If you didn’t catch these great local SEO blog posts last week you might want to dig into them this week. Each of these posts has a wealth of excellent information for a small business owner who wants to be more visible online.
The first was Google Authorship for Your Plumbing or HVAC Business by Plumber SEO. While this wasn’t about local search per se it was a post that gave the Authorship program a distinctly local spin for contractors or other local business owners.
Authorship may well be feeding into Local SEO results as it is. That became abundantly clear when I read Linda Buquet’s post “Google+ Business Images in the Local SERPs – New and Hot for Local!” The jury’s still out on just where these images are coming from, but as I mentioned in yesterday’s post it’s time and past time for business owners to really get on top of their photo presence on the web.
Those who are interested in Local Carousel will want to pay attention to two posts. The first is A Heat Map Click Study for Google’s Local Carousel Results. Carousel took 48% of the clicks, so you can tell that this new development isn’t going away any time soon.
If you really want to get “deep in the weeds” on Google Carousel then you can take a look at Mike Blumenthal’s own round-up post, “Local Carousel Reporting from Around the Local Web.” There were a lot of neat posts on his list that were quite educational.
Finally, there’s “Small Business Can Still Have Big SEO Success.” Again, article from Search Engine Journal isn’t direct Google+ Local search advice. However, it is good SEO advice aimed squarely at small business owners who need to draw traffic from their immediate physical location, especially those in large city markets who may be competing with national businesses that have big deep pockets.
By the way, I’ve decided to do some sort of round-up once a week. It’s occurred to me that there are tons of people out there who are putting out some really smart work, and I’d like for my readers to be able to benefit from that work too. 🙂
