Fencing Contractor Local SEO Mini Audit

Local SEO Mini Audit of a Fencing Services Website

Below is the transcript of a recent mini audit I conducted on a local business website.  It is just an overview audit but I do cover the main elements of a fuller audit.  I look at the overall look and feel of the site, keyword research, competitor analysis and Google My Business Audit.

Here is the video I put on my YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7D5Till7fY&

SEO Audit Transcription

Hi, this is Simon Kensington-Fellows from Kensington SEO and I’m just going to the quick run through of a local business site in the Northampton area. It’s a fencing company and I just want to look at the site and see how we could improve the on page so that this website would rank better in Google and through ranking better generate more leads and inquiries for this business. Now, the moment, the company that I’ve chosen here, I’m completely at random. It’s on page two for the keyword, a fencing services Northampton. And so I’m just going to have a look at this site and see over the next 10 or 15 minutes what they could do to improve it. I’ve done a little bit of research into the keywords and a little bit of research into the Google My Business and I’ve also done a little bit of competitive analysis to see what other pages are ranking for other companies.

Look and Feel of the Website

So let’s crack on. The first thing I’d like to look at when looking at a site of this kind is the look and the feel. Does it, does it give off trust signals? Because if you’ve got a site that doesn’t look trustworthy, then it’s going to be harder for to encourage people to do whatever you want them to do, whether it’s to, in this case, make a phone call or whether it’s to fill in a form or whether it’s to purchase directly. So the first thing we can see here is that the site has got an https although it’s not good a green padlock, that may just be the browser setting that I’ve got here, incognito but it has an https, which is a good ranking signal and it has a telephone number, some pictures. But aside from that, it doesn’t really offer any other kind of trust signals. And it isn’t GDPR compliant, there are no Terms of Service, Privacy, Cookie policy notices.  This really does need fixing urgently.

There are no marks for local business bureaus. There’s no kind of trade association marks, there’s no kind of business chamber type, links that you might expect on a local business website. So adding those sorts of links or badges or certificates that you get from being associated with those organisations would add some trust factors to this page. Now I notice this page is made by Yell so they’re kind of cheap and cheerful sites that are put up without consideration for search visibility but even so there’s a lot of sites that kind of come back from the web designer looking like this. So there are things that we can do here that will help other sites like this.

Basic Local SEO Keyword Research

So in terms of looking at the keyword research, I have gone through and looked at Google keyword planner and I’ve put the three terms, fencing, fencing services, fencing contractors and I can see that I’ve got a number of keywords to come back from the keyword planner. So you can see this 1,333 here and I think the two most relevant ones here, are fencing contractors and fencing services. Now this one has a bid price, which means that people are paying around about fifty cents per click for the ads that you see on the side of the page. So at the top pair, if we had any ads then they’d be paying around about fifty cents for those clicks.

So looking at commercial intent that suggests that people who are bidding on these keywords believed that fencing contractors are a better keyword than fencing services. Now I tend to agree with that simply because when you look at the Google my business, which is the free listing that any business can complete, we see that the primary category for fencing services is actually fencing contractor. So fencing contractor is what Google believes is the most relevant for fencing services as you can see, fencing services. So one of the tips that you can use to help rank better is to make sure that your website is in alignment with the Google My Business primary category. So if you’ve got a Google My Business listing and your primary category, which is here is fencing contractor, and if you add fencing contractor to your website, then Google’s going to be able to make that, that link much more easily and in turn will probably rank you higher than those that don’t have that on page somewhere. So when we look at how Bell Fencing Services, we can see that they don’t have fencing contractor anywhere on the website.

Competitor Analysis

So that’s one of the things that I would do. Now, this is interesting. This is the top ranking page for fencing contractors and they’ve got a lot more content on their page, a lot more links. They’ve got reviews, they’ve got generally a site looks a bit dated, but it’s got a lot more content on it. You can see on the bottom of their page here, they’ve got their address which makes it nice and easy to find. It doesn’t look as if they’re hiding anything. You can see up here that they’ve got their page title is Northampton fencing services, so they’ve got their keywords in there so it was probably one of the reasons that it’s helping them to rank higher in Google. Whereas we come back to our target site here. It’s kind of fairly plain and a bit simplistic in contrast to that.

So I’m looking at the on-page details for our Bell Fencing Service and we can see here that the main target here is fence panels, pergolas and steel fence and in Northampton, now that’s quite a mix of things. So we’re looking at fence panels and pergolas and steel fencing. Now those in my mind from experience, those are probably two different things to be lumped in on the same page. Google is going to be there thinking, well, is this page about fence panels or about Pergolas, which is arguably nothing to do with fences other than made from wood generally speaking and steel fencing and how does that fit in with that kind of fencing panels and things. So these keywords probably deserve their own pages rather than being all kind of lumped in on one. Google likes to have things laid out for it.

On-page Audit

And the simpler you can make Google’s life the better and you get rewarded with higher rankings. So when we look at the H2’s and the H3’s, we see that there isn’t anything in the, in these heading tags that would give Google the idea that this is wanting to be ranked for fencing services or even fencing contractor, which is the keyword phrase with the most commercial intent. We look at the word count, we’ve only got 274 words, so that’s not particularly high. The title has got the fencing services, but it’s part of the brand name so this is reasonably well optimized, but I think if we were looking at fencing services or contractors, then we could probably make this a bit more specific for fencing services, fencing contractors in Northampton.

Now, the meta description here, which is the bit that shows up in the snippet in Google’s search results, you can control what this says by putting the right code on the page. If you don’t put the right code, Google will just pull a random snippet. Now if you add the keyword into the Meta description, you’ll find that you’ll get more consistent rankings, so it would be a good idea to put in fencing services, fencing contractors in here as well, so this a reasonable length, but we would just want to put in the keyword in there so that it makes it easier for Google to understand what the page is about.

So in terms of the site strength and authority, it really isn’t up to much and traffic-wise it’s probably not getting a great deal. It’s ranking for fencing Northampton as number 15, Northhampton concrete posts at 49 and timber supplies at 98. So it’s certainly not on page one for any terms. And here we’re talking about page four, five and an even higher on here. So in terms of being found on Google, this website is failing big time in terms of generating any kind of reasonable amount of phone calls or enquiries for this company and all that could be changed just by adding some more information onto the pages, restructuring the website and genuinely making it more google friendly. And they don’t take a huge amount of time. In terms of local ranking factors, the things that Google likes best and there are four of them, there is the page title, and that’s the bit that shows up in your browser tab, that needs to have your keyword phrase in it.

Then you’ve got what is called the h1 tag, your first heading tag, which is usually on the top of the page here. And then you’ve h2’s, h3’s which are the subheadings. And in those, usually you want to put a variation of your keyword and then you want to make sure that you have your main keywords in the first paragraph and the last paragraph, the first and last 100 words are best. And you also want to make sure that you’ve got plenty of content on the page to describe what that service is. Aim for just a bit more than your competitors. So probably if we’re looking at garden and security fencing, probably find that these are actually two different target groups. People might be looking for garden fencing and then other people might be looking for security fencing. So probably a good idea to create two pages. So we’ve got one page that targets garden fencing and then another one that targets security fencing, and then we can label up those pages appropriately so that there’s no confusion at all so that when Google is thinking about where to put that page, it knows what this page is all about.

Garden fencing, the page titles mentioned garden fencing, the h, one tag mentions, garden fencing, the h2 tags mentioned variations of those. The content is about garden fencing and so that’s the sorts of things that you want to be looking at when you’re putting together a page and wanting to get it ranked in Google. Now I’ve done some analysis on a with a tool that I’ve got. I’m using the keyword phrase fencing services in Northampton now. This has pulled out a number of variations and if you recall, I mentioned about putting these variations in places like your h1, h2, h3 and h4 tags, and within your content, these are the sorts of words that you should be having in your content for this keyword. So including words like fencing, contractors, fencing contractors, Northhampton fencing services, Northhampton fencing services, fencing services, a fencing company, these are the phrases, the words that Google likes to see an irrelevant to this keyword.

So these are the sorts of things that we need to be putting on our page. Now that’s in part come from some analysis of the top ranking sites that I’ve pulled out here and these are local business competitors and this has given us a page score of 47 per cent, which is not very good at all. So if we wanted to improve this page, then there are some recommendations that we can do here. So we ought to put our keyword in the main URL, we want to put it in the page title. We want to make sure that it’s in the h1 tag. Now from our analysis, the rest of these are okay for the variations and it seems that we’re over optimized for the variations. So we need to look at how we can perhaps remove some of these references where we are talking about these more than we’re talking about our keywords. So the things that I would do is look at going through some of these and making sure that I am not over optimised and not under optimised. So those are some of the things that I would look at. I would also look at adding some more words to the page. The average target count here is just under 400 so we can put a good deal more relevant content on our page to help to boost the relevancy of our page. And I did another analysis here. Using keyword fencing contractor, now fencing contractors, for this site, ironically optimise a little bit better, but again, we are under optimised in those key areas and for the variations were over optimised. So these are some of the things that I would look at in terms of trying to get this page ranking better.

Google My Business Audit

Google My Business Analysis

The other big issue is that this site doesn’t have a Google My Business listing. Now Google My Business (GMB) is free to set up and it’s relatively straightforward to go through, but it is important that you fill it out properly and you make the correct links between your Google My Business listing and your website. The important thing to bear in mind is that the maps listings account for about 33 per cent of clicks on a page. So if you’re going to be in the top three here, you’re likely going to get some of the third of all of the clicks. Now, about 10 per cent of the clicks will go to any adverts and then the rest will go to the first two or three results down here. So as you can see, being up here is a huge benefit to your company. And so optimising your Google My Business listing is vital to getting clicks. So that’s another recommendation that I would make for our business here, is to improve the content on the page using some of the tips that we’ve gone through and also creating a google my business listing for this so that they can start to have a shot at ranking up here and getting the lion’s share of the clicks, which will generate more inquiries to the business. So hope you found that useful when I’m Simon Kensington-Fellows from Kensington SEO. Many thanks.

Audit Summary

This Yell made site doesn’t work as a lead generating site on so many levels, aside from the main fact that it isn’t GDPR compliant and could render the owner subject to prosecution!  Aside from the compliance issue, this site may just be a ‘brochure site’ like an online business card or maybe somewhere to send paid traffic.  Although due to the lack of legal policy pages I doubt it is Google Ads compliant.

We offer a full audit service and you can read more about the SEO audit here

 

 

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Local Security Company SEO Audit

00:01 Hello, this is an SEO site audit for the Three Lion Security Limited, so we met at the networking meeting in Thrapston, and he asked me to have a quick look over his site. So I’ve gone through and done what I would call an simple SEO audit for you, which will highlight a number of the issues you have with the website and I’m listing things that you need to do, a checklist of things that you need to get done to help you improve your ranking. So hopefully you find it useful.

00:58 So I’m just going to take you through your website and show you some of the issues. I’ve got a notepad here where I’ve just taken some notes of some of the issues with the site. I expect this will take about 15 to 20 minutes, so start off with. It’s a, it’s a nice little site. It’s functional, it’s on WordPress, which is good. There are a few kind of legal things that need to happen. You need to have an EU cookie consent pop up. You’ve probably seen those annoying popups on other websites where you need to have one on here so that you can, you can do that via a WordPress plugin. There are plenty of those. Um, and also you need to have, I can’t find them anywhere, some privacy pages and your terms and conditions pages, especially as a limited company.

01:59 You should really have those on the website as well and you can just pop them in the footer bar here, the footer menu here to keep them out of the way that they really ought to be there. One comment on the homepage is there isn’t really a lot of information and to improve your rankings it will be a good idea to add some more content. One of the biggest issues I see with websites these days is they try and look better than they are useful to Google. So, you know, it looks nice. You got a big header image here and you’ve got the three content boxes here, but the only real content is this a little bit here and it’s not really enough for Google to be able to understand what your site is all about. So let’s just have a quick look at the Moz toolbar.

02:54 This is something that just gives us some information about the page and you’ll see as we go through this that there are some reoccurring themes. A page title, this should be around about 75 characters and yours is 133. And for most of the pages the page title is too long. So we need to look at reducing the page titles, the Meta description as well, which is here. This is the snippet that shows when somebody does a search and Google, this is too long as well. There should be shorter than this, otherwise it gets truncated and it doesn’t make sense for the searcher. So we need to look at shortening those on the page. One of the things that most of your pages have is these Meta keywords, now this has been dropped by Google.

03:52 I would remove those keyword tags has probably been done by the Yoast plugin, but you can disable that. So I would get rid of those. We’ve got an H1 tag here. There’s no H1 tag. It will be good and helpful to have an H1 tag, although we’ve got an H2 tag. It was possibly something to do with the theme or it might just be the way in which the text has been formatted, but you would certainly want to have an H1 tag not having an H1 and just having an H2 wouldn’t make any sense to Googlebot. So that needs to be looked at and there’s no bold words or Italics. Ideally, you want to bold your main keyword and italicize some of your main keywords throughout the content, preferably in the first paragraph.

04:46 This is the ALT tag, a little explanation that you can add to any images that you’ve got on the page so that a web browser can read them and understand what the image is about. And also screen readers use this for the visually impaired. If you’ve got people with accessibility problems, shortsightedness, those kinds of things, then the screen readers will be able to tell them what the images are and all throughout your site, your ALT tags really could do with being better optimised. This is pretty much the standard that we’ve got on every single page. That’s mainly due to the logos and that in the footer. So it will be better to look at improving the ALT tag and again, through WordPress, that’s reasonably straightforward because each image has the facility to add an ALT tag text to it using the media library.

05:51 There isn’t any Schema markup on any of the site. Schema Markup is something that is a code that you put into the site which will tell Google exactly what your page is about in an easy to understand machine language. You should, as a local business, have at least local business markup you can use. You can use a plugin to help you with this and it should ideally be in JSON LD, but it could also be in microdata format, but really it tells Google what your business is, where it is, and also helps to link together your social profiles so it can start to build up an idea of who your business is on the web and start linking those properties together so that when you tweet something or you share something on Facebook, Google can understand that it actually is about your website entity.

06:50 One last issue on the home page, something that is a ranking factor these days, which again now isn’t that difficult to do, is to switch to an https website, a secure website. You’ll need to make sure that you do any redirects from the old site to the new site, but that would also help to give your site a little ranking boost. So, just looking at, these other pages, we’ve got things like security guarding and again, it’s a fairly similar thing. We’ve not got anywhere near enough content on these pages. There should be at least 300 words as a very minimum. And if you’re looking to outrank competitors, then you need to make sure that you’ve got more and better quality content for your pages to make sure that you rank for these. Again, looking at the on-page stuff, we’ve got a page title too long meta-description this a little bit too long.

08:02 We’ve got meta keywords that need to be removed. We’ve got H1 tag, but really we could do with better optimising that so that it’s more keyword rich. And we’ve got an H2 tag with the content “why use us?” That’s a bit of a waste of a keyword in the H2 tag. Again, no bolding or Italics to identify or highlight the keywords that this page is about. So in an ideal world you have, for each of these pages, this is your security services page. Your title will reflect that your meta-description will reflect the keywords, the keywords that are bolded in the text reflects that the H1 tags reflect that the H2 tags, the images, the images, ALT tag text on the images reflects that as well. So the whole page is themed around these, a main keyword.

09:03 So I won’t go through the rest of them because they’re all pretty much the same. I’m just moving over to here. Accreditation’s again, it’s just a similar theme. There’s just not much content and Google really doesn’t like what’s known as thin content pages, ones that don’t have much content. So you need to look at putting more information on your pages or combining the pages so that it’s. I said that they’re kind of better laid out. On the meet the team. I thought it was a bit odd because I was expecting to see staff images and that kind of thing and I got a an about us page essentially, so we might want to look at kind of rewording that or doing something so that it seems to make more sense and it looks as if there’s been some copying and pasting as gone on because there’s a lot throughout the whole site.

10:02 There are these areas here where you’ve got odd characters and these are ‘dot formatted’, character’s usually where something’s been copied and paste from word and it’s gone in and WordPress hasn’t quite understood the character and coding that’s gone through, so this all needs to be attended to. It should be fairly straightforward just to go through the text and make the changes so that we get rid of these odd characters. I noticed there was a lot of it on the job vacancies page as well. I’m down here. We’ve got kind of odd characters around here and here, here and various other leather load here and I think on one of the pages right at the bottom where it was it. One of the pages contact us, one of the pages that have got a big banner at the bottom, which is kind of got your motto and that was messed up as well. So let me just see if I can quickly find that for you whilst we’re flicking through.

11:17 The other thing that we can do to the site is what’s called siloing, this is about building buckets of related content. The other thing is to do with silo in and that is where we create content stacks, if you like, and where we start linking from our content to relevant content within our site. So we haven’t got any of that at all. So we’re not helping google to understand what the site is about. The other issues looking through my little list here is that we’re looking at targeting these local areas, which is absolutely fine, but there’s nothing on the site other than the keywords that have been put in which needs to be got rid of. That really indicates that you are a local site targeting these areas.

12:11 So really to do this properly and efficiently it will be good idea to have a locations page tab here with the various locations and the services that you provide in those locations. And then build out content within each of those that let’s say for Wellingborough. So let’s say you want to provide these four services within Wellingborough where you recreate these pages within the Wellingborough location tab and you then put the content in there and you make the content relevant to, to Wellingborough. If you want to rank locally, you really need to look at doing more about optimising your site for local search intent because at the moment you’re not really taken advantage of that. Although the keywords seem to suggest that that’s what you want. So overall, there are quite a few things from an on-page point of view that need to be looked at.

13:17 Your Google my business page. That’s an important element because it kinda tells Google that about your business. And really that kind of ties everything together. And the one of the ways, the main ways that Google will tie that together is by using what’s known as the NAPW, which is your name, address, phone number and website, and these details need to be the same across all of your web properties and directory listings. So on your Twitter, on your Facebook, on your Google, My Business page, on your Yelp or Yell.com listings, or any of the free listings that you can get. These all need to be exactly the same and they need to be the same as what is on your Google My Business page, which at the moment is showing this address which is slightly different to what you’ve got is different to what you’ve got on your website and different to what you’ve got.

14:11 Because as we see down here, we’ve got your Registered Address. So it might be better if you put the registered address in your, say your terms and conditions page. And then you had your address down here, which would then match up with what was on the contact page. And the contact page addresses, again, slightly different to this. So that would need to be changed up so that it actually matched the address because it needs to be exact. Say they haven’t got that in the Google My Business listing and the postcode is, is formatted slightly as well. So there’s a little thing, it might not seem much, but in Google’s eyes they’re as different as chalk and cheese. So you need to make sure that the address is laid out correctly and is the same and consistently the same. Otherwise you won’t benefit from those mentions, what are known as citations from across the web.

15:12 So I think we’ve got a good deal of things that we can target to improve your website on-page, you’ve got a lot of keywords here and you have got the opportunity to make some really good content up about this. So a content marketing campaign, creating interesting posts about all of these topics and then getting people to link back to those articles locally will really help you to start to boost the authority of this website and really help to improve your rankings, which will of course get you more calls, enquiries and generate more business. So I hope you found that useful I’ve got a separate report which I shall include with the email to you and I’ll send this all over with a link to this video so that you can watch it and if you need to, you can obviously watch it a couple times. So feel free to get in touch if you want some advice on how to get all of this done on the implementation.

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Search Marketing Specialist [Certified]

Certified Search Marketing Specialist

During this search marketing specialist SEO course, I learned that SEO is continually evolving and how to best optimise websites for improved visibility in the search engines which will result in more traffic (assuming you’re targeting the correct search intent) and more leads or sales. As Google refines its search engine algorithms updates like Panda (site quality) and Penguin (link quality) change the rules of SEO.

Being a search marketing specialist means you are skilled at getting a website ranked in the search engines.  Getting ranked (and staying ranked) means your website needs to meet a ‘quality standard’ and needs to get links from other websites that are both relevant and meet the required ‘quality standards’ themselves.  A search marketing specialist will be able to advise on a search strategy that will both improve the quality of the website and help it to acquire more backlinks.

In addition to developing a search marketing strategy, a search marketing specialist will be able to implement the changes necessary for improved visibility in the search engine results page.

During this Search Marketing Course, I refined my knowledge on how to develop a comprehensive organic traffic strategy that will stand the test of time.

Search Marketing Course Content

In this introductory lesson, I learned more about how search marketing has evolved, the three big players in search marketing and how Intent Based Search Optimisation (IBSO) is the new normal in the search marketing field.

• The State of Search
• The 3 Players
• Discoverability and Availability
• What Are Search Queries?
• Search Marketing Goals
• Introduction To Earned Media and Link Building
• Introduction To UXO and RXO
• Intent-Based Search Optimisation (ISBO)

Intent, Context and Assets:

Every search query begins with intent and context. In this section, I learned how to determine that intent and provide the assets that satisfy that intent.

• How We Use Search Engines
• The Tyranny of Physical Space
• The Long Tail of Search
• Intent-Based Keyword Research
• Finding Intent And Context
• Building Customer Avatars
• Intent-Based Avatars
• Keyword Research Tools
• Keyword Modifiers
• Intent-Based Keyword Research
• Choosing Assets

Channels, Optimisation And Ascension:

Search has become much larger than Google and Bing. In this section, I learned about optimising for traffic on less competitive platforms like YouTube, Pinterest and Amazon.

• Channels, Optimisation And Ascension: The Big Picture
• Choosing The Right Channel
• Ascension As Optimisation
• Channel Optimisation: Web Page
• Channel Optimisation: Blog
• Channel Optimisation: Amazon Product Page
• Channel Optimisation: YouTube
• Channel Optimisation: Pinterest
• Channel Optimisation: iTunes
• Channel Optimisation: Review Sites

Experience Optimisation:

If you want traffic from Google and Bing you’ll need to optimise the experience of your user and the experience of the search robot. In this sectio, I went through the process of conducting a 23-Point Search Marketing SEO Audit

• About Content Management Systems
• Domain Audit: Site Command
• Domain Audit: Google Webmaster Tools
• Domain Audit: Google Analytics
• Domain Audit: Sitemap
• Domain Audit: robots.txt
• Domain Audit: Backlinks
• Domain Audit: 404 Page
• Domain Audit: Internal Site Search
• Domain Audit: Navigation
• Domain Audit: Accessibility
• Domain Audit: Mobile
• Domain Audit: Value
• Page Audit: Layout & Design
• Page Audit: Mobile
• Page Audit: Keyword Targeted
• Page Audit: Keyword Cannibalization
• Page Audit: Cross-Linking and Siloing
• Page Audit: Share-ability
• Page Audit: Duplicate Content
• Page Audit: Stranded Page
• Page Audit: Redirects
• Page Audit: robots.txt and Meta robots
• Page Audit: Page Load Speed

Earned Media and Link Building:

When another site links back to your website it is effectively a ‘vote of confidence’ and Google rewards your website by passing on some of that reputation to your website,
this is often referred to as ‘Google Link Juice’.  The more ‘juice’ your website gets from other quality sites in your niche the more authority your site earns and this usually results in higher rankings.

• • Paid and Owned Media
  • Link Building Today
  • Earning Links: Cross-Linking
  • Earning Links: Competitive Research
  • Earning Links: Content that is Generous
  • Earning Links: Build Link Bait

• Earning Links: Create Primary Research
• Earning Links: Getting Out More
• Earning Links: Newsjacking

You can find more information about the Search Marketing Specialist course and other Digital Marketer online marketing certifications here

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Does Your Business Need Local SEO In 2017

Local SEO Is A Vital Marketing Strategy You Can’t Afford To Ignore

SEO is dead, then it’s not, then it is then it’s not! As a business owner who serves customers in a geographic area, it is confusing and difficult to know who to believe. To be upfront, I have never agreed with the naysayers, I believe it is more important than ever to optimise your website for search.

I say this for two main reasons, firstly, new websites are getting published every day and secondly, because Google is constantly refining the way it decides which order to place websites.

So, if you have been asking yourself if your business needs local SEO?
The answer is YES – in fact, I’d argue that it’s more important now than ever before. Here’s why.

Local SEO – The State Of Local Search

Let’s start by reviewing some local SEO facts. The main facts you need to know:

• 50% of consumers who do a local search on their mobile phone – and 34% of those who search on a tablet – make a visit to a local business within the next 24 hours.
• 18% of all searches on a mobile device lead to a sale within one day.
• 93% of searches with local search intent is shown the Google local business three-pack at the top of the search engine results page.
• 60% of all adults use their mobile devices to look for local businesses.

These stats are proof that local SEO still vital for local businesses.

Ignore Local SEO At Your Peril?

If you’re not convinced. After all, optimising your site for local search can be confusing, time-consuming and expensive, especially if you need to hire a Local SEO expert to audit and implement any changes.

Without going all doomsday scenario on you the worst thing that’s likely to happen is that your competitors are found instead of you. Now, if you have no competition then that may not be a concern but let’s face it, most of us business owners have at least a few competitors.

Another interesting local search fact is that the higher up the list for a search term the more clicks you will get. Now that may sound obvious! But what is surprising is just how much more clicks the higher positions get when compared to the lower ranking sites. Here is some data on click-through rates (CTR) for the first page of Google. As you’ll see the first 3 positions attract nearly half of all the clicks.

• Position 1 – 20.5%
• Position 2 – 13.32%
• Position 3 – 13.14%
• Position 4 – 8.98%
• Position 5 – 9.21%
• Position 6 – 6.73%
• Position 7 – 7.61%
• Position 8 – 6.92%
• Position 9 – 5.52%
• Position 10 – 7.95%

Not optimising your website’s SEO can hurt you in several ways.

1. Incorrect online listings, also known as NAP (Name Address Phone) listings, can confuse Google (and Bing) because the search engine won’t know what it the correct business name address or phone number is and won’t show your website when it should.
2. The lower your Google rank, the fewer clicks you’ll get.
3. You will be unlikely to be in the Google 3-pack (the maps section at the top of a local search) – the 3 pack gets a vast number of clicks, especially on mobile searches so your competitors will get the click instead.
4. Paying more for AdWords clicks. SEO doesn’t make AdWords cheaper but if your website ranked higher you wouldn’t need to pay so much for adverts.
   In summary, if you rely on the web for generating leads and sales then cutting corners on SEO will cost you more in the long run.

5 Tips to Get Your Local SEO Working For You.
I’m going to list out 5 tactics you can use to improve your visibility in the Google search engine. These tips will also help your rankings on the other search engines too. You can do these yourself if you know your way around making changes to your website and your Google My Business account. If you’re not happy about doing this then call in a Local SEO consultant like Kensington SEO to help.
#1: Claim Your Listings And Make Them All The Same
This is important. Every time your business name and address appear online, the information must be both correct and identical.
Google tracks all the mentions of your business name, address and phone number the more mentions and the more trustworthy the sites it finds you on the higher it is likely to place you in the search engine.
For example, Google may have your address as 1 High St but you use 1 High Street whenever you add your business listing online. Even this slight difference is likely to dilute your presence and can affect your rank. So, check your Yelp, TripAdvisor, Yell pages etc. for any discrepancies.
#2: Add Local Keyword Terms in Your Website Tags and Descriptions
So many websites miss out this step. Yet the URL, Page Title and H1 tags have a massive impact on search.
Pro Tip: don’t rely on your web designer to do this, optimising for search and building websites are two different disciplines.
Title tags and meta descriptions play an key role in telling Google what a particular page is about and subsequently what search queries to show your website for.
It is essential to add your town, city or service area and what you do to these tags. E.g. Dog Walker in Kettering.
When your business appears on Google’s search engine results page (SERP), searchers see your title and meta description.
To make the best use of this tip, place the local information as close to the beginning of your tag and description as possible, it is best to keep the title tag to less than 60 characters so it doesn’t get truncated by Google.
#3: Your Website Must Be Mobile-Friendly
More searches are done on a mobile device than on a desktop/laptop these days so your website must be easy to use on a small device. This means it must load fast and be easy to read.
Here are some mobile optimisation tips:
 Make sure the content is responsive to the changing screen size, a single column is usually best for a mobile device.
 Use small images so they load quickly.
 Make buttons easy to use so clicking is easy.
Mobile users account for over 50% of visits and they will click away if your website is a pain to use on a smartphone.
#4: Use Google My Business
Google My Business is free and it is your way of telling Google exactly what you do, where and when you do it. This has a massive impact on your local SEO.
Get started by clicking the link above and verify your business. To make sure that only genuine businesses get listed they will verify your address the old-fashioned way – by sending you a postcard with a code on it. It usually comes within a week and when you get it go back to your Google My Business listing and enter the code to verify it. Once done, you’ll be able to update your information such as opening and closing times, add photos and videos and a detailed business description. The more information you include the higher you will tend to rank.
#5: Use Schema Markup like JSON LD
My last tip in this article is the most technical of the lot, but it can make a dramatic difference to your search engine visibility.
Schema markup is code you add to your website. Imagine Google spoke in a different language, schema markup code is Google own language. This makes it really easy for Google to understand exactly what your business is all about so it can show you for relevant search queries. Here are some examples of information you can add in markup code.
 Maps
 Phone numbers
 Products
 Menus
 Business hours
 Events
 Payment methods
There are hundreds of different elements you can add to the code. You can find a list here. The more code you use the better Google will understand your business.
Optimising For Local SEO Is A Vital Marketing Strategy As We Head Into 2018
If you have local customers looking for your products or services, you must optimise your website and online profiles correctly or you’ll miss out on sales. Perhaps worse than that you’ll find your competitors business growing at the expense of yours and who wants that?

Digital Marketing Tips Start Ups

Digital marketing is one of those buzzwords that everyone says you need to know about if you’re going to run a successful business. But how can you make sure you’re getting it right? Emma Gribben, founder of Digital by Emma, shared some tips on the Virgin Media Business VOOM Tour in Belfast recently…

“You know your business inside out, but do your customers?” Emma asked at the start of her talk. “No. So you need to tell them.”

But, she said, you need to tell them in a way that they understand, on channels that they use, and in your own language. “You need to understand who your target market is and the channels they are using,” Emma said, and recommended: “Be yourself. Be your company. Be very clear about your tone of voice.”

Where do you start?

1. Own your space

Emma said that you need to make sure you own your brand name on Google – and to make sure that you’re on top of what people are saying about your brand online. “You want to put your competitors onto page two of search results,” she said.

2. Know your audience

Obviously you need to know who your target market is for your business – but you also need to work out who you’re targeting online. Target market profiling can help you to work out what that person looks like – and where they are active online. Then once you’ve done that, Emma said, “it becomes clear what the questions people have about your business are” – and then you can work on answering them.

3. Create an experience

Marketing of all kinds is about creating an experience and with digital the scope is even greater, with technology enabling you to do so much more. “Give [your audience] something new and exciting,” Emma said. “We are consuming digital content all the time so you need to find what is unique about your business.”

How do you do it?

Mobile first is the real key here. People use their mobiles to surf the internet more than they use tablets, laptops or desktop computers now so you need to make sure that mobile is your priority when you’re creating anything digital. Emma said: “Start with mobile and build it from there. If you are not mobile optimised you will lose out.”

When creating your mobile first website though, it’s important that you only include the necessary information. Don’t overload your pages with too much – keep it simple, Emma recommended.

Once you’ve created your site, Emma said it’s important to test it and make sure that it works properly and isn’t loading really slowly on mobile. She recommended using Google’s testing site, testmysite.withgoogle.com, to see how your website performs.

Source: Digital Marketing Tips Start Ups