If you’re a business that targets your local audience as potential customers for your products or services, the first basic step to growing your visibility is improving your website’s local visibility in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is where local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. One of the most simple and effective strategies to increase the reach of your website is to use Google’s website listing service ‘Google Places’. Google Places is a free website listing service which aims to create a detailed database of places all over the globe. It was launched in September 2009 to replace the now defunct Google Local Business Centre. Google specifically describes this service as “a webpage for every place in the world, organising all the relevant information about it.”

What is the impact of Google Places to Local SEO?

Google has released undeniable data about how people consume local information online.

These facts show you just how important local SEO is for your business growth, and website’s ranking, and to keep you on top of the competition, using Google Places can actually boost your websites ranking, therefore giving your business more visibility in the local area. Businesses listed in Google Places are prioritized by Google Search and are displayed at the very top of search engine result pages.  For example, if you have a Website Development business in Purley, every time a person searches for “Website Development Purley” or ” Digital marketing agency in croydon” Google prioritises the listings of businesses on that locality, displaying all possible places and establishments that closely matched the query. If you’re unsure as to why SEO is key for your business’ growth, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to explain further.

The Advantage of Google Places for Small Businesses

Employing the use of Google Places is very much recommended for start-ups and small businesses.  Even those companies who don’t have websites yet can register and get free online exposure.  Google Places only needs to verify your business details through a validation process which would enable your business listing to go live online.

SEO agency Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to offer local businesses digital marketing services and online marketing advice on relevant Local SEO Services and content marketing to help increase presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Get in touch to chat about your business goals and how a tailored SEO campaign can help your marketing strategy.

Getting attention online isn’t something that will just fall into your lap. The first way people will find your site is by searching on a search engine such as Google. If you don’t have the right keywords, you won’t rank well for the key areas you want your website to be noticed for, leaving you basically invisible. This is a clear indicator that using keywords, alongside internal links on your site, is a good way to optimise your site on search engines.

Keywords are important no matter what kind of content marketing you do. Whether it’s your YouTube video, an article you’ve written or your website, keywords will help decide whether you get discovered.

There are two basic principles to Content keywords:

Traffic

Number of people who search these keyword daily

Other sites trying to rank for the same keywords

Competition

Harder to rank for keywords with high traffic

Highly competitive keywords will be harder to rank highly for as big businesses may have already established a firm ranking

Long tail Key words

A regular Keyword may be something like “Shoes” but a long tail keyword would be something like “Red shoes with big heals and no straps” It’s going to be a lot easy to rank for as there will be less competition, but you may see less traffic to your site as not many people will search such a specific phrase.

Finding keywords for your business

This can be quite a tricky process, you need to find keywords that work with your business goals and target the areas you’re looking to promote. But finding out which keywords have the most traffic or competition is information that isn’t widely available, so you can outsource this to another company or download software or use online web applications to do it.

How to target keywords

You may think that jamming your content full of keywords is going to help your site, it will, but only for the short term, as search engines can recognise “keyword stuffing” and will penalise you for this. So to prevent any wrong-doing, you should focus each piece of content around one or two keywords and let your results build up over time.

If you follow this guide and you have a successful keyword strategy, you will notice the extra leads to your site and then possibly more sales, which is after all, the main goal.

Content marketing agency for accountants

As a digital marketing agency in London, Smart Cow Marketing can help your firm stand out online by providing the tailored content marketing strategy your business needs. Book a free consultation.

What is bounce rate and how does it affect your site?

Bounce Rate is the percentage of people visiting your site and then immediately leaving. Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can identify what search engines show the highest bounce rates. For example, it could show that Bing is delivering a 75% Bounce Rate. This means that 75% of the visitors coming from Bing to your website during the date range you have selected are visiting one page and then leaving your site.

Depending on how your Google Analytics account is set up, this may include closing the browser, directly typing in a different site’s URL into their browser’s navigation bar, or clicking on a link to one of your social media sites or off-site blog. This third case is important to note, because unless Google Analytics has been set-up to track these off-site channels as part of the account, a visitor will be considered a Bounce even though they are still interacting with channels your brand controls.

IS A HIGH BOUNCE RATE BAD?

A high Bounce Rate typically indicates that a visitor did not find the page they landed on relevant to what they were looking for. This is not always the case. If your blog is being tracked by Google Analytics and a visitor lands on one of your blog posts and the information they seek is clearly available, they may have no further interest in staying on your site. A low Bounce Rate, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean your users are happily engaged with your site. If you pair a low Bounce Rate with a high number of Page views and low conversions, your visitors may be frustrated and unable to find what they are looking for even after searching and are leaving your site unfulfilled.

So although these statistics are great, they can only be used as an estimate as you can never know the real reason for someone leaving or staying on your page, unless you asked them all individually.

Digital marketing agency London

If you need a helping hand building an digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign! Digital marketing tactics we offer include web design and development, SEO services, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Google webmaster tools is an excellent tool to analyse your sites performance allowing you to identify the areas you need to improve on, and what’s going well.

These are the features that it includes:

• Submit/check the sitemap for your website.
• Adjust the crawl rate of the Google bots for your website and view the statistics.
• Generate/check the robots.txt file for your website.
• List the internal and external pages that link to your website.
• Check what keyword searches led the site to being displayed in the Google search engine results pages and click-through rates for them.
• Check statistics about how Google has indexed your website and whether it has found any issues while doing so.
• Set a preferred domain name (e.g. yourdomain.com over www.yourdomain.com or vice versa) which will determine how the site URL will be displayed in search engine results pages.

Google Webmaster Tools is a very popular solution for your website and it is highly recommended by webmasters. It will help you with the Search Engine Ranking Optimization of your website. You will be able to use it for a frequent analysis and for checking the statistics of your website. It gives you precise information how your website is indexed by Google and provides you with deep insights in case of an issue.

In order to use the Google Webmaster Tools for your website you need to confirm that you are the owner of the website and have full access to it. The process is absolutely automated and all you need to do is place a given text file in the Webroot directory for your website.

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to submit an XML sitemap for your website. This provides information about all pages on the website and making it easier and faster for Google bots to crawl and index it. You will also see more detailed information related to the indexing of your website.

Google Webmaster Tools provide a full list of the search phrases that result in your web site being displayed on the search engine results pages (SERPs). You will also receive full information about all internal and external links to your website, keywords, errors and missing pages. Such information is of upmost importance when you want to better optimize your website and have it displayed higher in the SERPs

In order to start using Google Webmaster Tools, you should create a new account (or use an existing one if you already have a Google account). Visit the Google Webmaster Tools web page:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

You will be asked to log in or create a new account. The registration process is simple and you should not experience any troubles.

Digital marketing agency Croydon

Interested in learning more? Book a Practice Growth Session with Smart Cow today.