10 EFFECTIVE LOCAL SEO STRATEGIES FOR MOVING COMPANY WEBSITES

SEO might not be the first thing that comes to mind for small business owners when they set their marketing strategies. Many local businesses think that SEO is strictly for companies that do a large amount of their business online.

This assumption is a huge mistake. A reported 88 percent of consumers look at reviews on the web prior to purchasing services from local businesses. Small businesses can use SEO as a massively effective tool. If you have a small business, like a moving company, that is specific to one geographic area, you can use local SEO tactics and target your ideal market right outside your door.

To target your local market online for your moving company, here are 10 local SEO strategies.

Start with the Basics

You’ll first need to establish your business page with the search engines’ local directories. The big players are:

• Google My Business
• Yahoo Local
• Bing Places

It’s a pretty straightforward task; simply enter your moving company’s name, address, and phone number, also known as NAP data. Make sure your NAP data are formatted uniformly with the information on your site. You want this information to be consistent anytime a potential customer finds it online.

Format Your Business Info Correctly

While it’s important for your moving company’s NAP information to be consistent on the web, you’ll also want to format it correctly. On your site, ensure your NAP data are formatted in HTML that is search bot friendly.

You can also use schema markup in your HTML code to give the search bots even more detailed information about your company. You can include available services or products, customer reviews, and more.

Include High-Quality Pictures

When customers perform local searches, they often pay attention to pictures of the various businesses. Ensure you upload professional-looking photos into your local business accounts for Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Google will automatically place a picture on your account, so make sure to pick your own.

Don’t Neglect Business Directories

After you’ve claimed your business on all the major search engines, it’s time to look at the review sites. Some of the most popular sites to focus on include:

• Yelp
• TripAdvisor
• Manta
• Foursquare
• Yellow pages

Ensure these business review platforms list your business. You can also claim your company, like you would through the search engines. Make sure your NAP data on these pages are consistent with your site and search engine business pages.

Watch Your Online Reputation

Although claiming your page and optimizing your NAP data are important for local SEO, you also want to pay close attention your online reputation and the feedback your company is getting on these review sites. Google has repeatedly mentioned that reviews factor into local results for businesses, so focus on garnering high-quality reviews, especially for Google My Business.

Leverage Social Reviews

Many consumers look to Facebook to find reviews of products and services from their friends list. Focus on garnering positive reviews on your social media platforms to leverage this word-of-mouth style local marketing.

Separate Social Between Branches

If you have multiple branches for your moving company, set up social media profiles for each individual location. Social platforms, like Facebook, have location functionality, which allows business owners to control the pages for all individual locations, as well as the main page for the entire company. This lets customers interact with each branch and the company as a whole

Create Locally Targeted Content

Build your content strategy on locally focused keywords and topics. Blogs, articles, and other content should hone in on the local area. For your moving company, craft content that relates directly to your business and delivers value on a local scale.

This might look like a blog post about local on-street parking regulations for moving trucks or the best time of the day to move in your city to avoid traffic congestion.

Remember Mobile Optimization

Tweak Your Title Tags

Include geographic descriptors in your title tags to boost your pages for local search. Instead of using “highly rated moving company,” use a tag like “best moving company in New York City.”

Optimizing your title tags lets search engines know that your services are local to your area, which increases the chances they rank for local searches.

When used properly, local SEO can push your moving company’s website to the top of the search results pages. By focusing on these local strategies, you can hone in on your target audience online right in your own backyard.

TOP 5 REASONS WHY YOUR LAW FIRM IS HIDING ONLINE

The web is one of the first places many people go when they have legal issues. With a quick search on Google, they can find more information about their legal dilemma and a listing of local attorneys just waiting to handle their problem.

If you’re not one of the attorneys or law firms coming up in the search results, you’re missing out on thousands of potential clients. The web is a great resource for those seeking legal help, but it can also be a great tool for your firm to get in front of potential clients.

Here are a few potential reasons your firm’s name isn’t popping up at the top of the search engine results.

1) You’re Not Targeting the Correct Keywords

Keywords are the specific phrases people use to perform a search on Google. These are typically phrases like, “DUI attorney in New York City.” You may have some issues being found in the search results if you’re not doing your keyword research and using your findings to guide your content.

The key to targeting the right keywords is all in the research. You need to envision your ideal clients and then think of what types of problems or questions they may have. If your firm mostly handles DUI charges, you’ll want to start your research on words and phrases someone recently charged with a DUI might use in a Google search.

You can use the Google Keyword Planner Tool to view the analytics of certain keywords and phrases that you think of. The keyword tool will also suggest related keywords, which will help you build your keyword list.

These targeted keywords will be the basis of your content strategy. You’ll use them to write informative articles that help answer the questions that they’re related to.

2) You’re Not Posting Regularly

Getting your firm’s site in the top of the search engine results is a commitment. Part of this commitment includes posting on a consistent basis. Stagnant blogs with no posts in several months don’t display the level of authority and expertise you’re looking for.

A good target to aim for is one post per week. To gather a decent following and establish yourself as a leader in the legal field, you’ll need to post as often as possible without going overboard. As readers come to know you as a consistent source of legal information, your shares and readership will increase.

One great way to produce quality content is to create a schedule for posting and commit to it. You can create multiple articles at once and then schedule them to be posted later

3) You’re Not Using Social Media

You should use your social accounts to amplify content on your page. Post the links to your articles and other content across all social media channels. Not only will this make your content visible to followers on your social media that may not visit your page regularly, it will also increase the odds of your articles being shared.

4) You’re Posting Thin Content

Posting high-quality, relevant content is a surefire way to steadily push your site up the search results pages and establish your firm as a legal authority. Churning out the same old information spun in various boring ways will do just the opposite.

Thin content is the exact opposite of high-quality content. Whereas quality content is original and provides valuable information to users, thin content doesn’t offer any useful or actionable information for readers.

Users that take to a search engine to look for legal answers need very specific and often technical information. Thin content is not very good at delivering this type of information. Focus on thoroughly delivering quality information, and you’ll see a slow but steady rise in your site’s search positioning.

5) You’re Not Using Internal Links

When it comes to SEO, so many site owners and managers think about external links and their benefits. Although external links are great ways to boost SEO for your firm’s site, don’t neglect the power of internal links.

If you’re posting regularly, you should have a healthy amount of content on your site. Linking back to relevant posts from the past is a great way to give context to current posts, highlight old content readers may find valuable, and boost SEO.

With so many people searching for answers to legal issues online, your firm can’t afford to have its site sit at the bottom of the results pages. Focusing on these above problems and making a commitment to fixing them will help right the ship and improve your chances of moving up in the rankings.

3 SEO TRICKS E-COMMERCE SITES OFTEN OVERLOOK

The world of e-commerce is highly competitive. Thousands of niche product sites vie for the clicks of shoppers across the world. In a space where so many competitors jostle for elbowroom at the same table, every edge your site can garner will go a long way.

Most site managers do their fair share of due diligence when it comes to site SEO (search engine optimization). They ensure that a base level of SEO tactics is applied to their e-commerce page. Yet with so much at stake, there are simple things site owners and managers can do to give their site the extra boost it needs to land at the top of the SERPs.

Optimizing e-commerce sites for SEO is different from blogs or company websites. The hundreds or thousands of product pages can create mayhem for SEO game plans. For e-commerce sites, the base level of search optimization doesn’t guarantee traffic. Below are a few strategies many sites often overlook that can give your web store an extra edge.

Ensure Proper Keyword Placement

The placement of your keywords always trumps the frequency. If you stuff too many keywords into your page, you risk being penalized by search engine algorithms. Turn your focus toward ensuring your keywords are in the right location instead.

Google places priority on the beginning of title tags, so this is where you’ll want your targeted keywords. Be sure to include the keyword in the meta description, as well. This will ensure that Google doesn’t choose random content from your page and use it as your description. It’s true that the meta description itself doesn’t affect your ranking, but it’s insanely important when it comes to click-through rates, so don’t neglect it.

URLs, headers, and subheaders rank second behind your page’s metadata. Be sure to include your keywords in these locations as it makes sense to do so. Also, place your keywords throughout the body of the content in a way that reads naturally.

Give Images Context with Alt Text

Many e-commerce sites miss the chance to capitalize on solid image alternative text, or alt text. Alt text is simply descriptive text applied to the images on your site. This text lets the Google web crawlers read your image and give context in relation to the content surrounding it.

Properly written alt text can give your site a leg up on the competition by taking advantage of the popularity of Google’s image search.

This is especially important for e-commerce sites considering the large number of photos included in a typical web store. It’s important that you take the time to add quality alt text to each of your product images. While this is a large undertaking, you’ll definitely see the benefit when you edge out your competition in the SERPs.

Keep in mind, your efforts may be in vain if you don’t include quality alt text. Solid alt text gives a detailed description of the image. Avoid simply stating what the item is; instead, include brand names, item numbers, and other specific descriptions. Most web page crawlers only read about 125 characters of alt text, so keep it short. Take advantage of the alt text by including your keywords but avoid stuffing. You simply want to concentrate on providing context to the picture and incorporate your keyword if logical.

Avoid Duplicate Content

You may have heard that content is king when it comes to building out solid SEO. This is definitely true, but the saying only tackles part of the issue. Original content is truly king. You can have all the content in the world on your site, but if duplicates exist elsewhere on the web, your ranking will suffer drastically.

While you won’t be penalized directly for duplicate content on your page, you will create issues for the search engines when they attempt to index your URL. Duplicate content makes it difficult for the search engine crawlers to determine which URL is most relevant for given keywords.

This can be pretty common for e-commerce sites with vendor-provided product descriptions. Vendor-distributed product descriptions are often copied and pasted onto individual e-commerce stores, creating a vast amount of duplicate content across the web. You should aim to create as many unique product descriptions as possible. This is a big undertaking when you consider many e-commerce sites have hundreds, if not thousands, of products. You may have far too many products to write unique descriptions for each one, and that’s OK. The idea is to avoid page after page without any unique content. Aim to rewrite the majority of your descriptions, and you’ll be off to a good start.

It’s true that e-commerce SEO presents a different set of challenges compared with traditional sites or blogs. The massive amount of moving parts and content can make optimizing your web store extremely difficult. It may be tempting to lay out a basic SEO strategy and consider it good enough, but by taking a few extra steps, you can leverage tactics that many site managers often overlook. If you put in the effort, you’ll see your hard work result in increased traffic.