Insights:Off-site SEO: Why local matters on the world wide web
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is defined as “actions undertaken to improve a website’s search engine rankings.” Simple in theory, but somewhat more complex in practice. SEO activities generally fall into two categories: On-Site and Off-Site SEO. Although the exact balance of factors that Google’s search algorithm uses to make decisions are proprietary, the recent Search Engine Ranking Factors study conducted by marketing analytics company Moz indicates that the ranking weight of both types of SEO is roughly 50/50.
On-site SEO refers to actions taken to the content, architecture and design of your website, ensuring the subject matter is more understandable to the algorithm. This involves optimizing content for relevant keywords, structuring pages with Headers (H1) and Sub-headers (H2), copywriting that clearly defines subject and metadata, alt-tags and other coded pointers.
Off-Site SEO actions take place outside of your website, and with the goal of improving your site’s relevance, trustworthiness and authority to search engines and end users alike.
Off-site considerations include:
• Link building
• Data consistency
• Local search
• Social media strategies
There isn’t enough space here to go into detail about all these factors, but it’s worth drilling down a little deeper into one factor with a significant impact on visibility for local businesses.
The local search environment is a vital resource for small to medium businesses. Google’s 2019 local SEO statistics report indicated that “97% of people searched online to find a local business” and “92% of searchers will pick businesses on the first page of local search results.” In short – business owners need to pay attention. But it can be extremely challenging and time consuming to keep up to date with the ever-changing web of Maps (Google, Bing, Uber etc.), business listings (Yelp, YP, Superpages etc.) and consumer review sites (Local Best, BBB, foursquare etc.).
One flaw that many directory sites have is data consistency. Consistency speaks to the trustworthiness of your company’s search engine results. Is the address correct? Phone number? Business hours? Are you found under the correct categories? Many directories auto-create entries by scraping the Internet for information. More often than not, this results in incomplete, inconsistent and out of date results. But who has time to maintain literally 100s of separate sites?
At Insight Marketing Design we utilize tools to create a single dashboard that can build a comprehensive profile of your company. From this profile we overwrite the existing data on the main national aggregators, which in turn push it out to 1000s of directories and databases. If you’d like to learn more about strategies for enhancing your local online presence, give us a call at 605-275-0011 email us at [email protected]