Tag: Google

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Improving Your Rank in Google’s Local Listings

Man's hand pointing on street map
No Kidding Google Knows Your Business Location!

Local listings on Google.com can make or break certain types of businesses, but did you know that when you drop in placement there may be some things you can do to remediate your drop.

Here’s what I recommend you look at first after your ranking has dropped:

1. Make sure you review, understand and fully embrace Google’s Places Quality Guidelines.

2. You must link to a specific address – no post office boxes.

3. Google wants a local phone number not your vanity number or a 1-800 number.

4. Select one category at the minimum from Google’s own list of categories. Even if you provide permanent makeup not tattoos, the correct category for you according to Google is tattoos. Provide other choices using the custom category option.

5. Here’s a big one: “Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.” So if you don’t ever meet your customer face to face, you will not be able to get Google+ Local placement and should not expect to rise in the rankings or placement.

6. Be aware that Google is cracking down right now on duplicate listings for Google+ Local Places; trying to weed out fictitious accounts or those that have previously gamed the system trying to get better location specific placement by using fake or bogus addresses. You can no longer use your mother-in-laws address as a store location just to get placement in that city.

With Google Local providing an excellent avenue to drive traffic to local stores, but with Google’s improved understanding of your real business location, it is getting nearly impossible to “game” the system as many were previously able to do.

 

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The Clarity of What You Write Matters a Lot

Matt Cutts has some great words of wisdom for bloggers and website owners in this video on how technical you should get in content and blog posts. You can watch the video at YouTube.

In a nutshell, here are the takeaways on this important topic.

1. Clarity of what you write for your website or blog really matters to Google as it will determine relevancy and what queries your content will match in the Google index.

2. If you cannot make the content easy for people to understand then you do not really understand the content yourself. Matt says this not me! This does not mean that you need to “dumb down” what you write, but content should be informative and written in a manner that attracts those that may not have the depth of experience on a topic to your site to learn more.

3. There will always be a special place for higher level content on a topic but as far as Google is concerned the broader the appeal the better your placement will be.

4. When you make your content too technical or statistical heavy you lose the understandability of your content unless your audience is particularly coming to you for higher level information. Matt Cutts says err on the side of clarity and I say, write for the high school graduate in the bulk of your writing.

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Does Google Love or Hate Links in Their Ranking Algorithm?

Are Links Important?
Are Links Important?

Over the years Google has valued links in their ranking algorithm by boosting sites with more links to a higher position in the organic or unpaid search results. By valuing links Google created a cottage industry that SEO’s jumped on and really milked with clients. Some SEOs charged exorbitant amounts to clients with very little accountability in regards to the price a client was paying for the number and quality of links they received.This past year Google has addressed this cottage industry by “smacking it down” stating that links from spammy resources, article directories, and forum postings would not be a good fit and encouraged site owners to start moving away from link building and into content creation and site optimization that focuses on improving the users’ experience.

However, Google has admitted that even though they themselves have a love hate relationship with links, that the results in their own search engine are better and have more relevancy to readers when Google does include links in their placement algorithm.

I feel that quality links that point to a website and shares of links do allow Google to evaluate the popularity and relevancy for readers so there will always be a place for links in the Google algorithm but link numbers are getting less important than a review of the whole picture which include links, social shares, co-citation, and blog mentions.

To further explore this important topic I would recommend that you watch this video from the MOZ blog. It provides two differing points of view on are links valuable to Google or not. The take away from this blog post is that yes links are still valuable but less valuable than they have been previously.

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Guest Blogging as We Know It is Dead – Per Matt Cutts

You know something for SEO tactics is dead when Google’s Matt Cutts comes out point blank and says:

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.” Read the full blog post.

But not only does this mean that the tactic is dead, but continuing to use a tactic like this for link building may actually get you penalized in the Google index.

Let’s Explore Guest Blogging Further

Here’s what’s considered bad:

If you or your SEO firm were trolling the web and sending out unsolicited notes to webmasters saying “Hey use this blog post and keep the links as dofollow, or we’ll pay you to post this content”, ouch, watch out! This is exactly what Matt is talking about that you need to steer clear of.

Here’s what’s still considered good:

If you are guest blogging for a news site like SiteProNews, the Huffington Post, industry trade journals – these types of high quality guest blogging opportunities and high profile exposure can really continue to work for you; building your online authority. But the reality of these types of gigs is that they are few and far between and not available to the typical newbie.

Tie the demise of guest blogging in with Matt’s thumb’s down on article marketing and you can clearly see that link building now is considered a spammy practice and one worthy of a Google penalty.