Carmen Rane Hudson

Are you struggling with on-site SEO? Many small business owners do.

Keyword optimization doesn’t just happen in the text of a blog post or web page. There are other elements that Google’s robots look at.

These elements are the title, the meta-tag, and the meta-description. As a small business owner you probably don’t want to go messing with the HTML to add all of these elements. Fortunately, you don’t have to, just as long as you are using WordPress to build and manage your site.

Instead, you need to download a little plug-in called WordPress SEO by Yoast. This plugin will put this box at the bottom of all of your posts.

This allows you to do more than select your target keyword. As you can see, it also shows you exactly how those results will look on the SERPs page. This means you can clean up your SERPs description and make it a little more compelling, so that people will click on it.

It also means you can check for the presence of keywords in the title and meta-description. These are the two places where Google is always happy to see your primary keyword at least once.

WordPress SEO by Yoast will also check for the presence of the keyword in the post URL, and at least once in the body of the article. It will then give you a green light, a yellow light, or a red light depending on how well you’ve done at optimizing your page.

Get into the habit of using this tool each and every time you post content on your website. While you won’t get a perfect “green light” every time (sometimes there just isn’t a good way to use the actual keyword, or a good keyword to use at all) it will train you to position yourself to receive the best possible search engine results for each and every page of your website.

I’ve been impressed with the Whitespark local citation finder for some time. And since building lots and lots of citations is one of the best ways to supercharge your local search marketing I decided I’d take a moment to walk you through the use of the tool.

Whitespark is powerful because it can literally uncover hundreds of different places to build citations. Use them all and it becomes much harder to knock you out of the top local search spots.

You start by filling in this simple form.

You won’t get results right away. Instead, Whitespark will add you to the process queue, and you’ll get an e-mail when your results are ready. A “view your results” button will be available inside of the email.

You’ll see how your competition is doing. You’ll also get a list of places to start building citations. You can even use the checklists function to keep track of where you’ve already gone.

You’ll note on this screen shot that most of the entries are blurred. You’ll need a paid account to really dig in and use this tool.

A small business account is only $20 a month. As you can see, my example generated 150 new places to build your business. If you’re trying to tackle DIY local SEO it’s going to be worth it, even if you only use the tool for one month to build those first 150 citations.

If you are thinking about getting SEO help then you now have a glimpse into some of the tools that might be used on your behalf. And some of the time commitment that you’ll be avoiding by getting that help! Just imagine, if you will, how many hours it would take to build 150 citations. Effort that pays off, but time-consuming just the same if you have to run your business, too.

As a business owner trying to advertise your products and services on the Internet you’ve got to observe a careful balance. On one hand, you’ve got to make Google happy. On the other hand, you’ve got to appeal to customers.

It can be tempting to skew that balance too far in Google’s direction out of a desire to rank as highly as possible. There’s something primal about the need to be number one. It’s also easy to assume that the top spot will bring you all of the customers you could possibly desire, whether your’e looking at your Google+ Local listings or your organic search listings.

But if you don’t spend at least as much time thinking about your customer’s experience you are likely to be disappointed by your results.

Customers are Pretty Savvy

Customers know that Google doesn’t always put the best results on top. They know that Google is ultimately just a piece of software.

So while a customer will click on the first search result first,, he won’t necessarily stay there. Not if he doesn’t see that the result meets his needs.

The person who ultimately gets the phone call may be the second or third result in line if they do a better job of giving customers what they want.

Irony of ironies: Google knows its just a piece of software too, so it takes bounce rates into account. If your listing consistently bounces customers your ranking will drop anyway.

On Google+ Local Listings

Start by taking a second look at your business description. Is it enticing? Does it speak to customers? Or is it just a collection of keywords?

Next, look at the photos you’ve taken and added to your listing. Do you even have photos? Are these photos the best you could have chosen? Could you add more photos?

On Your Website

There are three thins you need to look at on your website: content, clutter, and visual appeal.

First, content. How well does your site read? How useful is the content to the customer? Is it something you would want to read if you were searching for a website like yours?

Next, clutter. Is the site clean and easy to navigate? Does it load up quickly and perform smoothly?

Finally, visual appeal. Is your theme unique and professional? Does it bolster your brand? Are there any pictures or videos on your website? How good do they look?

Correct any issues and update your site. If you do, you should see more sales as well as more traffic. Conversions, after all, are the ultimate goal of all of this marketing, so it makes sense to pay attention to them.

If you spend a lot of time listening to SEO buzz these days you might wind up getting the impression that keywords no longer matter. Google is certainly working hard to make its search engine harder to manipulate, but this would be a misnomer. Keywords are still very important.

It’s more accurate to say that you don’t need to go crazy with keywords. The days of trying to shove an awkward keyword into every other sentence are long gone.

However, slipping keywords into your title is still a good idea. And if the title of your web page or blog post fulfills its promise, then the keyword (and related keywords) should appear naturally in the text.

Google’s algorithms have evolved enough to understand what’s going on without repeating exact keywords over and over again. Good news for quality content, but in many cases, 80% to 90% of a local business owner’s traffic will come from organic SEO and local SEO–not, say, from social media (however important it may be) or other tricks.

Keyword research is also still important because it gives you a lot of insight into what your customers want to know about. A phrase with a high search volume can tell you exactly what kinds of problems your customers are working to solve.

“Long tail” or “phrase queries” represent direct questions about your field or industry. For example, “outdoor kitchen ideas” (5400 global monthly searches) is a great keyword for someone in the landscaping industry, since it tells you exactly the kind of content that you need to create in order to appeal to their interests and concerns. You’re also far more likely to rank for that keyword than you are for “landscaping.”

Keywords are also pretty vital if you want to engage in PPC Advertising. PPC advertising relies heavily on keywords!

The VHT Blog captured this concept pretty nicely in one of its blog posts.

Think of it this way, if you are a real estate brokerage, and you focus your content and the keywords on your site around how awesome of a a community you have, but never include real estate focused key phrases, you’re not going to be seen as relevant for real estate consumer queries. If I fail to use the phrase “homes for sale” on my site, I’m not going to show up for searches that include that phrase. It’s somewhat of a simple concept.

If the specifics of keyword research are baffling to you, then you are not alone. This is where having the help of an internet marketer can be really crucial. Keep that in mind if your content creation efforts aren’t generating the type of traffic you were hoping to produce.

This week I had a little bit of trouble finding stuff to include in the round-up.

It wasn’t that there weren’t a lot of great posts out there. But I did not deem many of them as interesting to my core readers here as usual. Many were interesting to me, but not necessarily to you.

And since I don’t believe you should curate any content that your customers don’t care about I was left with a smaller list.

Two of them came from Mike Blumenthal this week, covering two specific developments in Google+ Local search and the Google+ Local interface. The first was Google Looks to Keep Local Users at Google.com With Two Interface Updates. It’s beginning to look as if Google doesn’t really want people looking at your Google+ Local page at all, though it’s still going to be important for you to claim and optimize your information so that it will show up on Google.com.

There’s rumors that links to Google+ Local pages are also no longer showing up in the Google Local results, which means it’s going to be more important than ever to have a webpage. Webpages still show up, and of course they continue to show up in organic search results.

Mike also shared a second development in Does Google Helpouts Indicate a New Direction For Local Transactions?

Help-outs is like Hangouts, only you’re selling video time with yourself, or giving away free videos to gather more business, or whatever.

But Mike covered more than that — he talked an awful lot about what this might indicate for the direction that Google is trying to move in with local search, and all of those insights are worth absorbing.

My third pick was from the Content Marketing Institute: Create Precise Buyer Personas with SEO Data. If you really want a content marketing strategy this will help you out. It will show you where there are holes in your content, the types of people that are reading specific types of content, and how you can cater to each of them. Furthermore, the post was almost exclusively geared towards local business!

Finally, there was a post from Inc.com called “Don’t Sweat Fair Weather Subscribers.” The idea is that sometimes a person’s decision to remove themselves from your email list can be a very good thing. The article will tell you why.

See you next week, hopefully with a longer list of content to share!