18 responses

  1. Jim Rudnick
    August 8, 2011

    @Ted…great recap of the variables we SEO practitioners work on! As a contributor to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey by David Mihm, what I can tell you is that while all of us contributors work on the variables – we do not agree ‘en masse’ on any of the rankings of same exactly….tho there are many many factors that we do rank highly…ie. NAP for instance…and as you noted, do NOT get hung up on any single factor…it’s truly a ‘mash-up’ of them all….

    Jim

    Reply

  2. Zunaira Karim
    August 17, 2011

    I haven’t been on for awhile! Great to see your posts in local search, Ted and fantastic points all the same. On point no.13 of your post, it’s probably best to use schema.org for your microformatting, check out this post:

    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html

    It’s basic to implement schema.org and Raven Tools even came out with the Free Schema Creator, to make life easier for non-coders!

    http://raventools.com/blog/free-schema-creator/

    Reply

  3. Ted Ives
    August 17, 2011

    Thanks for passing the tool along Zunaira, I had not seen that one either.

    I am a little wary of microformats for purposes other than NAP as I see some of them as an easy way for Google to take away a click by presenting information to users right in the SERP (i.e. movie showtimes and so on)…

    In cases where it helps the user make a better decision about coming to your page over someone else’s I guess they make sense. In the case of recipes it’s starting to look like, if you want to rank, you’re going to have to play in terms of microformats…an interesting trend, don’t quite know where it’s going to end up.

    This will be an interesting topic to really dig into at some point!

    Reply

  4. Kathy Long
    September 1, 2011

    Hi Ted, Great post. Thanks for sharing your fantastic expertise!

    I have one concern, though, and it’s about obtaining an address through the companies you list. I’m concerned because I know that Google says your place of work must be a place where you can meet clients. Clearly you can’t do that in a mailbox 😉 or a Mailboxes, etc. store either.

    Wouldn’t it be easy for Google to collect all the addresses for UPS and Mailbox, Etc stores and disallow all of those? I’m seeing a lot of spamming going on in this area and if they don’t do it now I would think it’s just a matter of time before those addresses get banned. Am I wrong?

    Thinking this is a good way to trick Google, I’m seeing lots of virtual office businesses cropping up selling “office” space that is nothing more than an address. It’s not unusual to see attorneys with dozens of “offices” now, some as far away as 300 miles. Yep. Seen that and it’s getting pretty common.

    So, what say you? Is that really a good practice? I’ve advised clients to get actual offices where they can meet clients if they have to, even if they are on shared plans to get that all-so-important address near the centroid. Do you think I’ve been asking too much?

    Reply

  5. Ted Ives
    September 17, 2011

    Kathy, taking the high road as you’re recommending is usually the right choice.

    I did not notice that verbage about having to be able to meet customers at the physical address, good catch (I actually had a friend recently tell me ‘well, I do have a second office in the northern part of the state I meet a lot of people at – Mcdonalds 😉 but of course he can’t put that down…kind of like Fonzie’s “office”.

    One would hope that Google will collect all the addresses for UPS and Mailboxes etc. and then disqualify those, but my guess is the Local team has been starved for resources (much like the Spam team was for a couple of years), and it doesn’t look like they’re doing much of anything to improve things. Google has a track record of allowing things to get pretty bad and then coming in and taking no prisoners at some point.

    You’re right, future-proofing by doing it right is both the smart, and the right, thing to do. Make sure to point out to your clients in 2-3 years when Google changes things how you took good care of them!

    Reply

  6. Bill Gassett
    December 10, 2011

    This is outstanding advice. Local SEO is usually one of the easiest ways to capture business yet so many business owners don’t do the proper research to take advantage of it.

    Reply

  7. Ted Ives
    January 13, 2012

    Cody, I have found a really odd WordPress bug, maybe it’s a caching thing, but it’s not letting me update that link. Try it here:
    http://bit.ly/lUnC5f

    Reply

  8. James
    January 29, 2012

    I have a roadside assistance company that services San Antonio Texas and 100 miles radius. Can you give me a few pointers on staying in the game.

    Reply

    • Ted Ives
      January 29, 2012

      James – yes – get a new website – ASAP!

      Your “flat tire service” page is “sitemap.html” – that’s not supposed to be used for a page users look at, it’s supposed to be used to list all your pages so Google can easily index them. Also, Google really frowns on putting keywords repeatedly on pages, in tiny fonts, and in white – those techniques stopped working 8 or 10 years ago!

      I would recommend starting over. First find someone local to you who can knock out a nice WordPress site for you from a template inexpensively, and have a page for each town you service, with each one focused on a different term like “roadside assistance san antonio” , put the keyword in the title, etc….pick up the book “The Art of SEO” if you really want to get into it.

      Try to find a domain you can use with some variation of “roadsideassistance” or “roadside-assistance” “assistanceroadside” or even “roadsideassistant” (the stem assistant should help rank for assistance), that would help a lot as well.

      Good luck!

      – Ted

      Reply

  9. Sean P Fullerton
    April 12, 2012

    Interesting article. I hadn’t realised that about places listings sharing the same ip address, that’s one to think about!!

    Here’s another handy tool for creating h-cards…. http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator

    Reply

  10. Stella Q.
    May 31, 2012

    My SEO knowledge and expertise has just gotten higher thanks to this post. And thank you for introducing me to David Mihm. I also suggest asking customers to give a review before they exit the site. To encourage them to give a review, an incentive program may work. Cheers!

    Reply

  11. Paul
    August 19, 2012

    Excellent material! Has a great way to not only boost the Google view of your site, but could also help customers know what your business provides.

    Reply

  12. Anita Clark
    April 13, 2013

    This post was way ahead of its time as local SEO is now no longer an afterthought but often times the first thing thought of.

    Reply

  13. Ron Sanders
    May 27, 2015

    hey Ted, i like point number 7… to change the name to get higher placement according to the alphabet. This is a defintely long forgotten trick 🙂

    Reply

  14. liam cobb
    August 20, 2015

    wow i had no idea about .7, i had never really considered that having and earlier alphabetical character would help, great article, something i will have to keep in mind!

    Reply

  15. Gary print
    September 19, 2015

    i always tend to use area pages when i building a website, i find it is far easier to rank in an area when you have a page built, dedicated to that area with the correct on page SEO and localized inbound links

    cheers

    Reply

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