My name is luc de round the founder of ranking academy. Uk, where I talk about the best tools, tips and ways to promote your local business online step by step and keep by click on my blog, I cover everything. Any local business owner needs to know from search engine optimization to social media.
My goal is to help you thrive online, so you can drive more visitors to your business and ultimately make more money if you’re new here consider, subscribing and clicking on the bell button, so you don’t miss any of my new articles. One last thing don’t forget to check out the description below, which is where I put additional notes and links I refer to in this tutorial. So, let’s jump in with our first hack hack number one simulate local search results for different locations.
You may or may not know that Google uses location tracking technology to determine the location of a searcher. With this technology, Google can guess users exact location based on the IP address or GPS coordinate of the device they are using. This means that if I search for the keyword electrician near me on my office computer, I will get a very different set of results than if I conduct the same search for my computer at home located several miles away from my office.
This not only affects the Google map back results, but also the rest of the results, especially when there is a clear indication. The search is based on local terms such as a city, a postcode or a near me query. So unless you use a tracking tool, it makes it difficult to check if your business ranks in different locations when you are doing your research from the same computer. But if you don’t want to spend the money on a tracking tool, there is a free hack.
You can use to quickly check if your business ranks for your target keywords in specific locations. Even if you are using the same computer, go to Google and open an incognito window. Doing your research in an incognito window will prevent Google from giving you results. Based on your previous history, so the outcome will be totally clean in your address bar search for a keyword you are targeting for your business.
I’r going to use the example of one of my clients website with an electrician and wants to rank for the term emergency. Electrician in multiple local areas, near where his business is based, press return in the address bar, remove everything after the keyword parameter and add the following command and near equals city, replace the parameter city with the location area. You want to see the results for.
In this example, I’m going to use Bexleyheath, which is where the business is located and sure enough. They are at the number one spot in a map pack and in the traditional results. Let’s switch to a neighboring location called Dartford. This time they are number two in the map pack and number one in the more conventional results. This hack is very handy, as it enables you to quickly identify locations where your business is not ranking, just create or improve existing content for these areas to get more visibility and more traffic.
Moving on to hack number two find keywords: your competitors are ranking for it. All starts with someone typing a keyword in a search engine. If your business’s website ranks high enough for it, it is likely you will get a new visitor and hopefully, a new customer understanding. What keywords people are searching for is the foundation of search and that’s why it is extremely important to do some keyword.
Research before you start creating content for your site, but keyword research can be a bit tedious and time-consuming, especially if you start from scratch and if you’re new to this SEO game, you won’t really know where to start here is a hack that not only will speed Up your keyword, research process, but will also give you the ammunition you need to generate lots of traffic head over to neil patel comm.
Slash, ubirr, suggest ubersuggest is an awesome tool for anyone to improve their organic traffic and perfect. For those of you on a very tight budget, because it’s totally free okay, so let’s imagine I run a dental practice in London and these guys are one of my competitors. Boleyn dental comm, just copy their website address and paste it in the uber suggests. Search box. Select the appropriate country and click the search button uber suggests will display a statistical overview of the performance of this particular website, which includes the number of organic keywords.
It ranks for the estimated monthly traffic they receive the strength of the site, as well as the number of Link’s pointing to the site. You can scroll down for more data, but what we want here are the keywords, this guy’s ranked for just click on the tab, organic keywords which will take you to all the keywords that drive traffic to this site. The results are organized by volume, which is the number of times keyword a search for every month, position, which is where this business ranks in Google.
For this keyword, the estimated number of visitors they get for that keyword, the webpage on that site that ranks for that keyword and, finally, the SEO difficulty, which is how competitive this keyword is pretty cool right. Click on the export button on the bottom of the page. To download the full list of keywords in CSV format, which you can import either in an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet where you can filter through the data easily, so it’s faster to identify the best opportunities.
What you are looking for our keywords with low difficulty and high volume, for which you are not ranking for repeat this process with all your competitors aside and start creating content on your own website to target all the keywords you have identified as being opportunities. This should yield a lot of traffic time to move on to hack number three find links that are pointing to your competitors website, but not yours.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you’ve, probably noticed. I talk frequently about the importance of getting external links. Pointing to your website. Links are one of the strongest signals Google uses to rank websites, the more quality links you have pointing to your site, the higher you will rank. This means that if your competitors have got better links pointing to their site than you, it is highly likely they will outrank you to beat them.
You just need to get better links pointing to your site, and why should you start by looking at your competitors? Links like we did with their keywords, go back to uber, suggest and enter one of your competitors web address. Let’s take with our dentist example. On the left hand, side menu select the option backlinks. This will show all the links that are pointing to this site. In this example, this website has two thousand six hundred and nineteen links coming from two hundred and seventy seven domains or, if you prefer web sites.
This means that some web sites have included more than one link on their pages, this dentist site to reduce your workload. You just want to identify only the web sites that are pointing to our competitors. We don’t need to see all the links to do. This make sure the one link per domain option is selected. The other thing we want to do is to select the follow option. The difference between a followed and a nofollow link is that Google doesn’t give any value to a nofollow link.
Therefore they don’t interest us. What we now have is a list of valuable links from unique web sites pointing to our competitors sites. All you need to do now is to go through each link by clicking on the open window icon and check if you can replicate what your competitor has done. Repeat this process with all your competitors site and export all the links in an Excel or Google sheets to make things easier to manage.
Let’s continue with hack number four identify citations inconsistency. If you don’t already know what a citation is, let me give you a brief recap. It is a mention of your business on the web, which generally includes the name the address and the phone number of your business, also known as nap. Citations are generally found in business directories such as yell, Yelp and many other specialized directories.
You can find a comprehensive list of the main directories where your business should be listed on my site at ranking academy da koat UK slash tools, slash business citations. If you haven’t done it yet, you should submit your business details to each and every one of these directories as they do influence rankings and help search engines. Trust your business is legitimate. The only caveat is your business.
Citations need to be a hundred percent identical across all directories. If they’re not, it will negatively impact your rankings and, obviously your traffic, and when you submit your business to multiple directories, it can be easy to make. A mistake here is an example of a dentist located in London called Camden high street dental practice, although it is correctly named in Google, my business and has the right address and phone number.
When I dig around the web, I can find this business listed under a different name in another couple of directories: the dental practice the postcode is also incorrectly displayed in Yelp and in Facebook. This type of inconsistency can be very harmful for your business, since Google will struggle to understand which business is, which you can verify the consistency of your citations manually if you want to, but it would take a lot of time and efforts and you’re not even guaranteed You will capture all of the errors either.
Instead, you can automate this process by using a tool called bright. Local write. Local is not free, but you can use it for free for two weeks without having to even enter a credit card which is more than enough for what we need to do so go to bright. Local com create an account once you’ve created and verified your account. You can add your business details using either your google, my business details or fetch your location manually, go through the location process, set up filling in all the details and let the tool pull out the data for your business.
This should take a bit of time, so be patient once finished, go to the main dashboard and sell the citations options in there. You should see where your business is mentioned across the web, and if there are any errors they will be highlighted in red. All you need to do now is correct. The errors, in addition, bright local, will also less directories where your business is not listed, which is the perfect opportunity for you to add more citations.
Let’s move on to hack number five increase your number of Google reviews with a custom build link. Did you know that reviews are the third most impactful indicator that Google looks at to rank businesses in a map pack? Well, you do now. This means the more reviews your business gets. The higher your business world rank in Google if those reviews are good, of course. Collecting reviews, however, is not always easy and can be a cumbersome process.
Many clients you deal with can’t be bothered to search for your business online, then search for the link where they can give you a review, etc. The trick here is to make it simple for them once you’ve finished dealing with the client just send them a quick email and ask them politely if they wouldn’t mind, leaving a review for your business. If you don’t know what to write download my review email template at the address showing on your screen or in the description.
But here is the real hack. Add a link in the email which, when clicked on, will open the Google review box for your business directly on your clients. Computer. All they need to do is write the review in the box. But how do you create the link? It couldn’t be any simpler right. Local I’ve just launched a nifty little tool completely free that allows you to do this in seconds head over to the address displayed on your screen, search for your business in the search box and click on the fetch links and ID button.
This will return. Three results. Click on the icon, next to the review link to copy the link and add it to your email. This will make the process so easy. You should see the number of reviews increased significantly along with your ranking and obviously the traffic to your site time to look at hack number six check your local positions in Google map. This is somehow a little similar to hack number one, but this time we only focus on the ranking positions in Google Maps, go to player, calm and choose the tools option from the main menu from the drop-down.
Select local rank, tracker, scroll down and start searching for. Your business add a keyword you want to check rankings for choose the distance between the pins that will get displayed on the map and a great size. The free version only allows you to pick three. You should start seeing where your business francs on Google Maps for the keyword you’ve selected. Why is this useful? Because you can easily identify areas where you’re just outside the map? Pack like position number four or number five, with a little bit of optimizing work? You should be able to climb a couple of positions, so you end up in the top three results and drive a lot more traffic to your site.
As I mentioned, the free version only allows you to choose a grid of up to three pins, but a full license for this only costs eighteen dollars a year. So it’s worth investing in it. Hack number, seven add quality content to your site. The quality and relevance of the content on your website is very important. The better your content is the more likely you will be rewarded by Google and the more traffic you will get.
But how do you find out? What type of content you should be adding to your site and how should you write it? Let’s go to uber suggests, once more and once again, let’s enter one of our competitors web address in the search box. Our dentist and click on search on the left hand, side menu click on the top pages option. This will show you the most popular pages for this site, based on the amount of traffic they receive like most sites.
The home page is the most popular one. So, let’s ignore it for now, let’s have a look at their content page instead at number two, I can see that a teeth. Whitening page is very popular and receives about 660 visitors a month, which is quite a lot and if you click on a view all option next to the page, it will show you the keywords that are driving traffic to the page, along with the rankings straight away.
I can see that teeth, whitening, London and best teeth whitening London – would be very relevant because they are very localized and although teeth whitening has a lot more potential in terms of volume, it is way too broad and likely to be very competitive. Since they’re ranked in position four and five for these terms, I wonder what their page looks like. So, let’s click on it. As you can see the page, it’s clearly optimized for teeth, whitening, London and is very decent, but the content is very thin.
So here is the hack if you want to get the chance to rank above your competitors, for the same keywords: just build better pages. Yes, it’s as simple as that. This dentist could have added a whole section around frequently asked questions: a article showing the process of teeth, whitening a price list, how to section that would explain how to look after your teeth once they’ve been whitened and much more.
That would make this space a lot more comprehensive and Google will see that and will reward you accordingly repeat this process with all your competitors and create better content every time it will pay off massively hack, number eight add popular Q & A s to your Google. My business profile – this is a widely overlooked feature in Google. My business and chances are your competitors aren’t doing it within Google, my business, you can add popular questions and answers.
The problem is anyone and everyone can ask questions and answer themselves on your own google listing which sometimes lead to some bad results. Would you want to see this in your profile? This Ellucian add your own questions and answers yourself. It will a prevent anyone from asking for something. That’s already been asked B, you will be able to give an accurate answer C. It will display right in your Google, my business panel, making your listing stand out and generate more traffic D.
It might even get displayed in Google search results. So what kind of questions should you put in there as a business owner? You know better than anybody else. What question people always ask time to put pen to paper and start collecting them, then add them to your Google, my business profile. You just bring up your business, listing click on the ask a question option and simply add both the question and the answer.
If you’re not sure what questions to add just head over to answer, the public comm tap a keyword related to your business in there and click on get questions. This will bring a list of the most common questions related to that keyword. Click on the data option to make this easier to read, find out what the most relevant questions are and write an answer for them then add them to your Google. My business ethic use final tip each question as a like option.
The more like an answer has the higher up. It goes on the list. So if you want a specific question to sit right at the top make sure it gets some likes all good things come to an end, including this article. Don’t just read it start playing with the various tools I have talked about and make changes to your site today, the sooner you do it, the sooner you’ll benefit from it. I love creating tutorials for you guys and I’m always open to new ideas.
So if you want to suggest any topic, you want me to cover in my next tutorial, just post them in the comments below. In the meantime, happy marketing,
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