A Review Strategy for Local SEO

Written by Marcus Miller on June 3, 2013. Posted in Blog, small business seo

Once you have a consistent name and address, have optimised your site for local traffic and have got a series of high quality citations in all the right places then sooner or later you need to think about getting reviews on various online portals starting with your Google+ Local page.

Now, reviews are important for local SEO but they are also different to the other elements in your marketing in that they are not directly under your control and to get good reviews you have to ask for them.

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WordPress Database & WidgetKit – Problems & Solutions

Written by Marcus Miller on June 1, 2013. Posted in WordPress

I broke one of my own golden rules yesterday and launched a new website for a long term client on a Friday afternoon.

Of course, doing this on a Friday, everything went horribly wrong just to remind me why I created the rule to never make any kind of technical changes to anything on a Friday afternoon.

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The Importance of Reviews for Local SEO

Written by Marcus Miller on May 28, 2013. Posted in Blog, SEO, small business seo

How important are reviews for small business and local SEO? Pretty important it would seem and there are plenty of folks out there in Googleland that will tell you this. But, what is somewhat harder to find out is why they are important? What is it about reviews that is important for local search rankings and? The remainder of this post will take a look at what it is that makes reviews important for Local SEO so you can use that knowledge to improve your own local rankings.

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The Most Important Part of SEO – Organisation

Written by Marcus Miller on May 24, 2013. Posted in Blog, SEO, small business seo

The most important part of SEO? Organisation? No, surely not. Organisation? Boring!

Show me links from .org sites; give me citations from Yell.com; show me some 301 redirects from expired domains; expired, well linked domains relaunched as microsites with some new content on them and some outbound links  – do anything, but just keep those ‘strategies’ coming fast and furious and whatever you do, keep it edgy and interesting. I want to here what you have planned and go ‘ooooohhhh’.

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Find Your Competitors Best Citations

Written by Marcus Miller on May 22, 2013. Posted in Blog, small business seo

One of the most important aspects of local SEO is building high quality citations and there are some UK usual suspects but sooner or later you will get to the point where you need to take a look at what your top competitors are doing so you can further refine your approach.

To do this we can use some advanced search queries (that are really pretty simple) and find out what structured and unstructured citations the top players are using and importantly what they are doing with them.

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The Best UK Citation Sites for Local SEO

Written by Marcus Miller on May 21, 2013. Posted in Blog, small business seo

Once people have understood what a citation is in relation to local SEO then the next question we hear is ‘what are the best UK citation sites?’.

Well, if you Google around you will find plenty of folks giving their opinions but the fact of the matter is that Google removed visibility of external citations from Google Places listings in June 2011 so no one (outside of Google) knows which citations are best for Local SEO in the UK or anywhere else for that matter.

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Penguin Cometh – SEO Crackdown in 2013 & Beyond

Written by Marcus Miller on May 20, 2013. Posted in Blog, SEO

Matt Cutts, the spam tzar from Google has just released a new video detailing what webmasters can look forward to in the world of SEO in the coming months.

Unsurprisingly, a large part of this is the continued crackdown on low quality and manipulative SEO practices intended to artificially inflate a sites position and visibility in Google search and a push to drive quality of results ever upwards – as that is what keeps us all using Google right? 

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Quality not Quantity – Small Business SEO Citations

Written by Marcus Miller on May 17, 2013. Posted in Blog, SEO, small business seo

If there is one fundamental mistake that people make with SEO, and this is extends from lone rangers to business owners right through to SEO agencies it is always concentrating on volume. More (crappy) links, more (crappy) citations, more (crappy) content. More, more, more is better, better, better – right?

Well, you know, bigger is not always better (or so I tell my wife) and quantity is not going to win out over quality in more competitive spaces. I have seen estimates that total citations accounts for around 25% of the local rank so whilst they are certainly important, getting them right and concentrating on that quality is also an equally important and often overlooked factor where you can get a leg up on the competition.

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Name Address Phone number – NAP

Written by Marcus Miller on May 16, 2013. Posted in Blog, small business seo

Local SEO is not difficult but it does require that you pay attention to the details and getting your name, address and phone number (NAP) correctly formatted and consistent across all of your citations is one of the areas where you really do have to pay attention to detail.

There are plenty of posts out there about how to do this for a US business but not so many for those of us in the UK so rest of this post will take a quick look at first getting your NAP correctly formatted.

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Types of Citations for SEO

Written by Marcus Miller on May 15, 2013. Posted in Blog, SEO

In our previous post we took a look at what citations are and how they are important for SEO, today we are looking at the main different types of citations that you can use to help raise the visibility of your site in the local and organic search results.

Not all Citations are Created Equal

To very quickly recap a citation is the mentioning of a businesses name in close proximity to it’s address and phone number (and ideally website URL). This is known as the NAP – Name, Address & Phone number (not the nice kind where you doze off with a book after a big lunch).

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