In this Video Tutorial, Chad Hill, CEO of Semify, and Adam Stetzer, President of Semify, talk about what you should look for in a local seo package. The agency you choose to take care of your local seo program should be able to both complete and verify your Google+ Local profile. They should be equipped to add videos, images, and keyword-rich descriptions of your business. They should also be skilled review writers and be aware of the other important directions to list your business on, including Yelp!, Bing and Yahoo. Watch the video to learn more!
TRANSCRIPTION:
Adam, how are you doing this morning?
Good, Chad. I'm thinking about local SEO today. A lot of hype about local, a lot of focus. So I've got a good question for you today. "How do you buy high quality local SEO packages?"
That's a great question. So with local SEO packages, there's a couple things that you really want to be looking for. The first thing, and the most important thing is that you need to find a company that can help you claim and complete all of the key local business directories. And the main one being Google+ Local. So you want to make sure you've got somebody who can help you verify and then complete that profile with all the pictures, videos, and the proper descriptions and categories on Google+ Local. There's also a need to claim other directories like Bing, Yahoo!, Yelp. Those are all ones that are also important. But Google+ Local is typically the 800 pound gorilla. The next thing that you want to do is, you want a company that, if you don't already, as I said, has a complete profile, so if you just have your name or your address verified, but you want to complete it with as many pictures and videos that you could possibly get. So someone who has some skills and can help you build out videos if you don't have them or can help you write keyword rich descriptions of your business, that's going to be useful as well.
And then once you get past that, there's a couple of other things that are important. With local, unlike traditional SEO, you hear a lot of people talk about citation building. And really all citation is, is it's basically what Google has said is that, in most cases, they look at links. That was their original business. But they said, for local businesses having your phone number on other websites is, in an indirect way, a reference or a vote for that business. So if there's a directory of the top pizza restaurants in Arlington, Virginia, and maybe it doesn't link to your pizza joint's website, but it has your phone number, that is sort of a link. And so they call that a citation. And that is, in fact, a vote for your local business. So you want a company that can help you a citation.
One of the most important citations is actually your website. So there are a number of things you can do to add schema.org updates and various other enhancements to your website to make sure that it's local seo friendly. So you want someone who can help you do that as part of your local seo package.
And then the final thing is finding other directories out there that they can get your business listing on that will help improve your chances of ranking for local seo. And I'm going to add one more item because I forgot it on my list, and that's reviews. So you also want a company that can help you set up some type of review program as part of a local seo package so that you're asking your customers to write reviews about your business because that will help build, again, your profile. And it is a ranking factor in getting your business to come up in the local seo results.
Cool, all right, so as I'm shopping local SEO packages, I hear you saying it's step one, claiming, maybe you've started that process, and it's incomplete, maybe you haven't. And then after claiming and making it complete, it moves quickly into citation building and reviews. And I know, I think, a lot of people find this whole process, when it comes to local SEO packages, what are you doing? It's sort of mystery. It sort of feels like how SEO felt five, six years ago when they were just starting to understand the power of inbound links. This, you're saying, actually impacts your placement of the pins in the local maps.
And so it is an ongoing piece that you have to continue. So can you think of anything people should watch out for when they're shopping local SEO packages? Like what are some of those things that scream low quality or don't sign up? Anything come to mind?
Yeah, a couple things. Well, on the review side, there's a lot of businesses that, for a long time, would write fake reviews or write negative reviews for your competitors. So I'd say stay as far away from that stuff as possible because all of the local directories starting with Yelp, and now, with Google+, have put in a bunch of filters to try to filter out fake reviews. So get real reviews. Don't waste your time on fake reviews. That's just, like I said, a waste of time. So that's one thing.
The other thing is, I think you want a company that is going to help verify and then actually complete your profile because there are some people that will complete your profile. And there's other people that will verify and complete-- you want somebody who does both of those as part of a local seo package.
Cool, all right, well that should be helpful.
Awesome, yeah, so if you're looking for some local seo, I mean, the other thing I would say with local SEO packages is to get a good baseline on where you start, where you start with the ranking, and then check back on that over time. And again, what often happens with what local SEO packages is, a lot of this is sort of checking boxes to make sure you're actually taking advantage of all the opportunities that Google and other search engines are actually giving you.
But you also want to be looking at what are the results that you're seeing over time. Is your listing verified in the search rankings, and are you building reviews on that listing. So if you have any questions on local SEO packages, feel free to give us a call. We'd love to talk about it.