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One of the core areas I concentrate on with my my local SEO package is helping my clients get more customer reviews online. Reviews are important for two reasons. First, they are a ranking factor for Google+ Local pages. Second, and most importantly, positive customer reviews provide social proof that the business is legit and worth doing business with.

If you have a lot of positive reviews, they can almost sell your business by themselves. They make your job of “selling” so much easier. It’s critical that you get as many positive reviews for your business as you can get from your customers. There are a few different places you can have your customers leave their reviews. I always like my clients to start with Google Plus – unless the industry has more of a following on other sites such as Yelp.

I thought I would post the same exact instructions I post on my client’s websites. If you want me to create a private label page of these instructions for your site, contact me and I’ll gladly do it for free. It only takes me about 5 minutes to do. You can then direct your customers to the page on your own website and they’ll know exactly how to write a review of your business on Google+

Please Note: You must have a Google+ profile to write reviews on Google.

If you have a Google+ Profile:

Step 1: Visit the Google+ Local Page of the business you want to leave a review for

Let’s say we want to leave a review for Sela Roofing and Remodeling. Here is the link to their Google+ Page:
https://plus.google.com/113678505948749535453/about?gl=us&hl=en

Step 2: Click on the blue “Write a review” button

Step 3: Sign into Google+

Step 4: Leave your review!

If you don’t have a Google+ Profile and need to create one:

Step 1: Create a Google+ Profile

In order to create a Google+ Profile, you need to create a Google account. Click here to create a Google account.

Fill in all the fields on the right side of the page and click on the blue “Next step,” button at the bottom of the page:

When you click on the “Next step” button, you’ll have the option to upload a picture. You can skip that if you want and click on the blue “Next step” button.

When you click on the “Next step” button, you’ll be taken to the Welcome! screen. Click on the blue “Continue to Google+” button

You’ll be presented with a popup window to other options within Google+. You can skip those for now and click on the gray “Continue to Google+” button:

Step 2: Visit the Google+ Local Page of the business you want to leave a review for

Let’s say we want to leave a review for Sela Roofing and Remodeling. Here is the link to their Google+ Page:
https://plus.google.com/113678505948749535453/about?gl=us&hl=en

Step 3: Click on the blue “Write a review” button

Step 4: Leave your review!

Keyword research is the first step in the SEO process.  It is also one of the most important parts of the search engine optimization process. If you target the wrong keywords, you’ll be wasting your time and money.

Remember, SEO should be an investment in your business – not an expense. You want to target keywords that will give you a return on your investment!

3 Keyword Selection Considerations

When doing keyword research, there are three components to consider before selecting the keywords you want to target. They are:

1. Number of Searches
2. Competition
3. Search Intent

You want keywords that get a decent amount of searches without a lot of competition where the intent of the search matches the goals of the web page you are trying to rank for. With this combination, you’ll be able to rank more easily and much quicker and you’ll have better conversions.

How Many Searches? More Is NOT Always Better

If you are a chiropractor in Minneapolis who has just started your own practice, what keyword do you think you should target – “chiropractor” or “chiropractor minneapolis”? Let’s use the Google Keyword Tool and see how many exact searches each one gets every month. Here is what we see:

“Chiropractor” gets 110,000 searches while “chiropractor Minneapolis” gets 320 searches. It’s obvious “chiropractor” is what you should target, right? Not so fast.

“Chiropractor” gets significantly more searches but which one is more targeted to your potential customer base and which one is likely to be easier to rank for? I’ll give you a hint: “chiropractor Minneapolis”

If you have a lot of money and time to commit to getting ranked for “chiropractor” it could be done, but would it be worth it? Sure you might get a lot of traffic but what kind of conversions would you have? After all, how many people searching for the generic term, “chiropractor,” are actually looking for chiropractic care? And how many of them live in the Minneapolis area?

When using the Google Keyword Tool there are three different keyword match types that Google returns data for. They are broad, exact, and phrase match. You want to look at the exact and phrase match data when selecting keywords to target. That is why we looked at the exact match data in our example.

How Much Competition Is There?

There are several things to look at when sizing up the competition, but the primary things you’re looking at are domain age, page rank (PR), and the number of backlinks to a site. The older the domain, the higher the PR, and the more backlinks – the stiffer the competition.

Using our favorite SEO tool, Market Samurai, we search for “chiropractor Minneapolis” to see what the SEO competition looks like for the websites on the first page of Google for that keyword. Here is what we see:

The results are a little hard to see but the average age of the domains is 7 years and most of the sites have a PR between 1 and 3. The website with the most backlinks has 2,149 backlinks while the website with the least backlinks has 0! Just looking at this data, the competition isn’t that bad at all.

If you properly optimized a web page for this keyword and did the monthly SEO required (i.e. obtained backlinks every month), you could rank on Google (the first page specifically) within a few months. Contrast that with the competition for just “chiropractor”:

There are a few websites that are 12 years old with a PR as high as 5. A handful of websites have more than 10,000 backlinks with one having as many as 62,619 backlinks! As you can expect, a very broad keyword like this has lots of competition. It would take several months and a lot of time and effort (and money) to get ranked for this keyword!

Search Intent

Another consideration of the keyword selection process is the search intent. You want to make sure that the intent of the search matches the goals you have for the web page you’re trying to rank for. If the intent matches the goals, you’ll get better conversions.

For example, if you are trying to get a page on your website to rank for “sports chiropractor” and your practice is located in Minneapolis, then you want to research and target keywords specifically about “sports chiropractor” and not “family chiropractor” or “child chiropractor” etc. In addition, you want to rank for those keywords with Minneapolis as part of the keyword. Instead of “sports chiropractor,” you’d want to consider, “sports chiropractor Minneapolis” instead.

Bonus Tips on Keyword Selection

Here are a few bonus tips when doing your keyword research and selection:

Think like your customer! Just because you know your industry, don’t assume everyone else does. Don’t just think of the keywords you’d use to find your products or services. If this is difficult for you to do, just ask a family member or friend who’s not in your industry what they’d search for to find your products and services.

Think like an industry expert. O.K, this totally contradicts the first tip but there are people in your industry that may be looking for your products and services so consider keywords that are specific to your industry.

Don’t target too many keywords for each page on your website. This is a common mistake. Keep your keywords laser focused. We like to target no more than 1-3 keywords per page and we keep the keywords closely related.

Links To The 10-Part SEO Series on How To Rank on Google

Part 1: SEO Success Starts With Keyword Research
Part 2: Why Producing Quality Content for SEO Is Important
Part 3: Structuring Your Website For SEO
Part 4: Content Optimization for SEO
Part 5: Internal Linking Strategies for SEO
Part 6: Human Testing for SEO Success
Part 7: Search Engines Submissions for SEO
Part 8: Link Building for SEO
Part 9: Monitoring Your SEO Efforts
Part 10: Extra Tools & Resources for SEO Success

When it comes to Google Places SEO, it is very important that you make it easy to find the content on your website for both search engines and for humans. To achieve this, you need your website to be very organized and there should be plenty of links from your homepage to your content pages and from your content pages back to your homepage. You should never have an abandoned page, which is a content page that contains no links.

When you are linking from one of your pages to another, you should always use anchor text. Anchor text is simply one of the keywords or keyword phrases that are used on the page that the link will take the user to. As an example, if you are creating a link to a page that has a primary keyword phrase of “Indianapolis Surgeons,” your anchor text should be Indianapolis Surgeons, not “click here.”

Optimizing Your Website with KML Files and Sitemaps

XML and HTML Sitemaps

The name pretty much says it all, but a sitemap is a chart or map of your business’s website. When it comes to sitemaps, there are two kinds. An HTML sitemap is basically for humans, and an XML sitemap is what search engines use. Although they are not used as much anymore, HTML sitemaps are still a good idea because they provide a helpful outline of your business’s website and contain links to all of the pages that are included in the website.

An XML sitemap is absolutely imperative. They are of a much more technical nature and are specifically designed for search engines to work off of, unlike the HTML sitemap which can be used by people. Your XML sitemap can be linked in the footer of your website, but you should also submit it to all of the most commonly used search engines. When you submit your XML sitemap to the search engines, they will “see” any new content that you add to your website and get it indexed much more quickly. This faster indexing can also speed up the time it takes to see the results of your Google Places SEO efforts.

Google GEO Sitemaps

Google Geo Sitemaps make it possible for you to publish Geo content to Google and make it capable of being searched in Google Maps and in Google Earth. Using Google Geo Sitemaps allows you to speed up the process of getting your business location to show up in Google Maps and Google Earth because you are basically telling Google’s computers about your Geo content instead of waiting until it is found by Google’s computers.

KML Files

The file format that is used to show geographic data on maps like Bing Maps and Google Maps is referred to as KML, which mean Key Hole Markup Language. This type of file can be created to point out and sync your business’s location on online maps.