Local Business SEO tutorial Page 3
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Now, the B of CCB | Backlinks | Part 10
B stands for BACKLINKS. A backlink is when a 3rd party website links back to you. Why is this important? The short answer is a backlink is like a “vote”. When a 3rd party website has a link to your website, it is like they are voting for you. What differs in SEO is not all votes count, not all votes are equal, and not all votes are good. First, let’s talk about good votes / good backlinks.
What is a good backlink?
Google, and other search engines, use backlinks as a way to find, qualify and validate your website. If a large authority website that Google likes links to you, then you get a little more credibility within your niche. The more relevant and quality sites link to you, the more your credibility and relevance goes up, as does your ranking in the search engines.
One of the easiest and important backlinks you can get is from Google themselves. How? Once you have a website ready for public viewing, create a Google My Business (Google Map Listing) and be sure to add your domain in the WEBSITE field. Then, take the time to VALIDATE your GMB profile. You validate your listing by entering a code Google sent via post card. When you enter the code from the post card sent to your related business address, your GMB is “validated”. The real world act of validating your listing instantly validates the link from your GMB profile to your website. For local business owners this is a 100% MUST DO.
After creating a GMB, be sure to then create additional back links by creating business profiles in the major social media sites. Small business owners should have profiles in the following social media platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. Twitter is also good, but the top 4 plus GMB are enough for a small business to keep up with. Of course, there may be others more relevant based on your business. For example a home decore company should invest time in a Pinterest profile over a Twitter profile. A sporting goods store might prioritize Twitter over a Pinterest. A computer store might prioritize Reddit over Instagram. When choosing which social media platforms to have, ask yourself this.
“Do my customers use this social media platform?”
SEO Note
Backlinks from social sites do not count the same as links from authority sites like a .edu or .gov sites, however they do increase citations, brand awareness and can lead to a true authority sites linking to you. Ultimately, you need HUMANS to visit your local business website and make a purchase, not Google. Always keep that in mind.
What is a BAD backlink?
Unlike voting in a real world election, you can get “bad” votes, bad backlinks. For example. If you sell shoes, and some random farming website links you, this could negatively effect you. Additionally, there are many bad actors promising 1000’s of backlinks quickly. Avoid those like the plague.
SEO Backlink summary
A “good” backlink is when a relevant and authoritative 3rd party website links back to your website.
Putting SEO CCB into practice
Putting CCB for SEO into practice - Best Local SEO CMS - Duda Part 11
Now that you understand what CCB is, let’s put it into practice and optimize one page of a website, which uses Duda.co.
What is Duda.co ?
Duda is a very good hosted content management system (CMS) which produces very good SEO results for local businesses. As the website owner, you do not have to worry about updates or coding. The CMS is clean, relatively intuitive and easy to use. Even the basic package website comes with ssl, mobile friendly templates, forms, SEF, schema options, open graph and a XML site map. The only thing local business owners need to do is add their SEO content.
Besides Duda what other SEO Web Builders and CMS are there?
Though there are many Website Builders / CMS systems available such as Joomla, Wix, Godaddy, Shopify, etc, the most popular is Wordpress (WP). However, we don’t actually recommend WP or any of the others, for small business owners, unless you have an expert to help you. To use WordPress successfully, and others, you need to add a variety of plugins to make them perfectly SEO and additional plugins for forms, schema, etc. WordPress itself has frequent updates. All the plugins used also have to be updated. Wordpress updates often lead to broken sites. Failing to keep your WP site updated, or other platforms, can lead to hacks. Both are bad for your SEO and BUSINESS. In our experience, local business owners do not have the time or expertise to keep the site updated and functioning properly.
So, for this tutorial, we will use Duda.co (Yes, .CO not .COM).
Before we get started with Duda and implementing CCB for our SEO, let’s gather our prime keywords.
Choosing keywords for your local website
Every business needs to know what keywords they should optimize for. Choosing the right keywords will help Google and Humans find you. In our example, we are going to optimize a martial arts school in Dallas TX (TKA Dojo). There are many paid services and keyword research tools available to identify the prime keywords. However, we recommend you start with Google. Visit Google, search a phrase you think is important and relevant to your customers. As you do, Google makes suggestions. Google makes those suggestions based on what people have searched in the past and are currently popular. If you are optimizing primarily for Google, it's a good idea to trust what Google says are the most popular search phrases and keywords.
Choose one, and then scroll to the bottom of the Google search result page. At the bottom of the page, there are additional related searches.
Copy and paste those search phrases into a Google spreadsheet or other document you can refer back to.
Additionally, check Google Trends. It is free and will tell you what words and phrases are popular and “trending”. Be sure to use synonyms when compiling your lists.
Using Adwords to choose keywords
If you have a Google Adwords account, you can get even more information about keywords. We do, so we are going to include that data set to help us make decisions.
Tip: When using Google Adwords to research keywords, there is an option to set region. We strongly encourage this. Use the "region" function often show different results.
Note: As a local business owner, you really should have a Google Adwords account. It's free to set up and you'll also be able to use it to promote your business and see instant results. *You have to be a paid advertiser to see detailed search volume.
The above shows that SELF DEFENSE class is the most popular term, while Martial Arts Class, is the lowest searched term. However, “martial arts near me” is the most popular related term. Though some people include “near me” in their titles and descriptions, we prefer to use GEO specific terms, schema markup (which we will discuss later) and Google Maps to help Google know if a website is “near me”.
Another way to know which keywords are most relevant, is to look at the actual search results in Google. In this example we learn a few things. We searched “karate class Dallas”.
We learned the number one site for the search phrase “Karate Class Dallas” actually optimized for “Dallas Martial Arts : Home”. Technically, that is not great “seo”. They are probably number one for the following reasons:
- The site in question launched in 2011.
- Has a good quality backlinks (188 from 48 domains)
- Has a ton of reviews (33 five star in Google Maps)
- Their domain name includes the words “martial arts” and “Dallas”. (Dallas-martialarts.com).
- They did optimize for “martial arts” which is a synonym for karate.
- The did optimize for the geo specific term: Dallas
That is VERY curious as it is a poorly optimized title according to standard best practices of SEO. It shows that Google understands synonyms. What it also tells us, and this is IMPORTANT, that Google considers “Martial Arts” a very important phrase. It should be included if possible in the home page title and description. However, the next top site does include “karate classes” in the title as do number 3 and number 5. However, the 2nd site does NOT reference martial arts in the title or meta description.
- We learned that our competitors used the plural form “classes” in their titles. No one used the singular “class”.
- We learned that our competitors who included geo keywords used “Dallas, TX” vs “Dallas Texas”.
- We learned that almost all of the top sites shown use “martial arts”, “karate”, “Classes” and “Dallas, TX in their descriptions.
Given the above, we have discovered that our primary keywords are: Martial arts, Karate, Classes, Dallas TX. We will be using these terms through out the the website. Now, let's write a HTML title and description for our home page.
*This process of choosing keywords should be applied to EVERY public page of your website. Whether it is a service page, product page, contact page, blog post, etc., if Google can find it, then time and consideration should be used to choose the right keywords.
*When creating content, it is often advisable to choose some target keywords BEFORE you create. Knowing the keywords your are striving to get exposure and traffic for will influence the content you make.
*In all your decisions about what keywords to choose, remember you have two audiences: Google Bot and HUMANS.
*Choosing keywords is half ART half SCIENCE.
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