Feb
16
No Shortcuts in Google Places and Local SEO
In the first week of February, a well known search engine optimization company announced it was launching a local paid inclusion service. News of this announcement spread like wildfire throughout the search marketing community, in part because nobody could believe the major search engines would offer paid-inclusion in what was considered a free listings space, and in part because nobody could believe this SEO firm of good repute would participate in such a scheme.
Setting aside the politics, the incident made me think. Why was news of an announcement like this able to get such traction among local search marketing professionals? If the announced service was for paid inclusion in the traditional organic listings, would search marketers believe it to be a plausible idea? Last weeks’ events demonstrate there is still an atmosphere of confusion and misunderstanding when it comes to local search listings, local SEO, and in particular, surrounding Google Places.
For the past two years, localization and personalization of search engine results has been a priority for Google. Why then are local search listings and Google Places SEO still so misunderstood that a shortcut like “local paid inclusion” was, by some, considered a real possibility? As there is no magical one-push button solution for achieving strong local search rankings, SEO’s and business owners will need to continue earning top rankings the old fashion way, through hard work and diligence.
There are no shortcuts in local search listing and Google Places SEO. There are however a number of steps and tools a SEO can use to make the process of earning local search rankings less tedious, repetitive and time consuming.
The local search and Google Places SEO process is still very manually intensive, primarily due to the necessary evil of Citation building. Citation building is a very important signal point in determining great local search rankings. Most local SEO’s need better tools to make the citation building process less manually intensive and repetitive. One of the most important time saving tips in local search engine optimization is to find ways to save time in creating and tracking citations.
In its purest form, a Citation is the mention of a business’ name, address and phone number. A citation can be considered the equivalent of a backlink for the local businesses physical location. In some instances you can create an enhanced citation or local business profile by including information such as: a description, photos, videos and your website URL.
I speak with at least 2 dozen local SEO specialists per week. Most give the same feedback regarding the difficulties of building and monitoring citations on directories and Internet Yellow Pages type websites. They need a less manually intensive process to build citations and monitor their publishing and indexation.
What tools can SEOs use to make lighter work of the heavy lifting?
Here is a list of tools that I have seen that give SEOs a competitive advantage when managing the citation building process. I have created 6 separate tasks for citation building and identified the tools that can help with each specific task. Note: I am not providing reviews or opinions on any of the tools, (FULL DISCLOSURE: I am the CEO of Get Me Listed.) You can make the decision for yourself.
#1. Citation Discovery:
Identify new potential authoritative citations sources that the competition is using to outrank you:
- Bright Local
- Get Me Listed
- Whitespark
#2. Citation Building:
Publishing your business data to all associated directories, websites and authoritative citations:
- Yext (publishes to approximately 31 sources)
- Data aggregators (they may publish directly to the websites):
- Info USA express update
- Localeze
- UBL.org
#3. Citation Monitoring (on specific websites):
Identifying when your data has been updated or published on a particular website or directory:
- Bright Local
- Get Me Listed
- Search.UBL.org
- Yext
#4. Citation Monitoring (indexed on engines):
Identifying when the search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) have indexed your citations:
- Bright Local
- Get Me Listed
- Whitespark
#5. Citation Reporting:
Compiling citation data into client reports:
- Bright Local
- Get Me Listed
- UBL.org
- Whitespark
- Yext
I hope that these tools can make your Citation building experience a little less painful and time consuming. Like links are to traditional organic search, citations are the real goal with which we earn strong local search engine listings. As for a paid inclusion method for gaining local search listings, as I mentioned before, there are no shortcuts getting to the top of the local pack.
Stay tuned, next we will explore the tactics behind building a successful citation campaign.
