about doing it.  Once you are armed with this knowledge, you can then compare their practices with yours to decide who is doing what the best.  If the competition has an edge, this knowledge will help you catch up.  If your strategy is better it will help you stay ahead.

For local search listings, the most important factor is business name.  We’ll cover that in another post.  The second most important is citations.  As we have discussed before, citations are references to the business’s name, address and phone number.  Considering the importance of citations in local rankings, it would stand to reason that a competitor that ranks higher than you will have more citations or better citations.  What you now need to do is find out where they are.  Once you know, you can go about getting your business listed there as well.

We have some in-house software that will determine that for us, and we use it to benefit our local seo clients.  However, there is some less sophisticated but still workable software available for purchase.  Competitive analysis software snoops around the net by backtracking from the Local search listing.  It can uncover obscure mentions of a business on blogs, online newspaper ads, and in some cases even tweets.  There are several versions of such programs, some of which are available as freeware.  If you are a small business owner who prefers to take matters into your own hands, such software can help you maximize your local search optimization and help your business stay ahead in the competitive world of internet advertising.  We will dig more into this specifically in an upcoming article.

And if you are using an SEO Agency and you aren’t getting solid seo reports – like this one from Webris, find a new team.

Call Tracking Can Kill Your Local SEO Results

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Local SEO Telephone Sheep

Sheep Made From German Phones – Courtesy Loop_Oh

Call tracking is an idea thought up by marketing companies to use as a tool to track which strategies are producing the most return on each advertising dollar.

The idea of call tracking is pretty simple.  A business sets up an account with a calling service that provides them with several different phone numbers that all ring at the business.  A different one of these phone numbers is then used for the business listing for each advertising source.  Once in place, the call system software can then monitor which numbers are calling the business with the most frequency and the owner will know immediately which advertising is paying off and which isn’t producing results.  This sounds like a good idea, but in the age of Google Local Business Listings and local seo it can have an adverse effect on page rankings.  Here’s why.

In traditional Search Engine Optimization for websites, the primary factor for determining page rank is the number of back links, or other sites that have links to the ranked site.  However for businesses, even extremely popular and reliable businesses may not have a web page to link back to.  This can skew the results and make a relatively unpopular business with a well optimized web page rank above a huge business without a site.  To correct for this, Google and other local search providers reduced the importance given to back links and instead rely on what are called citations.  Citations are simply a reference to the business somewhere in the vast world of cyber space.  A citation is something that lists the business’s name & phone number, name & address, or both.  In local SEO parlance this is called the name, address, phone number or NAP factor.  Are you beginning to see why having multiple numbers can be bad?

Local searches use what are called trust factors.  These are merely consistent indicators that a particular listing is legitimate and refers to what the engine thinks it does.  This makes having all of you business information standardized across the board.  Multiple numbers can confuse the engine and citations will be disregarded as unreliable.  In the world of local searches, a business’s NAP is how they are identified.  It’s the DNA of online business listings.

If a marketing company is telling you that call tracking is a good idea, then you might want to reconsider your company.  At least give them a pop quiz and make them tell you exactly how such a technique will not affect your local listings.  Be prepared for a song and dance.