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How to rank high in Google Searches – Citations

Citations are mentions of your business on the web and usually include your business name, address, phone number and URL.  There are thousands of places a citation can be found on the web – websites, online directories, data aggregators’ sites, and blogs.  Citations may also be found on chamber of commerce pages, Better Business Bureau, or local business association pages.  Citations are an important element of ranking algorithms.

 

High quality citations are viewed by many experts to be one of the top, if not the #1, ranking factors for local SEO.  The more citations you have on relevant and authoritative directories and sites, the better you will rank in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), if your information is consistent.

 

Google My Business, Yelp and Yellow Pages are well known directories.  There are also locally focused directories (such as Yahoo Local, Citysearch) and industry-focused directories.

 

Search engines look for consistency of information across the directories.  If your business’ information is consistent across the directories, website, etc., the search engine will rank your business higher in the SERPs than one that isn’t.  If there is conflicting information, the search engine is less likely rank it high in the SERPs.

 

Imagine you are Google. Your business is to provide relevant search results to your searchers.  Your algorithm finds conflicting information about a business address, phone number or URL in different directories.  How would you determine which information is correct?  Which information do you trust to be accurate?  Rather than showing incorrect information that could lead a searcher to an incorrect address, you would choose not to show information about that business.

 

Search engines reward businesses that ensure their information is consistent and accurate with higher rankings on SERPs.  Search relevance is critical to the success of a search engine.  Searchers are not happy when search results are not relevant to their search and will stop using that service.  Which is bad for the search engine.

 

Information about your business can be corrected and managed the on the web through citation management.  This involves reviewing information frequently on each business directory and ensuring it is correct and consistent.  If it isn’t correct and consistent, you must correct the information, making it consistent across the various directories and websites.  This requires contacting each directory or website that has erroneous information, claiming the listing and then supplying the correct information.  This is time consuming and tedious work.

 

How does inconsistent information get out to the directories?  Data aggregators and some directories pull information from public records, phone books, banking and phone records, and business registration entities.  This information is then licensed to local search engines and other directories.  Because the information is pulled from various sources, the information may not always be consistent when submitted by businesses.

In summary:

  • Citations are mentions of your company on the internet on websites, directories and blogs;
  • Consistent accurate citations are a critical component of Search Engine Result Page (SERPs) rankings;
  • Search engines reward consistent citations with higher SERP rankings.

If you don’t have the time, expertise or experience to do citation management, Infuseo uses proprietary software and expertise to do this for you.

Call 801-999-0867 x100 today or complete the following form to get your free citation analysis.

Fields marked with a * are required.

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Proven Fundamentals Over Cheap Tricks

There are a myriad of opportunities to promote a business online. The challenge is finding those that maximize benefits at the lowest cost. Many businesses struggle by chasing expensive or risky gimmicks while neglecting to execute on the basics.

Proven SEM (search engine marketing) Fundamentals

For a business that caters to a local customer base, the most fundamental and important internet marketing disciplines are without a doubt On-page Website Optimization, and Local SEO (search engine optimization). In addition to these, pay-per-click advertising can be an effective form of SEM. These fundamentals are the place to start for all local businesses, and most will have no need to look further to achieve their internet marketing objectives within their marketing budgets.

Cheap Tricks

Some search engine marketers (if I can call them that), employ tactics that are intended to trick search engines and expose temporary loopholes in order to achieve improved rankings for their clients. I am amazed to see supposedly reputable internet marketing firms still using these types of manipulative SEO tactics. I suppose they do so because their objective is to grab as much money as they can from their customers as fast as they can, and they are not concerned with the long-term success of their customers. I say this because these marketers know that such tactics will eventually be recognized by search engines, at which time, any temporary benefits will be lost. In addition, heavy ranking penalties which have long-term, damaging effects on their clients’ websites may be assessed.

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The Importance of Positive Customer Reviews

Realizing how important customer sentiment is to searchers, business directories often incorporate customer reviews into their websites. We encourage all of our clients to be in the habit of asking satisfied customers to leave them a positive review on their Google Plus Local page for a few important reasons. They improve conversion rates, rankings, and they offset the potential negative reviews have to harm your business.

Positive Reviews Improve Conversion Rates

customer-reviews

Take a look at the screen capture of some Google search results to the right. If you were the searcher, who would you call first? In this case, the business listed in 3rd place immediately wins the lion’s share of attention, despite the fact that they are two spots below the top result. Now, imagine if this business had 7 Google reviews with an average rating of one star instead of five.

The point here is that reviews are powerful — even more powerful than rankings within reason. If you have more positive reviews than your competitors, you will get a larger piece of the pie.

Positive Reviews Improve Rankings

In addition to increasing conversion rates, the quantity and quality of your business’ reviews contributes to your businesses overall relevance, as viewed by search engines. The more positive reviews you have, the more you’re helping your search engine optimization services to work for you.

Positive Reviews Offset Negative Reviews

By making your business as visible as possible on the internet, we open the doors of opportunity for more customers to find you. And, as discussed above, positive customer reviews being visible to potential customers can have a dramatic impact on the business you get from the internet. On the other hand, this increased visibility also gives any dissatisfied customers a captive audience to share any negative experiences they have had with your company.

Whether you like it or not, reviews are your potential customers’ most reliable means of evaluating the quality of your products or services on the internet. I say, “whether you like it or not”, because customer reviews suffer from some major shortfalls — the biggest being that unless you are soliciting positive reviews from satisfied customers, dissatisfied customers are the most likely people to voice their opinion about your business. For this reason, the only winning strategy for a business on the internet is to be in the habit of always asking satisfied customers to leave you a positive review.

Potential customers understand that every once in a while, a customer will be unsatisfied. If they see that positive reviews overwhelmingly outnumber any negatives, they won’t be overly affected by the negative ones. In addition, some platforms, such as Google Plus Local, allow business owners to publish a public response to any negative review. In this way, you can show your customers that you genuinely care about each customer’s satisfaction.

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Dangers of Changing Your Name, Address, Phone, or URL

NAPU – Your Business’ Online Fingerprint

vector-fingerprintIn order for search engines to compare businesses and determine which deserve to rank highest for each search, they have to have a reliable way to identify when and where each business is referenced on the internet. It’s easy for them to identify your website by its URL (domain name), but how can they tell when your business is mentioned on a website if the URL is not present?

Your business’ name is only somewhat reliable, because different business units can all share the same name. Your business’ address is a little more reliable, but not entirely; because there is always the possibility that some other business has resided there in the past. Your business’ phone number is even more reliable, but still not perfect. For these reasons, search engines have to consider a combination of these identifiers in order to identify your business. In the world of local SEO (search engine optimization), a business’ identity is commonly referred to as its NAP (name, address, and phone number). We refer to it as a businesses NAPU (name, address, phone, and URL).

Why You Should Avoid Changing Your NAPU Like The Plague

One very critical component of a successful local SEO strategy is to ensure that, when your business is mentioned on the internet, it is always mentioned accurately and consistently. Search engines like to see that your business is mentioned on the internet, but they simply can’t attribute a mention to your business if it’s not clear that it is in fact your business that is being mentioned. In addition, search engines penalize businesses that seem to have multiple personalities or identities on the internet. Simply put, search engines reward businesses for having a predictable and consistent identity, and in some ways, customers in the real world do too.

This reality expresses itself perhaps most painfully when a business that has a large number of positive reviews on its Google Plus Local page moves to a new location. The policy of Google is that once your business moves, it is an entirely different “business”. They require that your old Google Plus Local page is marked as “closed”, and all of your customer reviews are stuck with it. You have to create a new Google Plus Local page and begin from scratch acquiring customer reviews.

When a business with an established internet presence changes its name, address, phone number, or URL, it has changed its identity or fingerprint. Search engines can’t attribute the same relevance to it, because they know nothing about it. They only know a lot about the old it… Changing a businesses identity online almost always is accompanied with a reduction in rankings and exposure. In some cases, recovery is fairly speedy, and in others it is long, painful, and drawn out. For this reason, from an SEO perspective, we encourage our clients to change a part of their identity only when it is absolutely unavoidable.

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The Tracking Limitations Inherent to Local SEO

Local SEO (search engine optimization) professionals have long wished for more effective ways to measure the effects of their efforts.  Most notably, unlike some other forms of SEM (search engine marketing) and offline mediums, we cannot use tracking telephone numbers or URLs. Additionally, we cannot account accurately for customer walk-ins. These restrictions are inherent to the very nature of the discipline of local SEO. Fortunately, there are some very visible and meaningful indicators we can monitor, such as rankings for Google searches. Below, I detail the nature of the inherent restrictions mentioned above.

Tracking Telephone Numbers & URLs

trackingAs described in our post, Dangers of Changing Your Name, Address, Phone, or URL, search engines use the combination of a businesses name, address, phone number, and URL (NAPU) to know when a business is mentioned on the internet. And, any inconsistencies in a businesses NAPU lead to reduced relevance and rankings. For this reason, swapping out a business’ regular phone number for a tracking telephone number anywhere on the internet is detrimental. The same goes for tracking URLs. And, because of the way websites share information with each other, one seemingly-innocent tracking number or URL on just one website can quickly turn into a large number of conflicting mentions about a business. For this reason, we cannot use tracking telephone numbers or URLs to track leads resulting from local SEO. In addition, we require that our clients do not permit any other party to use tracking telephone numbers or URLs to monitor phone calls for their business online.

Customer Walk-ins

Another challenge when attempting to measure the benefits of local SEO is that, by nature, good local SEO promotes your business location. For industries that commonly service their customers on location, this is less of a concern; but for businesses that commonly service customers from a brick-and-mortar location, there is no accurate way to measure how many walk-in customers result from SEO or SEM (search engine marketing). We encourage our customers to be in the habit of asking their customers how they found them, which can help.

Company Profile

Located near the base of the Rocky Mountains in Sandy, Utah, INFUSEO’s staff enjoys instant access to the wide variety of outdoor experiences. The company benefits from being situated in one of the most technologically-focused and business-friendly areas of the country.

As is the case with most great companies, ours was born out of frustration as our founder… Read More...

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