Welcome to the first in a very long series of 2 Minute Tuesday podcasts that focus not on SEO but LOCAL SEO. Let me clarify that – each post (technically they are a podcast) is still going to be 2 minutes long, there’s just going to be a lot of them!
IMPORTANT REMINDER: While we’re talking about all of these ideas, keep in mind that we’re looking at things through Google’s eyes – not necessarily a human’s eyes. I talk often about the tug of war we have between writing and designing for humans vs doing the same for Google. While I still advocate your writing strictly for humans, this series has little to do with the writing on your posts and pages. Cool?
WHY LOCAL SEO?
My site is focused on a few key words and phrases that I want to rank for globally. I work globally and build custom websites for people all over the world, but I’ll bet you are different. Most of the sites I build for clients these days have a local business platform. That might be a real estate site, a gym or spin class, or I recently built a site that rents portable imaging staff and machines to surgeons. All are excellent examples where they should want to focus not on global SEO but LOCAL SEO. It doesn’t matter if your Spin Studio ranks great in Florida while your only location is here in California – right? That’s why local SEO is more important.
WHAT IS NAP?
NAP is an acronym for Name, Address and Phone. Pretty simple, right? Don’t worry, we’ll get more complicated down the road. The idea is that you want to make sure you have your NAP on all of your pages and most importantly the three that naturally get the most traffic – your Home Page, your About Page, and your Contact Us page.
Right now you’re thinking…
“I have a WordPress based site and the Footer section shows up in all the pages.
I’ll just put my NAP in there and I’m done! VIOLA!”
Remember smarty pants, we’re not talking for humans, we’re talking about what works best for The Google and when The Google sees your site they do see that the footer is part of the page but a separate part of the page. So in the interest of doing it Local SEO better, let’s manually put the NAP on all three of those pages AND have it in the footer as well.
Along those lines, the higher up on a page the better for SEO in general. Google tends to give a lower value to things the further they are down the page.
Follow the entire Local SEO Series:
This series has the potential of being huge! (like 50 posts huge) You can follow along in two different ways. The first would be by clicking or bookmarking this tag: 2MTLOCALSEO That will load an archive page with all the posts as we go. A better, or additional way would be to subscribe to the newsletter. This way, each of the posts will be delivered straight to your inbox each week.
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Weird Factoid: Like I mentioned I don’t care diddly about Local SEO for this site but I did do everything in my power to help this post rank higher for “local SEO” on a global scale – because my clients are not local, they are global.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez and freestocks.org on Unsplash
Mike Mueller
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and wants a really small one). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
Latest posts by Mike Mueller (see all)
- Local SEO Ep4: Consistency - November 12, 2019
- Local SEO Ep3: Your Footer - November 5, 2019
- Local SEO Ep2: Your Phone Number - October 29, 2019