Local SEO – Small and Medium Business Focus
Local search is increasingly important for businesses and their online reputations. Become a trusted local business in your market and learn how to increase customer engagement through this session.
11. What Did Hummingbird Do?
• Affected 90% of searches
worldwide
• Hummingbird allows the
Google search engine to
better do its job through an
improvement in semantic
search.
12.
13. • How to better understand the
user and their intent of what
they are searching for.
Semantic Search
14. As conversational search becomes
the norm, Hummingbird lends to
understanding to the intent of
terms used in a query.
22. What is it?
• Along with standard search results
for their query, the user will also
get a live scrolling feed of public
Google+ posts bearing the
hashtag searched for and links to
those hashtag feeds on Twitter and
Facebook.
29. “Content marketing will move
from buzzword to mature
marketing movement in 2014.
From an SEO perspective, Google
will be looking at companies that
have robust content marketing
efforts as a sign that they're the
kind of business Google wants to
support.”
~Jayson DeMers
Search Engine Watch
30. Advantages of a Good
Content Marketing Strategy
• Regular, helpful content targeted at your
audience.
• Social signals from regular sharing and
engagement.
• Freshness or signs that your site is alive and
growing.
• Increasing authority connected to your
body of work.
33. Keyword Strategy
• Where do the people live
that you’re trying to target?
• Build out keyword list (10-20)
• Core keywords + location
34. Health Insurance +
Location
• Focus on brand
Florida Blue Center Tampa
Florida Blue Center Jacksonville
• Focus on non-brand
Health insurance Tampa
Health insurance Jacksonville
39. Content Calendar
• Title of content (add location)
• Keywords (Geo-focused)
• Platform (social, web, blog,
podcast…)
• Audience
• Date
40. Build Out Content
• Build out valuable content utilizing
those keywords
• Types of content
• Web pages
• Blogs
• Whitepapers
• Video
• Presentations (Slideshare)
• Podcasts
Today I am going to talk about how to geo target you content marketing efforts to yield better search results,
My name is Victoria Edwards and I work for Florida Blue as their Digital Marketing Strategist. I am in charge of content creation, management and optimization for their English and Spanish blogs. I also help build out content on their main website not only to attract the consumer, but to attract the search engines
This is where you can find me on the interwebs
When I am not working for Florida Blue, I blog for various publications and also speak at various conferences.
Here is an overview of what I will be talking about today, so let’s get started!
2013 was a very busy year for SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media
A lot happened last year, but the 3 things that I will cover are a brief background into algorithm updates, what changed with search for marketers and one social media update, which was hashtag search.
In 2013, there were no fewer than 15 noteworthy algorithm changes in addition to several minor updates. Noteworthy is the key, however, Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times. While most of these changes are minor, Google occasionally rolls out a "major" algorithmic update (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin) that affects search results in significant ways
There were various updates to Google’s existing panda and penguin algorithms.
Just to give you some background, the original Panda update was released in 2011, which was a content quality filter. The update lowered the rank of low quality sites.
The next one was Penguin which happened in 2012. A year later, we saw the Penguin update, which targeted suspicious links, such as paid links or the use of link networks. Thousands of domains were hit by these tweaks.
In 2013 Penguin and Panda had their own unique updates along with another big update in 2013.
This was Hummingbird and was one of the bigger ones.
People were curious how big this update was. The best way I read was think of it as a 1950’s car, removing the old engine and replacing it with a new one.
As people start to search the web as a conversation, Google tries to learn what your intent is to better serve you up content that you want.
In 2013, Google decided to enable secure searching for all users.
This means that organic traffic from Google can no longer be tracked at a keyword level. Unfortunately, we lose a lot of valuable information about our visitors because of this ‘minor’ change. In 2014, it will be more difficult to optimize your site for relevant keywords
The introduction of Hashtag Search adds another element to the SEO timelines. Google now shows hashtags from Google Plus posts and links to the hashtag feeds on Twitter and Facebook in the search results. For marketers, hastags offer branding and authority opportunities. Likewise, hashtag search again reveals the value Google places on Google Plus. With this update, it appears that alignment among digital marketing channels is more important than ever.
What does this mean for 2014?
Google likes to see that you’re consistent in your content delivery and that you’re providing unique, interesting content to your consumers.
Ask yourself questions like where do people live that you are trying to target?
Build out a list of brand and non brand of around 10-20 keywods
What are your core keywords? Add the locations to those core keywords.
What are core keywords?
For example “Florida Blue” and “Health Insurance” are core keywords.
From there you can build out longer tail keywords, but adding your location in there. For example “florida blue center tampa” or “health insurance Jacksonville”
In your content calendar make sure you’re adding a section for location, if you’re targeting different areas. This will keep you better focused when developing content.
Make sure your location content is placed within this content area
Build out various keywords sets based on your location
Use those keywords in content consistently
Develop Content Around Your Audience
Personas
Value Content
Location
Promote in social media
Google Places for Business
Paid Ads
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
PPC
http://www.r2integrated.com/news/blog/how-to-rank-locally-with-seo-strategy-tactics-measurements
Content Calendar
Off page content
On page content
Develop your FAQ’s with
Make sure your meta data is focused on your locations! Luckily Florida Blue has our location within our brand name! That still doesn’t make it very easy though