Small Business SEO

I was catching up with my reading over at Search Engine Journal and I came across this post: Post Penguin 2.0 Local SEO Strategies for Small Business.

A lot of people groan at every Google update. Many believe that each update makes it harder for the little guy to get found.

This may be true…for internet-only businesses and blogs.

But as the article points out, a local small business has gained a significant competitive advantage in Google. “For example, a local coffee shop has no chance at ranking for a keyword like ‘coffee,’ but Google appears to be ranking local businesses more importantly in this new update.”

Of course, Travis and I have spent a ton of time talking about different ways that you can rank on Google+ Local.

But the article mentioned a specific technique, one that we’ve never talked about on our blog but that we’ve offered to our clients for some time now: creating location-specific landing pages.

You see, you can only have one Google+ Local listing, and that listing needs to be for the town that houses your legal, physical address. I covered this in a guest post over at Blogging Painters.

In that post I told readers that they should not worry about the fact that they’re not supposed to create a separate Google+ Local listing for every single city in their service area. Why? Because you can always talk about those cities on your blog. Eventually, you can rank for that city + your service organically. It’s not that hard, cause your competition isn’t doing anything like this.

Well, location-specific landing pages are another way to use this strategy. But you have to create them the right way.

Fortunately, there are only 3 rules.

No Duplicate Content

It’s going to be tempting for you to repeat your home page copy on your location-specific landing page. You might feel as though it’s okay since you’ll be changing the city name.

But it’s not. And Google will lower your rankings rather than raising them if you do. Every landing page’s copy must be unique if you want this technique to work.

The Content Must Be Useful

This is not easy to do. Not on a location landing page.

It will require you to think outside of the box. A simple sales page will not get the job done either.

Instead, you have to think about location-specific information that your customers care about.

A cab company might take the time to talk about popular destinations in that city. A company that does water damage restoration might talk about weather data as it relates to local flood conditions. You might also add city and county emergency resources such as links to emergency shelters, emergency phone numbers, and links to evacuation maps.

It can take a lot of time to figure out which local information is both genuinely useful and genuinely relevant to what you do. And it has to achieve both things.

Don’t Try to Do Too Many

Choose about 6 secondary markets that you want to target. It’s going to be all but impossible to be really unique with too many more.

Ignore your smallest markets. They know they’re small, so they’re probably searching nearby cities anyway.

What are your thoughts on location-specific landing pages? Will you be using them for your business? Let me know in the comments below!

If you don’t know about Google Plus Authorship yet then you really need to! According to Search Engine Land, Eric Schmidt of Google has released a statement declaring that authorship could become the most important factor for ranking.

Not keywords. Not social signals. Not backlinks. But whether or not Google knows and trusts the author of the content.

Obviously this is something that small business owners have to get on top of.

What is Google Places Authorship?

Have you ever run a search and noticed that someone’s photograph appears next to the search results? That someone is the person that Google has recognized as the content’s author.

Most people instinctively trust the content more when they see an author photograph next to that content. The results that show up without such a picture just don’t look as credible.

As noted in the Slide Share presentation below (courtesy of Mitul Ghandi), Google Authorship doesn’t just make your content rank better. It makes it more “clickable” too.

Aside from the trust and “clickiness” factor, the author photograph draws the eye. As Plumber SEO stated in a recent webinar, it “makes your listing jump off the page.”

What does this mean? It means your content could show up as the #2 or #3 result and might still get the click over the #1 result (without an author attribution) because the person’s eye is drawn right to it.

Author Rank–Coming Soon?

You may have heard that Google has a feature called Page Rank to determine how active, important, useful or interesting a site is. Well, while it’s not here yet, Google has made it pretty clear that Authors will also be given some kind of rank in the future.

Content written by someone with a high AR will probably rank better than content written by someone with a low AR. And content that Google considers “anonymous” will rank lowest of all.

The people who start building their AR now are the ones that are going to have a high AR when this feature rolls out. As with most things, fortune favors the early adopter.

Okay, So How Do I Make this Happen?

I think the best part about all of this is that it’s super easy to do.

First, you need to set up a Google Profile. Visit http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/profile/.

Next, you need to go to the “Contributor To” section.

Click edit to add your blog title and link, then hit save.

Now you need to tell Google that the content is yours. You can, if you want, do that the fancy HTML way.

Personally, I’ve never done that, because my brain doesn’t do code. (Travis might, though).

Instead, I like to install one of the many, many WordPress Plugins that will put all of that code in there for me once I give it my profile link.

Whichever way you choose you’ll want to use the Google Rich Snippet Tool to make sure that all of this is working.

And that’s it! Produce a steady stream of great content as normal, knowing that your author rank is increasing all the time.

And don’t worry. You can do this even if you’ve hired someone for their blog writing services. As long as the content points to your profile, Google will recognize it as having been written by you.