Category Archives for Enterprise SEO

SEO Basics: Local SEO for Multiple Locations

A recent article on HubSpot shared a few statistics about local SEO.

  • 78% of local-mobile searches result in offline purchases.
  • 50% of consumers visit a store within a day of performing a local search on their smartphone.

Those are interesting statistics. It shows that while people look for and research products online, they will then go the physical store itself to purchase what they want.  This sharply illustrates how important it is for every store in a city to have a fully-optimized and easy-to-find website.

The final two stats we’ll share are these:

  • 50% of local-mobile searchers want to know specific business information such as its opening and closing hours.
  • 71% of local-mobile users look up and confirm the business’s location before they visit it for the first time.

In order to reach every potential customer you can, it’s essential to have a website that can be found during local search, so that your customers can check everything from the basics of your address and when you’re open, to finding out what types of products you offer and read descriptions of them – and reviews.

But what if you have stores in different areas of the same city, or out in the suburbs of that city? How can you perform local SEO for multiple locations, to ensure that your site ranks in multiple cities?

We’ll share a few tips with you below. Ranking through multi-location SEO requires that your website be designed to showcase each of your different locations.

Multi-page Websites Are Essential for Multi-Location SEO

As shown in the bullet points above, most users “on the go” use their smart phones to find stores that carry what they want, and to find out where they are located and when they open or close. So, most websites these days are designed to be smartphone friendly – meaning everything is on a single page and the user simply has to scroll down from screen to screen on their phone.

But having only a single page website makes that site very difficult to rank for keywords, so it’s better to have a multi-page site, each page ranked for different keywords.

So, if you have a couple of restaurants, one in Downtown City by the Bay and the other in Lower City by the Bay, you should create a page for each restaurant, with the appropriate information as to location, where to park, what’s nearby and so on. Even if the menu is the same at each restaurant, your longtail keywords will differ – “best ribs in Downtown City by the Bay” will result in the Downtown location being returned first in the search engine results, whereas “best barbecue chicken in Lower City by the Bay” will bring up the page for your other location.

Note that creating separate pages on your main site is better than creating a separate website entirely for each location. By keeping everything to one site, you increase the power of your backlinks since you don’t have to duplicate your SEO for multiple locations efforts.

Add a Google Map to Each Location Page

 In its never-ending effort to remain the top, number #1 search engine in the world, Google offers many free webmaster tools for use by businesses large and small. Using their tools will help build your site’s ranking on Google. This includes placing a Google Map for each location on the appropriate page of your site.

 Seek out Local Directories

Most cities will have local directories not only for the city as a whole, but also for its neighborhoods and suburbs. By placing a listing for each of your locations in the appropriate local directories, you’ll build backlinks back to your site and also provide your potential customers with the information they need to find you.

Many directories have a feature enabling the owner of the store/restaurant featured to “claim” their listing and add additional information to it. When adding or correcting information to local directories, be sure that each listing has the correct NAP – name, address and phone number for leach location.

Provide Quality Content on Each Page

The better your website is at providing valuable information for your potential customers or clients, the better it will be ranked by Google. Google’s searchbot actually has the capability of grading a site’s content according to its own criteria.

By combining all these elements in a systematic fashion, local SEO for multiple locations delivers the results every business wants – more opportunities to drive more customers to your business and give a positive impact to your bottom line.

E-commerce 101: What You Need to Know

E-commerce SEO, sometimes called Shop SEO, is a specialized form of SEO that deals specifically with online storefronts (or shops).

Why Optimize for E-commerce Sites?

Currently, E-commerce has a 10% market share of retail sales in the United States, but this market is expected to increase every year. Amazon is currently the industry leader, followed by such big box stores as Target and Walmart that have embraced the online storefront as well.

Competition in the E-commerce realm is therefore fierce, which makes top quality E-commerce SEO essential. While much of the SEO that can be implemented for E-commerce sites is the same as for any other type of site, there are many essential requirements Google has put in place specifically for this niche.

Let’s talk about a few of these elements.

  1. Technical SEO

Technical SEO, an element of on-page SEO, refers to optimizing the coding of a website, rather than its content. Poor coding will impact the site’s rankings.

Take site speed, for one example.  According to research, most people will “bounce” from a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load on their device. If that’s not bad enough, Google’s web crawlers can detect how long a page takes to load, and will penalize it if it takes too long. This is a special problem for E-commerce sites, which tend to be very image heavy. Images should be resized before being uploaded to the site.

Another essential element for E-commerce sites is that every page be secure, so a security certificate should be purchased (designated by https://, rather than http://, in the URL). Not only is this safer for the businesses’ customers, but Google penalizes sites that don’t have such security in place.

 

  1. On Page SEO/ Blog

On page SEO – focusing on quality content – is especially important for E-commerce sites. Typically, the only text an E-commerce site has on its category pages is captions for each product photo. That’s why it’s important for each photo to be optimized via its name, alt text and description. No opportunity should be lost to place keywords on each page. If possible, clicking on a photo on the category page should take the user to a specific page for that product, where keyword-rich text describing the product can be used.

Search engines also reward fresh content. An integrated blog on a site, with regular, keyword-rich entries, provides the content that search engines like, but also helps build brand loyalty with customers who will appreciate the entries.

 

  1. Keywords Research and Implementation

Long-tailed keywords are essential for E-commerce SEO success. For example, a car enthusiast who needs new items for his or her classic car will not do a search on “car rims.” It is far more likely that they will search for “black rims for muscle cars,” or “chrome Mustang emblems” or “1954 Chevy quarter panel.” People who do a search on exactly what they want, which is why they use such long phrases, are far more likely to convert from a visitor to a purchaser on their first visit.

Choosing the right keywords is extremely important when the E-commerce site is in a very competitive niche. That’s why researching one’s competitor’s keywords is a good idea. Keywords must be relevant to the business. It does no good to “trick” someone to come to an E-commerce site by following a specific keyword, only to find that the site is not what they thought it would be.

By paying attention to these three elements, E-commerce SEO helps ensure that sites are rewarded by search engines with high rankings, and by converting visitors to customers.

website design and development

What Are the Ins and Outs of Enterprise SEO?

When you’re trying to improve your search engine rankings, one of the terms you may hear bandied about is enterprise SEO. Referring to search engine optimization across an entire business, enterprise SEO has some of its own rules and guidelines. Here’s a quick look at some of the overarching factors involved when you’re setting up an enterprise SEO strategy.

The Ins and Outs of Enterprise SEO

Enterprise SEO has very little to do with the size of your company as much as the size of your website. There are four specific areas to keep in mind, especially if you think that your website will grow to a significant size as time rolls on.

  1. Smart Keyword Use: As you get further into your categories, you should continue using keywords that help not only reach that specific product or service, but that will lead consumers down a specific path to that page. To accomplish this, you’ll want to look for long-tail keywords that are highly relative to your products and services. These keywords should be reflected in your page title tags.
  2. Rules for Site Automation: By being organized in your keywords, you can create better automation for the creation of new pages, making the process much easier than it would be otherwise. This allows you to take advantage of some of the webpage automation tools, because you can set up the basic rules once and let the software create titles, tags and similar SEO-friendly content.
  3. Optimized Page Templates: Let’s face it – every webpage on a good website has some degree of similarity. The banner, the bottom content, the background: by having all of this information available in a template, it becomes much easier to continue growing your website effectively and efficiently, including the tags you want to be indexed.
  4. Exceptional Content Quality: If you have the largest, most otherwise SEO-perfect website and your content is of poor quality, why bother? You need to make sure that the information going into your website is of the highest possible quality. Take the time to double-check your website content.

Contact SEO Experts in Atlanta

By taking these considerations in mind when you’re working out your overall enterprise SEO strategy, you can make the most of your efforts to improve your business’ search engine rankings. But what if you’re not quite sure where to start? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. That’s why the Atlanta SEO Company is here for you. Please feel free to reach out today to discover where your business can go.

 

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