How To Increase Google Ranking and Lower Your Bounce Rates By Increasing Your Website Speed Website speed is a ranking factor, for Google. It's official, Google has confirmed it! So, if you're not paying attention to how fast your website is, then you're completely ignoring something that can easily help your Google rankings! In this episode we dig into what can cause your website to slow down, how to test the speed of your website, how to identify exactly how long each element of your website takes to load, and best practices you can implement to maintain a fast website today, as well as into the future. YOU'LL LEARN Google has come out and said that your website speed is a ranking factor for your website In July of 2018 Google launched what has been called the "speed update" to it's algorithm John Muller (of Google) has said that you should target 2-3 seconds for page load time, ideally A website that loads faster will have a lower bounce-rate, which impacts your rankings Website loading times are even more important on mobile devices In 2009 0.7% of all web traffic was [...]

How To Survive As Local Business For Over 20 Years By Embracing New Marketing Strategies You know Bob Brennan as the co-host to Local SEO Tactics.  What many don't know is Bob's history as a successful brick-and-mortar business owner over the last 20+ years.  For episode 30 of Local SEO Tactics, Jesse interviews Bob Brennan, discussing what it takes to survive as a business for over 20 years, and how continuing to seek out and embrace new marketing technologies can help grow your small business. YOU'LL LEARN Insights into what it takes to persevere in small business with an ever changing marketing landscape How inbound or "pull" marketing is so much more powerful and outbound or "push marketing Contrasting the traditional marketing techniques like direct mail, versus newer digital methods Focusing on SEO and digital marketing costs substantially less than cold calling, direct mail, and appointment setting Business owners need to shift their marketing to become a "service based business" Using digital marketing allows for very low cost test marketing to see if your ideas will fly or not It's much easier for a local small business to open an online [...]

Understand When The Google Map Pack Shows Up and How To Get Your Business Ranked In The Map Pack We're all familiar with the Google Map Pack, right? Google map pack is the general term used to describe the location based results you see on a Google search results page, where it lists local businesses and identifies their location on a map with little place marker icons. Well, if you want your business to get in front of new customers, you need to be ranking in the Google map pack! In this episode we'll talk about how to determine which keywords will trigger that map pack to show up (not all will). We'll also dig into how you can optimize your website for the keywords that trigger the map pack, to make sure you are showing up here for local searches! WHAT YOU'LL LEARN ABOUT THE MAP PACK You need to be in the map pack if you want your business to be found for local search results on Google The map pack is the group of businesses that appear in a box at the top of the Google search [...]

Discover The Easy But Hidden Way To Engage With More Customers And Get Ahead Of Your Competition We've noticed a shift happening - customers are contacting businesses more and more with instant messaging, SMS text messages, and emails, and less with phone calls than they used to. This is great, but it comes with a catch! It's super easy to know when your phone is ringing...but how do you know if you have a new message on Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, or any other 3rd party messaging platform? Don't let these customer inquiries slip through the cracks! In this weeks episode we share some tips and tricks to quickly engage with these customers, and win the sales that your competition is missing out on! YOU'LL LEARN There is a rise in the ratio of non-phone call communications for customer contact from websites Phone calls remain the most popular method of contacting local companies for service requests Often times businesses are slower to reply to emails than they are in handling phone calls Customers can easily contact many businesses via email in short order If you can promptly reply to emails, [...]

How To Approach Local SEO and Increase Rankings If Your Business Has Multiple Locations If your business has multiple locations, you need a slightly different approach to your local SEO strategy. There are a few simple but highly effective concepts you can deploy to maximize your exposure and increase your Google rankings for all locations. In this episode we'll break down the subtle differences that are needed when you feature multiple locations on your website, in order to get every location ranked and dominate in your local market! YOU'LL LEARN How to setup pages on your website to rank and dominate for each location you have Setting up one website with a page for each location is better than having separate websites for each location Make sure you have a Google My Business (GMB) listing for each business location Create an individual page on your website for each business location you have Link to these individual location pages from the respective GMB listing for each page Create a main "Locations" page on your website, making it an index listing of each location Link to each individual location page from the main [...]