What is a Google local listing?

Google local listing is a free listing on Google that appears when potential customers are searching for your business name or a service you offer. It is sort of like a hub that allows customers to quickly find all of your contact info in one place directly on Google’s search page. Your website can, and should, be linked to your Google Local Listing [1]. It can appear in the Local Pack (under the “more places” link), the Organic results section, or on the right-hand side of the Google search. Your listing should be filled out as completely as possible to avoid being penalised by Google’s ranking algorithm [1].

A Google local listing shows various information about a business, including:

1. Business name
2. Address
3. Phone number
4. Business category
5. Reviews and ratings from customers
6. Website URL
7. Hours of operation
8. Photos of the business
9. Directions to the business location
10. Popular times when the business is busiest
11. Questions and answers about the business
12. Attributes such as wheelchair accessibility, outdoor seating, etc.
13. Products or services offered by the business
14. Posts from the business with news, updates, and special offers.

These listings appear when someone searches for a business or related keywords on Google Maps or Google Search. They are an important tool for businesses to improve their online presence and help potential customers find them easily.

Google makes this very simple for you and we would struggle to make this any easier. So we advise following this link to Google business profiles to get started. But before you do…

The most common mistakes of Google local listings / My Business listing

There are several common mistakes that businesses make when filling in their Google local listings / My Business listing. Some of the most common mistakes include:

1. Inaccurate information: One of the most significant mistakes businesses make is providing inaccurate information. This includes incorrect business name, address, phone number, website URL, hours of operation, etc. It can lead to confusion for customers and negatively impact a business’s online presence.
2. Using inappropriate categories: Businesses often choose the wrong category for their business, which can make it harder for potential customers to find them. It’s essential to choose the most relevant and specific category that accurately describes the business.
3. Neglecting photos: Including high-quality photos of the business, products, and services is essential for attracting customers. Neglecting photos or using low-quality images can make the business appear unprofessional and untrustworthy.
4. Ignoring reviews: Reviews and ratings from customers are critical for building trust and credibility. Ignoring reviews or not responding to them can give the impression that the business doesn’t care about customer feedback.
5. Not optimising for SEO: Optimising the Google local listing for search engines is essential for improving the business’s visibility in search results. Neglecting SEO can result in the listing being buried in search results, making it harder for potential customers to find the business.
6. Not updating information regularly: Businesses need to keep their Google local listing up-to-date by regularly updating information, such as hours of operation, contact information, products or services offered, etc. Neglecting to update information can result in potential customers being misled and negatively impact the business’s online reputation.

By avoiding these common mistakes, businesses can ensure their Google local listing is accurate, up-to-date, and optimised for attracting potential customers.

References:

[1] What is a Google My Business Listing and Do I Need One?

[2] Google Business Profile – Get Listed on Google

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Finding Long-tail keywords

Low-hanging keywords are those that are relatively easy to rank for due to their low search volume and competition. These keywords are often “long-tail keywords” that are more specific than the more popular terms and have a higher likelihood of being found by the search engine. Examples of low-hanging keywords are “tips for managing a home office” or “how to create a relaxing work environment”. By focusing on these keywords, you can increase your SEO rankings without having to compete with more popular phrases.

Creating a Keyword strategy

Here’s a step-by-step guide for researching low-hanging or easy-to-rank keywords for membership businesses:

Brainstorm Keyword ideas

Before diving into keyword research tools, start by brainstorming a list of relevant topics, themes, and questions that your target audience may be searching for. Think about the products or services your membership business offers, the problems you solve, and the benefits you provide to members. Consider the language and terminology your audience uses, and make note of any unique features or niche areas that set your business apart.

Using a keyword research tool

Once you have a list of topics and themes, use keyword research tools to find related keywords that have low competition and high search volume. Some popular tools include Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz Keyword Explorer. Enter your brainstormed topics and themes into the tool, and look for related keywords with low competition (indicated by a low difficulty score) and moderate to high search volume. These keywords are likely to be low-hanging or easy-to-rank opportunities.

In this Quick Win we will look at Google Ads keyword research tool:

How to use the Google Ad Keyword tool

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use the Google Ad Keyword tool to find low hanging or easy to rank keywords for association membership businesses:

Sign in to your Google Ad account

Sign in to your Google Ad account and navigate to the Keyword Planner tool.

Click on “Discover new keywords”.

In the “Start with keywords” section, enter a few broad keywords related to your association membership business.

Click “Get results”.

Alternatively click the “Start with website” section and enter the URI of your website.

Choosing Keywords for SEO

Review the list of keywords generated by the tool. Look for keywords that are specific to your niche and have a low competition level. These keywords are likely to be “low hanging” or easy to rank for in your content marketing.

Click on the “Keyword Ideas” tab to see more detailed information about each keyword, including the estimated monthly search volume, competition level, and suggested bid.

Advanced Keyword SEO

Select a few low competition keywords that are relevant to your association membership business and add them to your list of targeted keywords for your content marketing strategy.

Try to focus on long-tail keywords, which are more specific and targeted than broad keywords. This will help you attract a more qualified audience to your content. Consider using geographic modifiers in your keywords to target local audiences.

Use the “Add to Plan” feature in the Keyword Planner to save your selected keywords and get more detailed data about their performance over time.

Remember that keyword research is just one part of a successful content marketing strategy. Be sure to also create high-quality, relevant content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience.

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Sitemaps are a file on your website that list all the items hosted on your website. This is the map of your website that you want Google (and other search engines) to find. It lists the pages, posts, images, pdfs, all those good things you want to appear in search results. For this quick win you create one on your website and tell Google where to find it.

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A Sitemap is key to a good website

Sitemaps can be coded one of these using several sitemap formats like XML. But this wouldn’t be a quick win if you had to learn to code as well. So we recommend getting a plugin to handle this for you, as there are many free and premium products available. The plugin we use is called Smartcrawl, so I will be using this as my example.

By having and refreshing your sitemaps you can take the reins and tell search engines which pages are important on your website (and which are not). 

How to create and submit or refresh sitemaps

When your website has a sitemap it will usually be on a URL like /sitemap.xml . Here is Lighthouse’s sitemap at https://lighthouseuk.net/sitemap.xml . You can see the URLs with the last time they were modified.

With a plugin like Smartcrawl you can easily create a Sitemap for your website, the major decisions will be which types of website content should be indexed, and plugins like Smartcrawl allow the ability to switch post types on and off or get granular by adding or excluding specific pages.

Once your sitemap is in working order you need to access your Google Search Console account (or Bing webmaster tools), and make sure it is refreshed and indexed. This makes sure your most important content can appear in the right position in Search engines.

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Some blog posts are super star traffic generators and continue to deliver website visitors day after day throughout the year. Others can either slow down, or be ‘of their time’ with underperforming or outdated content. A blog refresh can turn these ‘old timers’ into superstar traffic generators once again.

Are your blog posts starting to underperform? 

People don’t tend to want to consume out of date content. Those listicles of the ‘best cities to visit in 2019’ do not catch attention or clicks, and slip down the rankings very quickly. But posts with the current year in the blog post title do rather well. A study has been conducted by SearchPilot that demonstrated a 5% increase in organic traffic for a blog post which had the current year’s date in its title tag versus one that did not. Users and Search engines are interested in new content which attracts more clicks and longer engagement. 

Does your website need a boost in traffic? Get a one-off, fixed price search (SEO) boost.

How to Refresh your Blog posts 

Refreshing your blog post content isn’t as difficult as you think, hence why we have included it as a quick win. So let’s break it down into some easy steps:

Make sure your updated blog post is still relevant and reflects the current date

Scan through your content and make sure it’s actually still relevant and interesting to your audience. A traffic boost is no good if your audience engagement rate is low. Look out for broken external links and old images too.

Change the title date 

Change the blog post to include the date in the SEO title. In most cases the current year is fine, but in some cases you might decide to use the month as well, future events might be the best example of this although I would consider if this is a time relevant blog post that perhaps it should be rewritten to be more evergreen.  

Publish the blog post with a new date

Once the above changes are made, go ahead and republish the blog post with its new date. This isn’t updating the post, this is changing the metadata of the post to show it was published more recently. You can do this by either changing the publish date, or unpublishing the post and republishing it.  

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Stuffing keywords into your web content headings used to be SEO best practice. But that hasn’t been the case for over 10 years now. Google admits Headings do play an important role in ranking websites, but only in regards to understanding the content as a whole. So using Headings in a logical way is very important.    

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Organise your headings for visitors and search engines

Using headings in your website content is a logical way to add structure and support readers (and search engines) understand what you’re writing about. Headings break up large walls of text and also help users who like to scan a page before committing to reading it all.  

In HTML there are six levels of Headings and are labelled H1 – H6. It’s common for the lower numbers to be a larger font style than the higher numbers, but this can be changed using CSS. But how to use them?

H1 – There should be only one of these, and it should be the page title   

H2 – A good way to title the sections of your content

H3 – Used in the breakdown of your H2 sections

H4 – H6 are for nesting content inside your H2-3 sections

Heading Hierarchy is simply the process of using headings consistently and not leaping about between styles.

For example: Do this:

<h1>Heading level 1</h1>

<h2>Heading level 2</h2>

<h3>Heading level 3</h3>

<h3>Heading level 3</h3>

<h2>Heading level 2</h2>

Don’t do this:

<h1>Heading level 1</h1>

<h5>Heading level 5</h5>

<h4>Heading level 4</h4>

<h2>Heading level 2</h2>

Let’s just reinforce those points again:

• Putting keywords in headings will not necessarily make you rank better.
• Headings are useful for communicating what the content is about.

How to: Check your headings hierarchy

There are a few ways to check your heading hierarchy. If you’re using a Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress you can look at the page editor and see which headings you are using. Here’s an example from our Curated Content blog post

If you’re comfortable with HTML you’re probably aware you can peek inside the development tools of your web browser and search for headings there. 

Also the ‘SEO review tools’ website have a good free tool you can use. Which makes identifying the number of Headings you are using and the order they appear. https://www.seoreviewtools.com/html-headings-checker/

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Google Data Highlighter is a tool for non technical marketers to mark up content on websites that could appear in rich snippets, leading to higher rankings and click through rates.     

What is the Google Data Highlighter for?

Does your site contain content such as products, recipes, event listings, reviews or ratings? This type of web content can be shown in search engines in more prominent ways called ‘rich snippets’. For example events can be shown in a search engine results page like this:

Lots of websites contain events that may not have been marked up to appear in Google Search. This is because they may not have added “structured data” a web development team usually does this. But Google has created the Data Highlighter system so that non-techy marketers can also add rich snippets such as the one above. It’s a simple process (described below) of loading up a web page  and clicking on the relevant data and Google does a good job of guiding you through it. It also doesn’t need you to highlight every page. Once you show a few examples of data on your web pages, Google uses machine learning to add the structured data to all similar pages on your website.

How to improve your website using Google Data Highlighter 

Login to the Google Data highlighter https://www.google.com/webmasters/data-highlighter/

Note: to use Google Data highlighter you must have a Google account and your website registered with Google Search Console.

Click the ‘Start Highlighting” button to get started.

Then enter the URL or web address of pages that contain structured data such as products, recipes, event listings, reviews or ratings.

Then select the type of information to highlight

Click start and the webpage will load. Then it simply a matter of clicking on (or dragging over) items and selecting the type of data. Once the page is marked up click done.

Do this on a few pages to give Google enough examples and it will do the rest.

Need some more help with this? Or want a better Schema Solution we can help!

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Have you tried this quick win?

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