Applying Basic Local SEO To Your Homepage For Geography and Keyword Focus – 124

Transcript For Applying Basic Local SEO To Your Homepage for Geography and Keyword Focus – 124;

Caleb Baumgartner: Welcome to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I am producer Caleb Baumgartner. And in this solo episode, Jesse delivers excellent tips for improving the SEO of your website. If you are new to SEO and looking for easy first steps to take to make your website more SEO friendly, this episode will offer great insights into small changes that can make a big difference. Enjoy the show. Don’t forget to leave us a review on the platform of your choice. Thanks for listening and enjoy the program.

Jesse Dolan : Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you in tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. We’re going to talk today about local SEO for your website and how to use keywords. I’m going to walk you through an example that we used in a webinar that we’ll do, and it kind of breaks down, with some illustrations I’ll share some slides, well probably a slide from a PowerPoint as part of the presentation. So if anybody’s listening, I will walk through it and talk through it for the podcast. But also this is going to be a great one for you to maybe flip over to YouTube and check it out on the YouTube channel. You can find all of this on localseotactics.com. Just go to the show page for this recent episode. And there’ll be a YouTube video that goes along with this audio here.

So what we’re going to do is just kind of show you how to maybe take your page, your listing page that talks about your products, your services, and how to leverage your geographic references for keywords, and your product and service references for keywords to just kind of update the copy on your page to be more SEO optimized. Kind of a basic thing, but something pretty much every day when reviewing new client websites, this is one of the mistakes that we see all the time. So I think it would be a good one to just cover with everybody and I’ll do some, kind of some basic fundamentals here and walk through it. Before we get into that, I do want to mention our free instant audit tool. You can find that on localseotactics.com, plug in your keyword, plug in the page you’re looking to get a score on. And our tool is going to give you a quick SEO checklist.

Well, what are you doing good? What are you doing bad? And how well optimized is this page for that keyword? Totally free, very fast. And it’ll send you an email with a PDF with all this information when you’re done. So you can share it with your team, pass it on to a delegate, whatever it is, a super awesome localseotactics.com, yellow button. Instant SEO audit, check it out. All right, so let’s dive into it. I’m going to share my screen here and bring this slide up on the page. All right so what I have on the screen here is the slide. As you can see this as a webinar for a local SEO for your website, in the context of this, didn’t take the time to kind of reorganize the slide and modify it for use just for this episode here. So some quick context, this presentation that we do, kind of walks through the basics of local SEO.

We’ve talked about the GMB and your website and the stage that this is in is really how to leverage the keywords previously in the context of this presentation that I’m showing you, we just talked about doing some keyword research with everybody, right? And now it’s okay, take those keywords then let’s leverage them within your website. So here, what we have as an example, this was pulled from a screenshot from Avada. We’ve talked on the show plenty of time. We prefer WordPress to operate in. And within WordPress, we love the Avada theme. This is a screenshot pulled from an example off the Avada theme website. So that’s where we got this from. So this Avada electrician, this is just kind of a fake company, right? This is not a real business, but it’s a great one to illustrate what we’re talking about here.

So first things first, there’re some things that’s communicated on this page, which are great from a conversion standpoint, in building some trust with a prospect or with a client. 20 years experience, this is an electrician, right? 20 years of experience, is a great headline, you can see some services, some contact. Obviously there is some placeholder text here for this screenshot, but it conveys a good look, 20 years experience, good information, etcetera. One thing that we want to be looking at here is how do utilize keywords? When we’re talking about local SEO, it’s really bringing in two types of keywords together. One is, what’s your target city? Where do you want to be found when people are searching, right? If you’re a service area, business, where you go to your client, what region is that? What cities is it? What suburbs is it?

If you’re a storefront where people come to you, where are you located? Where are you trying to attract the business and get those customers, get those prospects coming to you. So usually you’re going to want to have these keywords, your geographic location, and the keyword that you’re going after, be in the prominent places on your page. This example here that we’re looking at is, would be a homepage for the website. And what we want to do is find a way to work these keywords into some of the key local SEO areas for your pages, for your website. For example, the titles, page title, the page text, the bullet pointed lists on your page. And if you’re not having bullet pointed list on your page, I’ll tell you that’s a great little trick to add more content to any given page and to also incorporate SEO keywords, right?

So features include, areas served, these are examples of lists you could make, right? Used for benefits from just things like that. There’s lots of ways you can be descriptive where you might not be able to write this into an intelligence like paragraph or kind of statement that kind of content. But to list that out in bullet points can be a pretty efficient way to just rattle off some things that just wouldn’t read together as good as a paragraph, right? Quick reads for everybody. So you’re going to want to use bullet point lists, also buttons. For example here, this button on the example says, request a quote. You can put keywords into that text. That’s actual text, right? If you can highlight over it with your mouse and copy of it if you will, that’s going to be texts, not just an image. You’re definitely going to want to try to incorporate keywords into that.

Image filings, we’ve talked before in the show extensively, don’t just settle for the one, two, three, four, that JPEG for a file name. If you take that with your iPhone, let’s just say, download that to your computer and then change it to be something that incorporates the geographic or the product or service keyword that you’re optimizing the page for. Basically these, you got to think about these areas. There’s just the general text on your page, but then there’re spots on your page that are more important, right? Again, your headlines, these lists, buttons, the image file name, wherever they are. You explicitly want to be using your keywords in these areas because Google, when they’re scanning your page, these are the things that are jumping out. You’ve made these things special, bold, italic, underline, anything you’re doing that’s not just normal text, it’s kind of special compared to normal texts.

You want to be leveraging that as much as you can. Write text and content with the reader in mind, by mixing the keywords in a natural manner. You can’t just mash all these keywords together and have it not make sense when you read it, right? You have to have some grammar and some readability to it. So when you do this, you’re going to take your existing content on your page. If you’re following along, grab a page off your website, look at it, and you want to work in the keywords in these areas, but it still has to read good when you’re done. So there’s kind of a balance there of working in the keywords, but also kind of having a good message that you’re conveying. The example here, we’re going to look at is this 20 years of experience as the main headline on this page, really doesn’t have any value from an SEO standpoint, right?

It has a lot of value from a conversion standpoint, you’re relaying into your clients and your prospects that you’ve been around for 20 years or trusted. We must be doing something right to be around for that long, most businesses fail around the three-year mark. So if you’ve been around for 20 years, that’s a lot of staying power, but from an SEO perspective, in the most important spot on your page, your main headline above the fold, you have nothing in there that does anything for attracting anybody or getting found in Google. So a better way to convey this would be Trusted Miami Electrician Since 1999. So with the sense, 1999, you’re still giving that kind of mark for how long you’ve been in business and that trust factor. But now you can see we’re also working in Miami and this example that would be where you’d be targeting for your geographic location and electrician.

So you’ve got two high value keywords in that same title that effectively communicates the same message. We’ve been around for 20 years, right? But now you’re also calling out where you’re servicing and what it is that you’re providing, two very important keywords to communicate to Google for the relevancy and the content of your page, not disrupting that message at all for what it is that you’re trying to get across.

Now, in this case here, we’re just using Miami and just looking at the headline, but carry the same thought down through the rest of the page. If you have bullet point lists or other paragraphs of texts talking about where you’re located, the neighborhoods that you serve, things like that. You want to go through all that and again, add more cities. If we’re talking to Miami, what are some of the suburbs? What are some of the landmarks? What are some of the other inferences that you can pull for Google to know where you’re talking about and what it is that you’re trying to do. More Miami content on this page, right, is going to be very helpful for bringing that relevance.

All right. So that’s all that we have for sharing on the screen there. I hope that makes sense for everybody. Again, just kind of revisiting the topic. It’s kind of some basic SEO, but something that we find is just still a big thing out there is that people aren’t developing their content or looking at their pages with that intent of where you want to be found. And what is you want to be found for, especially in these critical areas.

So if you do nothing else, right, as soon as you’re done here, go to your homepage or your primary location page, and just look on that first screen, if you’re on your laptop or on mobile, whatever it is, just pull it up. In some of that first text, are you seeing geographic locations, cities, suburbs, state, whatever it is that you’re trying to serve. Are you seeing that on there? And are you seeing the keywords for what you want to be found for? If the answer is no, then take some of these tips and start revamping that page and targeting it towards what you want to be found for. You should see some good results.

Hopefully that helps you all out. I’m going to get into our five-star review for this episode here. If you haven’t left us a review yet, then if you’re liking the show, if these kinds of things help you and provide some value, we’d like to trade. We’ll keep doing the show and we’d like to get a review from you to let us know that we are hitting the mark for you. If you’d like to leave us a review, if you haven’t done so yet go out to localseotactics.com, go down to the bottom, clicking the button for reviews. We make it easy. There’s a button that you’ll see for Facebook, for Google, wherever you want to leave us a review, Apple podcasts. We’d love to get the review and we read them on the shows here, right? So not only are we going to be grateful for it, we’re going to give you a shout out and read it. If you’re so inclined to leave us one.

This one here we have from Michelle Vaughn, Finish Fierce. Review says, accessible for all. Finally, a podcast for local service businesses that’s actually useful. So many SEO and digital marketing podcasts seem to only be talking to other techies and forget. Not everyone knows what SEO even is. Thanks guys. Thanks Michelle for the review. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do here. We are not trying to get into some ego match with other SEOs about who knows more. You’re the exact kind of person that we are trying to help with this. Needing some guidance, you need some help. What is the SEO? What is local SEO? How do we apply it? What do we do? Not the latest, greatest breaking news, and things like that. Just good, actionable advice that you can take to improve your business and get found online. So appreciate the review. Everyone else we’d love to hear from you. And that pretty much does it for this episode. I hope it was a good value for you all out there and we’ll catch you in the next episode. Take care.