Local SEO – ISOOSI Tuesday Chat

Local SEO – ISOOSI Tuesday Chat

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On Tuesday 25th February the ISOOSI marketing hangout panel (#ISOOSICHAT) will turn its’ attention to Local SEO. Local SEO has definitely become a well discussed topic of late – and rightly so!

Join local SEO experts +Mike Blumenthal (Blumenthals) and +Darren Shaw (Whitespark) – along with our regular panel of experts which includes +Ammon Johns (ISOOSI) , +Bill Slawski (Go Fish Digital) and +Carlos Fernandes (ISOOSI).

Every business owner that relies on regional business realizes that they need to rank in search engines for regional phrases. They need presence in the SERP blended local listings in addition to regular organic ranking.
But many business owners still do not know what “Local SEO” even means.

What is Local SEO and why do you need it? 

If you don’t know, don’t worry…. we’ll be giving an introduction to it for our audience. We know many of you that are members of ISOOSI or list your businesses in our directory are not immersed in SEO or Marketing on a daily basis. We’ll give you the basics and discuss why Local SEO is so important… and will get even more critical in the future.

Whether you have a brick and mortar business or a home based business that serves a particular town or city – Local SEO should not be ignored. It is a very powerful tool that can be harnessed to improve organic rankings and map listings and thus increase website traffic and the number of walk in customers. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure it out; a better local presence in search engines and map systems will lead to more leads and higher sales.

Obviously the product or service still has to be quality as does your customer service (unless you want bad reviews 🙂 !!)  – but that goes without saying!

Since Panda and Penguin, getting exposure in the SERPs for regional phrases has become more and more of a challenge for businesses. Hummingbird will make it even more difficult in our opinion.

Businesses just can’t throw together several localized versions of a page targeting a particular term and expect them all to rank for particular towns / cities where they have a presence…. or want to rank for. It is certainly still possible to do this, but you have to ensure that your content is very tailored to those specific locations…. avoiding thin content issues and really making a case for the existence of the separate localized pages. 

With the progression of search as it relates to Google Now and personal assistant systems like Siri on iOS we can clearly see the benefits of ensuring businesses are well placed in the local listings. Having a number of quality citations is key and ensuring that each part of your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) is consistent throughout those citation sources is also highly important.

So, as it has become more challenging to organically rank for local phrases… and as local listings have become even more important due to instant search functions on phones and tablets… Local SEO is more important than ever.

Tune in and learn:

➨ What is Local SEO?
➨ What are the most important signals that boost local SEO rankings?
➨ What are some of the tools out there for checking / fixing citations and increasing the quantity of them
➨ Is the location of a business in relation to the center of a city important?
➨ Is Local SEO an ongoing process or is it a one-off activity?
➨ Useful Local SEO tools and resources.

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