I want to continue today talking about Local SEO and a few local marketing tips that can help you gain rankings in your local area and make a good first impression to possible clients for your business. Everything that I will describe can be done for free and it only takes a little time and effort on your part. You will get out of it what you put into it.
Do not be afraid. Anyone can follow these tips and implement them on your own site. You do not have to be a technical coding geek to do this. So, breathe easy and keep reading.
For this example, I’m going to use a friend of mine’s chimney sweep website, HomeSaverChimneySweeps.com. His name is Mark Ferraiolo and we have been friends for many, many years. He lives in Pennsylvania now and has allowed me to use his website to illustrate a few examples that one could use to make their sites better in the eyes of the search engines.
Mark has done a pretty good job listing his site on Google local. Below is the screenshot of how it appears.
At first glance at his Google local listing, I would recommend that Mark ask more of his customers to write reviews about his business. He is only showing 1 review. I know for a fact that Mark has many satisfied customers and he should be asking each customer to go online and write a review. Word of mouth and testimonials are very powerful.
Here is what I observe and what I think Mark should do to his listing:
- Be more descriptive about what your business does. Mark only has 2 sentences describing his business.
- Post more photos showing your work. Google allows up to 10 photos to be posted.
- Post youtube videos of his chimney sweep work. Google allows up to 5 videos to be posted for the listing.
- Add coupons to his listing. The coupons will appear with his business listing on Google maps.
Wrist slap #1
Here is where I’m going to fuss a little bit at Mark and slap his wrist. When I visit HomeSaverChimneySweeps.com, Mark does not have a blog on his site. As we all know, the search engines love fresh content.
Wrist slap #2
Add video to your site Mark. You and I have discussed this in detail. Start a youtube channel. Youtube is the #2 search engine in the world next to Google and unfortunately, Mark is not taking advantage of this.
There is no evidence of any social media presence for Home Saver Chimney Sweeps such as Facebook & Twitter. Do you think that Mark could benefit from using Social Media in his chimney sweep business?
Google Insights:
The next thing I would do if I were Mark, is to visit Google Insights to search for the top terms I could use to help customers find me. I searched for the term “chimney” and used the filter of the state of Pennsylvania and all metros.
A quick search using Insights turned up a ton of useful information that Mark could use. The screen shot below shows regional interest for the search term “chimney.”
The screenshot below is the pot of gold for Mark. Google Insight shows all of the top searches related to “chimney” for the entire state of Pennsylvania. It also show the top rising searches for the term.
What should Mark do with this information? It’s simple. He should be incorporating these terms into his site. There are many other things that Mark can do also. Start posting youtube video and tagging his videos with these search terms. Posting photos on his site using “alt tags” with these terms.
Add a blog to his site and write specific articles about each search term. Mark should start building links to his site using these terms as anchor text for the links. I only see 15 links pointing to his site using the Yahoo Link Domain tool.
If Mark could start to rank in the search engines for these individual terms, combined with youtube videos of his work and customer testimonials, I believe Mark, my good friend, would have more chimney sweep work in Catawissa, PA than he could handle. Actually, I don’t think it…I know it.
Of course, this is not everything that Mark could do to help himself. These tips are quick and simple that he could start to implement today. What are some recommendations that you would give to Mark to improve his local SEO? Feel free to join in and leave your tips.
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