Internet Marketing, Web Design, SEO, Web 2.0 Optimization
Posts tagged local SEO
How Do Contractors Benefit from a Website?
11 month ago
A good example of a business that needs to have a website but often does not are home remodeling contractors. Often these companies fail to see how a website can benefit them and struggle with paying high costs for low yielding newspaper ads… while their competitors, those contractors who have learned to make use of online marketing strategiesgrow thanks to their online clients.
Contractor Websites
The main thing plumbers, painters, interior design specialists and other general contractors need is customers. They are not selling a product that can be marketed online and then shipped to a customer. However, they are selling, and marketing, a service that is needed by customers in their local area. A website is essential for these types of business professionals.
Hiring a New Jersey SEO specialist who knows how to run a successful web marketing campaign for contractors is a very important aspect of a profitable local business. A web marketing professional will be aware of best practices in web design as well as using local SEO strategies to get the site seen by potential customers in your region. For a contractor who relies on this type of local business, a website can be a great tool.
Most of the time when someone thinks, I need a plumber…or a painter they will perform an online search first. When an SEO campaign is done correctly, this search should direct locals directly to the services you provide. This can mean a huge spike in profits for your business.
A website will offer customers your contact information and the types of services you can provide. You can also include photos where it is appropriate demonstrating some of your recent work and references. Customers will have all the information that they need about you all in one place. This can be your greatest selling point.
When it comes to doing marketing for contractors or engaging in any other SEO for local businesses there are many other proven strategies that can be used. These strategies will ensure that the website of the contractor will not only greatly increase business through greater visibility in SERPs, but will also drive business through a myriad of web 2.0 platforms that will be designed to generate quality leads. If you are a contractor and would like to learn more about doing SEO for your business please contact us by clicking on the contact button on the top of this page or by posting a comment here with your contact info.
Marketing for Doctors
02 months ago
SEO for Doctors
The Yellow Pages are not completely obsolete, yet. But they are slowly being replaced by a much quicker and more efficient web search. At least 70 percent of those seeking medical care, or looking for a physician begin with an online search. With the Internet being one of the main tools used by potential patients, it is important that doctors have an established online presence. For a physician, it is imperative that their contact information be easily accessed by Internet users. Their targeted audience or users in their geographical region must be able to find them and employ their services. This will take a professional SEO specialist who can optimize a doctor’s website so that doctor’s sites can rank high in local search engine results. Doctors are targeting a specific audience; therefore, there are certain elements that are essential to SEO for doctors.
Local SEO for Doctors
A doctor must make his services available to a targeted audience; those who are residing in his own geographical region. This targeted audience must be located in an area which makes it easy to be able to seek out the doctor and benefit from his medical services. There are several best SEO practices when it comes to the local SEO portions of a site. It is important to put the doctor’s contact information on each page of the site so that potential patients can reach them easily. But it is just as important to employ best local SEO practices so that the search engines can find the site and rank it in SERPs for people who live in the area. This will mean that you will choose proper keywords, local keywords, in the content of the site and in the Meta tags as well. This will help search engines know to place the doctor’s websites into the hands of a regional audience. As an example, simply add a location to your keywords. For instance, “Michael H Rieber, MD New Jersey” will suffice.
Off page SEO is also important. For instance, make sure that the doctor’s main business address is listed in Google maps as well as in the major search engine’s business directories.
Area of Practice
This should be clearly stated on the landing page, or home page of the site. It is very important for potential patients to find the type of physician that is needed for a particular situation. For instance, if the physician specializes in sports medicine, women’s issues or plastic surgery, a site visitor should be able to find this information readily to avoid confusion. An SEO professional will rightly use the doctor’s area of practice as a keyword in tags on site pages. Any area that the physician specializes in should be listed on the site, along with information about their practice in general. A patient needs to be able to build a quick rapport with the physician just from visiting the site. Web design, pertinent information, areas of practice and level of experience should all be information that is readily available to site visitors.
Reputation Management for Doctors
If a patient is looking for a physician and types in his name in a query only to receive negative information about that lawyer such as pending or formal malpractice law suits and such, it is very likely they will move on to the next result. For this reason, it is very important that a doctor’s online reputation be protected. Research indicates that it only takes one negative result to reduce the chances that a client will contact the physician for medical care. One way to monitor an online reputation is to subscribe to Google Alerts.
It is relatively simple to make sure that there are plenty of positives available online. A physician can keep an active blog which contains valuable information about the types of medical situations his clients may face. Always keep the main web site up to date with relative and pertinent information. Another best SEO practice is to make use of link building strategies. Keeping information pertinent, up to date and positive will help keep them on the higher end of search engine result pages. These positives can help diminish any negatives that might come up over time.
Google Local Listing Optimization
36 months ago
Online marketing is a very important aspect of the small business. Search Engine Optimization is a key component of getting a local business found online. To improve local search results good local SEO strategies are imperative. According to some research information about 87 percent of people who search for and find a product or service on line are likely to purchase off line. This means that you have to be able to get your business information on the web and into the hands of potential clients. The way to do that is through using SEO strategies. To put your business at the top of the search engine results for local listings may utilize many of these strategies. Using title tags is an essential part of these strategies.
Title Tags and Local Search
Improving the title tags within your site can improve your local SEO. When search engines are looking for information about your site they will check out the website code in the title tags first. You do not want to overload a title tag but you want to use it to its maximum potential. A title tag can hold quite a few words but Google’s limit is 70. It’s okay to use your business name in your title tag, just add some more keyword phrases; specifically keywords that people in your local area are looking for.
A title tag will specify the title of your web page in HTML code. This code is inserted in the header of the page and it will look something like this:
<head>
<title>Your Interior Painting Company Title</title>
</head>
There are two ways to optimize the title tag. You may choose to use the format: primary keyword – secondary keyword – brand name (or company). Another format may be: brand name-primary keyword and secondary keyword. An example for a painting contractor might look like this: Picone painting- exterior painting contractor – New Jersey. This way the primary keyword, business name and local tag are all included in the title tag. Remember to use a different title for each page of the site, don’t just use one title for all the pages. Make each one a good, but brief description of the contents of the page.
Using H1 Title Tags
The title tags and H1 (heading) tags should work together on a page. Actually they should be complimentary of each other. By looking at these two tags alone you should have a very clear idea of what the page consists of. These two places are very important in terms of SEO keywords. Take full advantage of the value that search engines place on H1 tags. To you, it may just look like a regular heading, but the search engine crawlers see much more. The page title tag has your focus keyword or keyword phrases in it. Then the Heading 1 tag should simply be reinforcement to the title tag. If the title tag has a general locality, like the state of New Jersey as a local keyword, then use a more specific keyword such as a specific county or town in the title tags.
What is Local SEO?
46 months ago
Local SEO Basics
Local SEO best practices
The World Wide Web, is just that – worldwide. There is no doubt that it is fascinating to see how far reaching the internet has become and how it has united the world in a strange way. And for those who can ship products around the world, the web can be the perfect place. But the global concept does not work for every business. Local businesses need to be able to use the web for meeting their business needs as well. And when I am looking for a painter, I do not need one from the other side of the world, I need one who can come to my neighborhood and paint my house. I will conduct a local search for a painting contractor.
Using local SEO means that I am trying to get the name of a local business in front of those who may need the services, or those who are in the general vicinity. It means that I will use the best SEO practices to market services or products to those who will need it in a certain region. The end result is that local SEO will help potential clients find an exterior painting specialist by searching locally.
Choosing Proper Keywords
As part of an existent SEO campaign you will want to expand to including the use of local keywords. “Painting contractor” will give you a very broad (worldwide) range of results. Local keywords which will help target local customers might be “painting contractor New Jersey,” or “exterior painting Essex County.” After selecting local keywords remember to include these in the content on the site.
Localized SEO
local SEO
One way to optimize local SEO is to use map programs in the major search engines. For instance, Google Maps allows you to register your site for free and then it will be seen in the localized results more often. Also remember to always put the physical address on every page of the website. This should include the city, state and zipcode for the area. This is precisely the type of information that will get indexed by search engine spiders.
There are more local business directories appearing on the web. These specialize in listing businesses that are located in specific geographical areas. Make sure that you have registered your business with these online directories. The listing will include a hyperlink to your business site.
One of the main things to remember when working on a business website is that you are trying to make it easy for customers to find your business. A regular SEO campaign is important and may work well. However, if you want to reach local customers a local SEO marketing campaign is necessary.
What is a Geo Tag?
37 months ago
A geo tag is the process of associating a geographical location with web page content. The webmaster can insert precise geographic coordinates in the code contained in a Meta tag which will tell search engines of an exact location. Geotagging usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates for a location. This geographical identification in the metadata is usually used for photographs, websites, RSS feeds or videos. Geotags give search engines the precise data needed to find a particular location.
GeO tags
How Does A Geo Tag Work?
Geo tags are useful for those searching for a particular business such as a painting contractor. It is important to find one in a specified locality so that they can perform their services. Geo tags are added into the code to the header of the site or blog. For example if I am searching for a contractor in Essex, New Jersey, the html code would look like this:
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”40.794747;-74.264883”>
<meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Essex, New Jersey, United States”>
<meta name=””geo.region” content=”us-nj”>
How does it work? “geo.position” is the tag that sets the latitude and longitude of the location. And “geo.placename” is the tag which inserts the specific town that is targeted by the site. The “geo.region” tag gives the information of the region, such as New Jersey.
This can be very useful because you can use a geo tag which will give the exact coordinates of where your business is located. Utilizing a geo tag can be very useful for contractors who only work within a specified region.
Geo Tags for Local Business
Let’s use our painting contractor as an example. I typed in “painting contractor” into google search and got 6,380,000 results. However, when I narrow the search down by being geographically specific and use “painting contractors new jersey” my search results diminish by half. That is still a very broad scope, but I also get a list of local businesses in that category.
The benefit to adding geo tags properly is that when someone from the area starts a search for a painting contractor the search engine will see that my site is close in proximity and therefore, it is considered more relevant to the search. Geo meta tags do have an influence on a site’s ranking.
Choosing the Right Keywords
We saw the difference in search engine results when we narrowed our search terms down by using geo specific terminology. It is no different when we are choosing appropriate keywords for local businesses. Depending on exactly how you want to execute your local SEO campaign, you will most likely want to choose keywords that are more localized. Instead of using painting contractor NJ, you may want to incorporate more specific information into the selection of keywords. For instance, using Essex County, NJ will be more specific for a targeted area.
Using best SEO practices means that the selected keywords will also be used in the content of the site as well as titles, etc. It will take a few months to get your ROI as a general rule. But after about a year with good results on painting contractor NJ, you will need to add other keywords or geo terms. The point is to not let the SEO campaign grow stagnant and be overtaken by the competition. You may want to add exterior painting NJ after doing further keyword research.
SEO for Local Businesses
59 months ago
Image by Steven Vance via Flickr
For any local business, developing an online presence may be challenging, but it’s worth it. Web marketing is the new way to reach new customers. There are millions of websites and businesses on the Internet competing for business. From a local standpoint, search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial.
SEO is a process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines, social networking sites and more. Through on page and off page SEO techniques, you can increase the amount of organic traffic to your website. Ranking in search engines for your local geographical areas is also important.
To appear in search results for different areas, specific targeting and local SEO needs to be implemented into your efforts; if you don’t intentionally target a county or specific town in your website copy or through other off-page SEO techniques, your business or website will not be found through search engines.
If your business ranks in your town and only your town, it’s most likely that you aren’t using any local SEO and neighboring towns won’t be able to find your business. You probably rank in your town because of minor mentions on your website. For example, Premiere Creative is located in Millburn, NJ and the address is written on the website in numerous places. If a customer was searching for, strategic marketing firm in Millburn NJ, the website would appear; the website would be far less likely to appear if someone were to search for SEO firm in NJ.
To appear for surrounding areas and counties, SEO must be implemented. Focusing on specific towns and counties requires on-page and off-page local SEO targeting. Google does build associations between towns and counties, but without any mentions or targeting for your business, they won’t make the connection.
It’s important for local businesses to use SEO. Although your local business website may appear in searches for towns that you conduct business in, it’s most likely due to the fact of an address mentioned on the website. Content is also important and keywords should be rich and business focused, strategically placed throughout webpages.
SEO Tip # 6 Using Google Local
11 year ago
I would like to welcome you to my sixth SEO tip of the day; here I will discuss the value of using Google local.
Google local has become one of the leading methods (replacing the Yellow Pages) by which most of us obtain local information such as phone numbers of restaurants in our area… It is therefore crucial for everyone who has a website targeted at a local audience to have a listing on Google local (as well as Yahoo local, Bing local…) There are a few major benefits when it comes to using Google local, the first of these is that it is free, the second advantage being that it is really easy to set up.
When it comes to optimizing your Google local listing there are a few important things, the first is to choose the right category for your listing, choosing the right category will get you more targeted results and thus higher quality traffic. The second important thing is, if the name of your business does not clearly state what you do you should add keywords for your listing, for example “NetLZ – SEO consulting services, web 2.0 optimization, blog optimization“
SEO Tip # 5 Using Local SEO for On Page Optimization
41 year ago
Image via Wikipedia
I would like to welcome you to my fifth SEO tip of the day; here I will discuss the value of on page optimization for local SEO.
.Local SEO consists primarily of positioning a website so that it targets a local market. Given that most websites today are local (specific to a town or region, ex: doctor’s office in Short Hills NJ, or Home remodeling Phoenix) and local traffic is often more valuable it is important for website owners to understand the basics of local SEO.
The basics of local SEO consist of targeting the right keywords that will appeal to your local market and that will get traffic to your website (one of the downsides of using local keywords is that traffic to your website may be very low, since few searches may be done locally for what you are selling, but if you use the right keywords you can be certain that the traffic that does come to your website will be very interested in your service or product). Another important aspect of local SEO is creating landing pages on your site for each town, county and region that you are targeting, each of these pages should contain basic information about the services that you offer in that town…
Easy Ways to do Local SEO
61 year ago
A guest post submitted by Eric Rea
Eric Rea is a college student who has a passion for Blogging and Sports. Check out his personal blog at www.ericrea.com
Local SEO is important
Local search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful marketing initiative to make. It’s the perfect blend of driving more traffic to your online website as well as to your local retail location. Alerting potential customers who live in your retail location’s general area to the existence of your business is going to undoubtedly increase sales. After all, people tend to trust local businesses more than obscure, online outlets. The beauty of the matter is that there are some relatively easy ways to do local SEO for anyone who is so inclined.
My first suggestion to you for your local SEO efforts would be to pay close attention to the keywords you use in the anchor text. Google does. Anchor text is the text that’s used to embed the link you are using. So, if you’ve written an article to post online and you’re going to link back to your website, instead of saying, “click here” and embedding the link into the word, “here”, instead use the keywords you want to rank for along with the local area your business is in. For instance, if you wanted to rank for the term, “Dentists” and you were located in Chicago, you might want to embed the link into the phrase, “Dentists Chicago”. That helps the search engines to connect the dots and realize that your link is relevant to those keywords and that geographical area.
Another great way for you to get your business to pull up on local searches is to submit your information to Google Maps. Google Maps is a very useful and popular tool that millions of people use every day. It can be used to get directions for various local businesses by consumers. By submitting your company address and information to Google Maps, you’ve just made yourself available to those who are looking for directions to local businesses in your community. Oh, and did I mention it’s free to do this? Yeah, it’s free.
Lastly, you ought to participate in local blogs and forums. Any sort of website that is already established for your local community will also already have local customers visiting there on a regular basis. Get in on the conversations. Contribute useful and relevant information and opinions for the conversations at hand. Be sure to embed your company website in your signature. The more people who see you participating actively on these local blogs and forums, the more their interest will be peaked. People will inevitably click on your link in the signature and will therefore learn about your business that’s located right in their local community. Local SEO really can be an effective marketing strategy that’s easy to do.
Going local: SEO through the eyes of the local market
02 years ago
Local SEO is something that I have mentioned a number of times on this blog and is something that I will continue to occasionally mention in posts b/c I am a big believer in it!
There are a few important things to note about local SEO, the first being that it is usually free. Another thing about this form of SEO is that it helps you to reach your target audience more efficiently, consider the target audience of a modern kitchen store in CT, or a SAT tutoring Center in NYC, the ability to reach local customers directly, at the exact point that they are searching for these queries in Google.
When it comes to local SEO there are a few musts, the first of these is Google local, Yahoo local, Bing local… that is simple, you input your local information, address, keywords… and when someone local searches for those keywords you will come up. Another big part of local SEO consists of local directories. There are many directories/classifieds that cater to a local audience (think Yellow pages or Craigslist) and all of these directories combined can do wonders to get you tons of targeted traffic, but as with other directories, it is a good idea to employ a top SEO firm for your local directory needs.
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