I’ve picked up a few SEO Victoria contracts in the last month. Mostly because I am now ranking #1 & #2 for the search term Victoria SEO.
Back in April I decided to change the keywords that I was targeting. So I went after every combination of SEO and Victoria. Considering it only took 7 months to get to the top spot (I was ranking #2 after 4 months), I feel confident that I can help anyone get there in a shorter period of time.
After all, my competition is SEO experts. Your competition is not.
As much as I like to boast about this, I want to give away a few tips to help your website. Although Google states that this will not help your rankings, it will help the search engines learn where your business is located. No matter what, it’s always a good thing to please the search engines!
Much like my 10 part series on the best free internet marketing tools, I’m going to give you a series of blog posts on how to please Google and help your search rankings.
Tell Google You Are a Local Business
One of the first things I do with any of my clients is add structured data to their main domain.
Here is the definition of structured data:
“If Google understands the content on your pages, we can create rich snippets—detailed information intended to help users with specific queries. For example, the snippet for a restaurant might show the average review and price range.”
Even though you can tell Google and the other search engines that you want to rank for city related search terms, it’s still a good idea to add these rich snippets to your website. Once again I do this by adding some coding to their website to tell the search engines that the business is local and more specifically, what industry it is in.
You can test to see if this has already be done by visiting the rich snippets testing tool. Simply enter your main domain name and hit preview.
Your results might be blank. So to see if you’re listed as a local business, you might see something like this test for StudioYDesign:
Google Structured Data Testing Tool
Looking at the above, we’ve notified the search engines that we are a Victoria Furniture Store.
Add This Coding to Your Website
You can add this information to your website coding in two ways.
For the item type, find out if your business and industry is listed at Schema.org. Once you click on that link you will see “local business” and “restaurants” links. I’ll assume you are one or the other. Click on whatever link applies to you and scroll to the bottom where you will see more links like this:
LocalBusiness schema.org
Click on your proper industry if it’s listed. Don’t see your business? I’ll cover what to do in a bit.
If it is, scroll down to the bottom again and you will find more links like the above. For Victoria Transmisson & Auto Care I came to this page. There is obviously a few types of automotive businesses from detailing to dealer to repair. For them I chose repair and simply added the link http://schema.org/AutoRepair to their item type.
Does this all make sense? If you have any questions, send me an email or post them below in the comments section.
The next blog post will go over how to link your Google + profile to your website so your avatar shows up beside your website in the search results like this:
Google + rel author
Be sure to check that out by subscribing to my email updates, either by the popup you will see about now or in the top right corner.
And of course if you found this post useful and like to help others out, please share this for me to your social network of choice.
Today’s post is going to be short and sweet. It’s my fifth post in a series of the ten best free Internet marketing tools you should be using.
This post will cover Hubspot’s Marketing Grader. It’s like Webmaster tools but it analyzes much more. It grades your social media, SEO, blogging, mobile and lead generation.
To have all those areas graded, simply head over to Hubspot Marketing Grader then enter your website and email. Give it a couple of seconds and you’ll see where you’re strong and weak. Then what to do about the weaknesses’.
Pretty simple and like I said, it’s a short post. But a useful one.
As a side note I want you to learn about how Hubspot markets.
Email is far from dead. People think that just because there is so much spam mail nowadays that people hate email.
Some do. But everyone still checks his or her email. In fact I really think that because people hate spam mail so much, they’ll only give it out if they really want something. So if someone joins your email list, they want more useful content from you.
Sure your email subscribers might not grow to match your Twitter followers or Facebook. With Facebook EdgeRank choosing if your posts are being seen or not and the average life of a Tweet being fairly low, email is a great alternative to avoid the clutter of social media posts.
If you happen to think email is dead or not useful in your business then this post isn’t for you. But you should still be trying to generate leads from your website!
If you want to increase your email marketing, read that last link and use Mailchimp to start out. Mailchimp is another free Internet marketing tool aside from Google Analytics and Webmaster tools. Obviously using something for free to test the waters with is a great way to do it.
Why Mailchimp rocks!
Mailchimp is great because it almost all the capabilites of Awber (affiliate link) which is what I use. With Mailchimp you can:
Use pre made email templates
Customize and brand your own
Create web forms to capture email address
Track and analyze visitor impressions of web forms
Integrate your blog feed into a email newsletter
Send automated emails after a certain day people joined your list
Track and analyze how many people open your emails
Set up different email lists
Their online support is fairly decent as well. But I personally think a how to video is better if you have no experience with Mailchimp.
Learn about any HTML improvements your website needs
What I love about Webmaster tools is Google is trying to help your website rank better. And we should all be trying to appease Google. They own the search market, sorry Bing.
Like my last blog post on how to setup and use Google analytics, I’ll be doing another couple of screencasts for you. The first one will be how to setup Webmasters tools. The other is where I will run you through how to learn about the benefits above.
Once again if you’re reading this through email, you’ll have to click on this link to view as a webpage.
Here’s a video for those of you who don’t know how to access your FTP server. You’ll need your FTP server address along with your user name and password. Those details would have been included in any email you received from your hosting company.
Now I want to walk you through the dashboard of Webmaster tools.
My goal with this blog post was to make you aware of how important this tool is. It’s free and it’s from Google. All they’re trying to do is help you. Take advantage of that!
Did everything make sense? If not, post a comment below and I’ll help you out.
A couple of weeks ago I met with a potential client.
Originally he was looking for someone to help with marketing his Facebook page. However I like to make people aware of the other potential online marketing areas.
So naturally I shifted the conversation to SEO. I tossed a few ideas his way including this creative strategy. All of sudden he was starting to see the light.
He was wanting to drive more traffic to his site using Facebook. That’s tough to do unless you’re blogging for business and sharing it.
We then talked about some other ways we can get people to his site. And he brought up a great way to do that which I will talk about in a minute.
Being that his site has very new, it was going to be tough to outrank the competition. Are you in the same situation? Or maybe you haven’t invest much into SEO.
In either case, it’s ok.
Don’t Be A Lemming
You see, most businesses are trying to rank their website for only a couple of keywords. This is very shortsighted and the competition is tough doing so. Especially in small city like Victoria.
Think about your business and how many competitors you have. Chances are they’re all trying to rank for the same 2-4 keywords.
I don’t want you to follow the lemmings and chase after the same keywords. If you do, it will cost a lot and take a while.
They are alternatives though. And they’ll get targeted traffic to your site. I truly believe it’s about the quality of the visitor rather than the quantity.
Do you want targeted leads to visit your website? Of course you do! Read on and I’ll explain these alternative methods for attracting targeted prospects to your website.
Another alternative was what my potential client mentioned in our meeting.
He runs Studio Y Design here in Victoria. They sell high end modern contemporary furniture.
During our talk he mentioned that people call the furniture they stock many different things. I call it modern. My mother calls it contemporary. A few of his clients calls it futuristic.
So while all his competitors are trying to rank for “Victoria BC furniture store”, he could try and rank for “Victoria Modern or contemporary furniture store”.
All you have to do is listen to people during conversations while in your store. Find out what they call certain products or services you sell. They might describe it differently. Jot down all the responses and rank your webpages for those terms.
Another idea I had was to create pages based on the brands of furniture he carries. I asked him how many people come into his store know about the brands they carry. He said quite a few.
The chances are good those very same people are searching Google (or Bing) for that brand name and the city they live in. Why not create pages that target those brands so these people can find you?!
Doing so will allow you to attract targeted prospects to your website.
To summarize what I’ve talked about:
Don’t follow the lemmings
Think of the other ways people might search what you have to offer
Listen to what your customers are calling your products or services
List all of the brands you carry
Create pages or blog posts that target points 2, 3 & 4
On Thursday I’m going to showcase an example from one of my clients and how we were able to generate more targeted traffic to their website. It was really easy to do. So be sure to watch out for that post.
