If you’ve tried to improve your local rankings yourself, you’ll know that having a Google My Business profile isn’t enough to get you showing in Google’s Map Pack. There’s a lot of work you’ll need to do to optimize your listing enough that it ranks highly. Exactly what you’ll need to do to improve your local SEO rankings is what we’ll cover in today’s post.

1. See if there’s a duplicate listing

One of the most common reasons businesses struggle with local SEO is because they have a duplicate Google My Business listing. You may not remember setting it up, you may not even know about it, but you’ll be shocked how common this issue is. Use an online tool like BrightlLocal or Moz local to see if there are duplicate listings of your business.

2. Add more relevant categories

Adding categories is a great way to increase your local SEO presence. And there are loads more categories than you probably realize. Think outside of the box to see if there are more relevant categories you can add for your business. Remember, as long as they are relevant they can help. Alternatively, just look at what categories your competitors are using.

3. Get your NAP sorted

If you’ve done your own local SEO, you’ll know that Google uses your business’ Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) to verify and associate every online mention of your business. Because of this, you need to make sure that your business address and phone number is found in text form on your website. If you can, put it on every page.

4. Make sure you are listed everywhere

In a previous post, we have discussed how important it is to make sure your business is listed in every relevant directory and to not just rely on a Yext PowerListing. The more instances Google can find of your business NAP, the higher it will rank you. So don’t stop creating citations!

5. Increase customer reviews

One of the biggest factors in local SEO is the number and quality of customer reviews your business has. Google uses it as a key ranking signal that suggests high-quality businesses that other people will want to know about. But potential customers will also take them into consideration when looking at which business to choose.

Go responsive

While this last one doesn’t strictly relate purely to local SEO, it is still important. More and more searches are being completed on smartphones. And especially local searches. That means a lot of people who visit your site will be viewing it on a mobile device. If your site isn’t optimized for these devices, however, they will quickly leave in order to find a better experience. Build a responsive website to make sure your bounce rate stays low.

If you need help getting your local SEO campaign off the ground, then speak to a member of our team today.

There’s no point investing in SEO if Google doesn’t index your site correctly. While this considered a minor part of SEO, you’d be surprised about the amount of indexation problems clients have. The good news is that issues are easily fixed. And you can follow this guide if you want to make sure that Google crawls your site completely.

Why isn’t Google crawling every page on my sitemap?

We’ve seen several examples where Google doesn’t completely crawl a sitemap. Remember that a sitemap is inclusive rather than exclusive. This means that there will be some pages on your sitemap that Google doesn’t crawl and some pages that aren’t on your sitemap that it does crawl.

There are a couple of reasons why Google won’t crawl a page on your sitemap. It is usually down to thin or duplicate content issues. If you have a doorway page or a duplicate page with very little unique content on it, Google simply won’t bother to crawl it.

Shouldn’t Google index every page on my site?

Google will never index every single page on your site or anyone else’s. It just isn’t going to happen and this is totally normal. Some pages just aren’t relevant and it isn’t worth Google or Bing or anyone else’s time. Focus on your most important pages and make them as good as they can be

Tips for making sure that every page in your sitemap gets crawled

There are a couple of things that you can do (or not do) to make sure that Google does crawl every page on your sitemap. These include the following points.

Make sure links are canonical and not redirects

Google wants to see the final destination of URLS, not be redirected around your site. So for landing pages in particular, make sure that you use the final URL and not a redirect.

Don’t create new sitemaps to get crawled

If some of your pages aren’t getting crawled, it can be tempting create several new sitemaps. Don’t. If your pages aren’t getting crawled in the first place, the problem is with your pages, not with your sitemap.

Stop creating thin content pages

If you are creating pages on your website with very little added value and a lot of regurgitated content, you’re not going to get crawled completely. Things like local service pages for different cities that are all but the same are a prime example of this.

Create proper 404 pages

By creating a proper 404 page that other pages get redirected to, you can stop the production of low quality doorway pages. There are several WordPress plugins that can help you do this.

Use the indexation report in Google Search Console

Google’s new indexation report in the Search Console helps you to identify indexation problems on your site. It will show you the reason why there was an error and how many pages are involved.

If you’re still having indexation problems, maybe it is time to let the experts have a look. Our team can help you identify any issues and resolve them quickly and effectively.

If you have a load of outdated content on your website, it’s time for some spring cleaning. As thematic content becomes more important and your SEO efforts grow over time, it is important to keep an eye on old content so that it remains useful to visitors and aligns with your business.

Why do you need to do spring cleaning on your site?

There are a couple of reasons you should go back through old content to see what is good, what is bad and what is downright ugly. One of the most important reasons from our point of view has to do with thematic SEO. It is becoming more apparent that the more content you write about a topic, the more Google associates you with it and the higher you rank. It may be that you offered a couple of services in the past that you no longer offer but you still have these pages lurking on your site. If they are still live then Google can still crawl them and they can take away from the relevancy of your site.

On another level, old and outdated content isn’t great for the user. If a user lands on your site from Google, sees a bad piece of content and leaves straight away, it will result in a high bounce rate. Google uses bounce rate as a factor so the less satisfied users are with your content, the more quickly they will leave and the more your rankings will drop.

Now let’s look at what to do.

Is it still useful? Update it

If your outdated content can be revived and updated so that it becomes useful to visitors again, then update it. There’s no point getting rid of old content if it can still add value, otherwise you are just throwing away hard work. But you must, must keep it updated. Even if it means changing the article completely, it is worth doing as the page itself will have a lot of SEO value stored in it.

Not useful? Delete it

If you can’t find a use for an old piece of content and it isn’t adding any value whatsoever, then delete it. But don’t just hit delete. Instead, find a piece of semi-related content that you are going to keep and use a 301-redirect to permanently redirect the out of date content to the good content. If you can’t find another useful post to redirect it to, then redirect it to the homepage.

Another option you may want to consider is to serve a 410 Gone status to Google to inform that the content has completely gone. This will stop Google from returning a 404 error.

Need help with a content refresh?

If you need to refresh your old content or want to improve the thematic relevance of your site, we are here to help. Get in touch today.

Most people would have you believe that Local SEO is relatively straightforward. In some cases it can be as simple as adding your business’ location to Google My Business, adding all the correct information, creating citations and getting reviews. Yes, it is still a lot of work, but that will normally do the trick. Sometimes it doesn’t, however. And when your map listing drops, or doesn’t show up in the first place, it can cause a problematic drop in organic traffic. More often than not, it also requires an expert to fix the problem.

In today’s post we are going to look at what happens when you map listing doesn’t work and what you can do to fix it. This is based on our own experience helping our clients to rank locally, as well as industry best practices.

What to do if you just can’t rank

We have seen instances where whatever you try, Google just won’t rank a business in a certain map location. It has happened to us with a fishing client of ours who wanted their business to show up in a certain marina. No matter what we tried or how many citations we built, it just wouldn’t rank.

Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the location. It could be that another business in the marina had used an inappropriate tactic to try to influence the rankings and, as a result, everyone was being punished.

Our solution?

Move the goalposts. If we couldn’t rank the business in the marina, we would rank it for another location close by.

So rather than keep toiling away, we decided to change the location of the business to the client’s nearby home address. As soon as we did this, and updated all of the citations as a result, the listing soared to the top of the Map listing.

Organic rankings can be affected as well

Not only did the listing soar to the top of the map pack, but the site’s organic listing also started to rise quickly. Soon, it was the top result behind the map pack.

What does this tell us? It would suggest that bad data in the map pack hurt your organic listing as well as your map listing.

It also tells us just how important it is to make sure that all of your citation data is up to date, too. Because clearly, it won’t just affect your map rankings, it can affect your normal organic rankings too.

Can we help you improve your map results?

If you are suffering from a similar problem, we can help. As local SEO experts, we can help you out whatever issues you are suffering with Google’s Map Pack. Whether your ranking has dropped or you can’t rank at all, we’ll develop a strategy that helps you get to the top of the pack. Get in touch to find out more.

Many agencies will tell you that you only need to submit your website to a few of the major aggregators to achieve a local map ranking. This may be true in very uncompetitive industries, but it simply isn’t the case in most of the cases we have seen. If you want to rank properly in Google’s Map Pack, you’re going to need a lot more citations.

In this article, we’ll look at the current state of the search ecosystem and discuss why it is so important to cover every possible directory rather than rely on a PowerListing or a single aggregator.

The U.S. Local Search Ecosystem

The U.S. Local Search Ecosystem is the result of work between Whitespark and Tidings. It maps out the entire ecosystem and shows who the primary aggregators of business data are, how search engines use that data and how the data flows between websites and platforms.

From their research, we can see that there are four key data aggregators in the U.S.: Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze, and Factual. These are the big boys that collect and aggregate all of the business data. Search engines then license the data from these sites. The also license data from other key sites like Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, and Yellowpages. Search engines also maintain their own data, but they make more use of the data provided to them by the sites listed above.

Finally, there are several vertical and geo-specific sites that can be a great source of traffic for businesses. These also take data from the main aggregators but also hold their own data, too. As such, it is doubly important to make sure that your data is correct on each of these sites.

As you can see, in order to increase your presence as much as possible, you need to have the correct information with all of the data aggregators, and then with all relevant vertical and geo directories, too.

If incorrect information is present on any of these sites, it can override the data that a search engine has about a business and lead to new listings being created or changes to existing listings. Both of these can lead to a decreased presence in search engines and less traffic coming to your site.

The good news is that we don’t let this happen.

We offer complete citation listings

When we do citations for our Local SEO clients, we don’t settle for a Yext PowerListing. We do our own citation building that allows us to cover every major aggregator outlined here as well as many, many others. When we do citations, we add up to 300 more citations every month to ensure that you have full coverage. And it’s usually these additional citations that help get our clients to the top. To find out how we can help you rank higher in Google’s map pack, get in touch today.