At Clix, we take a proactive approach to your local SEO plan. One way we do this is by actively pursuing your local listings by updating your business information within Google’s best practices. We claim and verify your listings so no one else can make edits. In Google’s eyes, they see the consistency across the web in your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) as an important factor in local rankings. This is all just a small piece of the big pie when it comes to SEO, but still very important.

In addition to actively pursuing local listings, we take the time to research any updates in the industry. This research is done for obvious reasons, but we really understand that keeping up with Google is like running a triathlon– never ending triathlon for that matter. However, Clix is always up for the challenge!

2017 has been another year for Google rolling out new updates for Google My Business. Some important updates include:

• Downloadable bulk insights for your GMB listings
• The ability to enter URL attributes
• The ability to enter accessibility attributes for your business
• Local pack ads showing up on mobile

You can bet that Clix has been on top of these updates and made the appropriate edits to maximize your digital presence! I mean…it’s kind of our job.

It is no secret that Google has been phasing out their ambitious Google+ social network because it didn’t gain the traction or attract the audience they wanted. As Google moves on, we have noticed a new feature that we believe is transferring from Google+ to Google My Business: the ability of posting through Google My Business.

Creating a post on Google My Business allows your business to publish products, services, and events directly to your customers via Google Search and Maps. We find these posts to be valuable because when customers are actively searching for your business, your business has the opportunity to serve a call to action or make important announcements to your audience relevant to your business.

You can insert photos and add details to whatever message you want to communicate. Important sale coming? Events? Important updates? These posts give you a meaningful way to talk to your customers.

Search Engine Land has confirmed that Google Posts are removed seven days after they are published. This helps businesses understand that timely relevant information is the way to go when using this feature.

Do you have any questions regarding your local listings? Contact our team at Clix and we’ll be happy to help you out!

The post Checking in with Local Listings appeared first on Clix.

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Using a SaaS platform for local SEO does have its benefits and can help automate some of the more monotonous aspects of citation building. The ability to store a company’s location data and then push it out to publish on over 50 websites from one dashboard is a game changer. Not only will the company’s information be published on various local channels such as search engines, local directories and social media outlets, but their information will be accurate and consistent. This is perhaps the most appealing aspect of using a SaaS platform because it can save a company time and money on citation building efforts. Utilizing a SaaS platform takes away the need to manually search each local directory website and claim or create a listing.

In addition to data management and citation building, here are a few more benefits of using a SaaS platform for local SEO:

• Duplicate suppression: Some SaaS platforms will suppress or completely remove duplicate listings for a company based on their NAP (name, address, phone number) information. This is an important feature as duplicate listings can hinder local SEO efforts by creating confusion for the search engines.
• Citation building on more websites: The site distribution list for most SaaS platforms include websites that do not offer free listings. These websites, such as Yahoo! (major search engine) and Insider Pages (aggregates data to other websites), are often very important for local SEO.
• Review management: Some platforms offer review management which typically includes the ability to aggregate reviews from different sources into one dashboard and respond to them.
• Social media content publishing: SaaS platforms also offer the option to push out content to various social media outlets from one dashboard, all at the same time. This can be convenient for companies with several locations and many social media accounts.

The SaaS platform will get a company’s location information published across many different websites, but after they are published, that’s it! The SaaS platform’s job is complete. Meanwhile, in the search marketing world, a local SEO strategy is never complete. It is an ongoing process that requires continuous optimization as the internet continuously changes; this is where the human management portion of a successful local SEO strategy comes into play. After the listings have been published and cleaned up, they need to be monitored for their positioning and accuracy. In addition to monitoring performance, there are two more critical reasons for including human management in a local SEO strategy: site specific information and compliance with the overall SEO strategy.

For more information on all of these processes and how human management is essential to their success, take a look below:

• Positioning: A way to determine if a local SEO strategy is helping online visibility for a company is to monitor the positioning of their local listings on the websites that are most important to their industry. For instance, a plumber might want to monitor their listing’s positioning on Google (because Google is important for every industry) and Angie’s List (because ‘plumber’ is a service area business). This positioning data is not available through a SaaS platform and therefore needs to be done manually. If a company is not monitoring their positioning, then they will not know if the SaaS platform they paid for is helping to increase their online visibility.
• Accuracy: Although most SaaS platforms promise 100% accuracy of listing information, this does not always happen. Listing information can be changed due to user edits to the site or due to the site’s existing database of information. This is another example of how human management is extremely important even while using a SaaS platform. The SaaS platform will not alert you that your listing information is inaccurate, and most of the time, the issue will only be resolved by reaching out to the site directly or by working with the support team for the SaaS platform.
• Site specific information: There are some websites that offer additional fields of information that cannot be filled out using an automated service. These fields must be filled out manually by logging into the account. A perfect example of this type of listing is Yelp. In addition to the usual listing fields, Yelp offers an area to include the business’s history and the business owner’s name, background, and photo. Without human management to go in and fill this information out, the listing would be left uncompleted and might be outranked by other listings that are more thoroughly filled out.
• Compliance with overall SEO strategy: Perhaps the most important reason for including human management in a local SEO strategy is to ensure the local strategy complies with the overall SEO strategy for the company. This is not something any automated platform can handle, as it includes: evaluating categories, evaluating keywords in business descriptions and products/services, evaluating where to direct traffic to…etc.

The growth of local search SaaS platforms in the digital marketing world has helped agencies and companies automate the tedious tasks that come with local SEO. They help to consolidate listings and ensure accuracy across various local channels. Although there are many benefits to using a SaaS platform, it should not be viewed as a one-stop-shop for local SEO. Solely relying on a SaaS platform for a local SEO strategy will get your listings published and cleaned up, but that’s about it. Without the human management aspect, you will not know if the platform has helped your online visibility (or what needs to be done to help it), inaccurate listings may slip through the cracks or listings may be left incomplete. Most importantly, you will not know if the SaaS platform is aligning with your overall SEO strategy. For more information on local listing management, contact us today.

The post Human Management vs. SaaS Platform: Local SEO appeared first on Clix.

Because local SEO is such a crucial element to an overall SEO strategy, it is important to stay on top of the ever changing local search ecosystem and the influence it has on search engines to ensure you are not wasting your time or efforts. The local search ecosystem is the network of directory websites and data aggregators that publish or aggregate local citations across the web. These websites publish citations and also pass their data onto other websites to publish, who then pass their data onto more websites, and the cycle continues to trickle down to smaller and smaller websites.

In the early days of SEO, the local search ecosystem was much larger than it is today. The main focus of a successful local SEO strategy was to create as many citations as possible that include identical name, address, and phone number (NAP) information. It was also easier to “scam the system” by not appropriately representing a business online in hopes of ranking higher in search engine results pages (for instance, keyword stuffing the business name to rank for a certain keyword or not adding a service area to a listing if the business is a service area business).

Although these tactics may have worked in the past, they will not get you very far in today’s local SEO world and could even push your account into penalization on major sites such as Google. The local search ecosystem has shrunk over the past couple years as search engine’s algorithms have evolved to better understand content and citations. Instead of reading hundreds of citations’ NAP information to determine if a business is legitimate, search engines are now able to understand the NAP information and enhanced content of a smaller amount of listings on authoritative sites such as YP.com. Instead of spending time creating hundreds of listings on obscure sites, a local SEO strategy should focus on building out NAP and enhanced listing content on a smaller list of authoritative sites.

Here is an example from the Clix local listings of how a fully built listing might look.

Search engines have also evolved to understand different variations of NAP information. For instance, if Yelp publishes your address as “32 W Broadway Ave” but City Grid publishes it as “32 West Broadway Avenue,” Bing is not going to count it against you when determining your business’s accuracy in their search algorithm. This is important to know because on some sites, such as Google, a business’s address will be abbreviated no matter how you submit it to their system.

Keeping up with the local search ecosystem is an ongoing task. As local SEO grows in importance, Google and Bing are constantly testing new capabilities of their local map pack and the different factors that can affect its results. Staying on top of these updates is crucial, as falling behind could dramatically affect the local visibility of a business.

An example of this happened recently when Google started testing a more thorough verification process in San Diego for local service area business industries that typically have a lot of spam in the local search ecosystem (plumbers and locksmiths). After this new verification process was implemented, 89% of listings in the plumbing and locksmith industry on Google were removed from the local search results.

Suffice to say, it is critical to stay informed on the latest local search updates. If this SEO strategy is neglected, it could mean lower rankings or even penalization from a search engine. For more on how to stay on top of these updates and increase your local online visibility, contact us today.

The post The Ever Changing Local Search Ecosystem appeared first on Clix.

Digital marketing offers a number of solutions for getting honest, constructive customer feedback. Through a variety of channels such as automation marketing and a focus on local citations, you can use the tools and software digital marketing offers to collect and analyze evaluations of the services or products you provide.

Automation Marketing and Customer Feedback

One of the most clear-cut ways to use digital marketing to benefit your business, automation marketing, allows you to create campaigns that drive engagement and feedback from customers. Campaigns might be focused on surveys to gauge customer satisfaction, or even something as simple as an automated follow up to an opened promotional email can help you determine whether or not your marketing efforts are paying off.

But automation does not exist in a vacuum, and neither do any of your other marketing efforts. An effective automation marketing campaign still relies on high quality customer service from your team, such as personal phone calls to customers or email checkins to touch base when appropriate.

Your automation campaigns are also an opportunity to increase usage of your website, using blogs, website pages, and other digital resources to benefit your customers, giving them the right information they need to make decisions.

Customer Service Software

When people think about digital marketing, they might not realize they can use tools like tracking numbers to not only record their own business calls, but to make more informed decisions about what their staff are doing on the front lines. Using call recording can open up a lot of avenues for internal improvement and allow business owners to hear the questions their customers ask in real time.

At Clix, we have had clients use call recordings to make informed decisions about their staffing and better serve customers’ needs in the office. We also take a proactive approach and give recommendations following our call reports in order to continue to be an active partner in your business success.

Form fills also provide our clients insight into the information customers are seeking. More often than not, having a report of the number of form fills and quality of leads helps our clients determine new information about customers they might have thought about or make adjustments to their website copy in order to move their campaign along. Plus, unlike having an email address on your website – an email address that could be in many other places or handed out by customers via word of mouth – a lead from a form fill can be directly correlated to the success of your digital marketing campaign.

Website Content and Customer Participation

Many businesses may not realize the kind of resources available to them to make their customer service even better, but using your website and other avenues for sharing your content can make a difference. From regular blogs and news updates, to using video and social media to drive engagement to your website, a robust website can set you apart from competitors in big ways.

If you’re ready to use digital marketing to gain customer feedback and grow your business, contact us today!

The post How to Use Digital Marketing to Get Customer Feedback appeared first on Clix.

Basically, there’s three reasons, but first I want to start out with the answer to, “What is local SEO?”

Local SEO goes beyond just making a Google map listing. Local SEO is the active process of building out necessary citations on industry directories or industry listing websites. Basically, this serves three main purposes, and these are very basic and high level. However, each of these is essential to making headway on your business’s web presence.

3 Important Purposes of Local SEO for National Campaigns

The first purpose of Local SEO is backlinks. A backlink occurs when one website links to another one. This may be done because the site being linked to is viewed as a resource or has some kind of reference or relationship they share.

By building out these profiles, every one of the citation websites – or 90%+ of them – ask for a link to the website. Once the information is published, that link is published. So, when an entity like Angie’s List, Superpages, or something of that nature publishes your profile, that very large and very authority website posts a link straight to you. You need these links to be seen as an authoritative page in the eyes of Google.

Even if the links are “no follow” links, or links that website administrators may label as such so they are not counted in the search engines, they are still valuable to the end user because they provide a gateway to your site. So if you find a directory listing you want to update but also know that the link will be a “no follow” link, it is still a good idea to make sure it points to your site so the person who comes to this site and finds you has a direct link to your website.

Secondly, a campaign focused on your industry directories and websites allows for categorization. Entities like Google My Business Pages actually ask for explicit category and tagging information. Once the profile is published, that category and tagging information goes to Google. Google likes when everybody uses their products for obvious reasons. So, if we can actually physically tag and categorize your business and URL in Google databases, we absolutely should go ahead and do that.

Lastly, building out your citations leads to increased digital visibility. Generally being found in more places is a part of every digital marketing campaign and leads to positive changes. The goal is to make you available when and where people are looking.

So, the next time you think, “I don’t really need to be in the maps because I don’t really want people coming to my office,” take a step back and think of the much larger picture here. Local SEO serves many different purposes, and these are just the top three that pertain to everyone, from mom and pop businesses with one storefront to large corporations with a national presence.

The post How National Brands Can Leverage Local SEO appeared first on Clix.

I for one have always loved and supported small businesses. I’ve held 5 jobs in my entire life, and all 5 of them were St. Louis based businesses. 4 of them were mom-and-pop shops. This is why it truly pleases me to write about how people, and search engines, are turning more attention to local businesses.

Jayson Demers of Entreprenuer.com recently said, “Local search engine optimization isn’t just about local mom-and-pop shops anymore. Practically any business can take advantage of local SEO’s benefits. Since Google’s fan-named “Pigeon” update in 2014, the importance of local SEO has grown….local SEO has risen in importance, but the ride isn’t over yet. Over the next few years, I anticipate that local SEO will become even more impactful and more useful for businesses.

I couldn’t agree more.

It’s no secret that as long as you’re logged into a Google account, your search history and your geographic location are both affecting your search results. I’m even starting to notice my own SERPS (search engine results pages) becoming increasingly geo-specific.

Check out this example I ran across while doing keyword research for a client.

EX:

Notice how this completely generic search yielded local results, and those local results dominate the top of the SERP.

Get this: I started to think maybe Google was serving me local results based on the fact that liposuction was a service. Maybe Google assumed people looking for info on services would be looking for St. Louis service providers.

So then I thought of the most general search I could think of… “Sandwich.” I was thinking, “it’s a product,” it’s a service, it’s a noun, it’s a verb… It’s also a transactional and kind of an informational query…what kind of SERP will I get!?

This is what I got:

Another extremely St. Louis oriented SERP!

This is only one example, but it still illustrates my point. A small sandwich shop like Fozzie’s Sandwich Emporium could only dream of being on the first page of such a short tail query 2-3 years ago. Marketing a local business with the help of local SEO is becoming more important as Google moves toward a more custom tailored Internet. Search queries that used to be impossibly competitive are now attainable for small business based on their location and solid local SEO efforts.

The post Local SEO Growing In Importance appeared first on Clix.

Taking away four spots may not sound like a big deal, but with local results on highly specific search queries only becoming more important, this may have a big impact for businesses who used to make the cut.

What’s changed?

Besides moving from seven results in the pack to just three, the results no longer link to the Google My Business page or Google+ page. Google has clearly been re-evaluating Google+ and its role in search over the last year or so, therefore a development like this was expected by some.

Mobile and desktop views of search have remained fairly similar despite the change. One thing to note is that mobile results have a call option by tapping a listing to expand it.

Finally, users still have an option to expand the “pack” to see more results—three is simply the default.

Which businesses appear in the “pack”?

As always, which businesses appear for certain keywords and which don’t is a complex secret. However, we can see certain clues that influence positioning, such as geographical proximity, website rankings outside of the “pack,” and even reviews, among others. This just goes to show that a properly optimized website and local listings are only becoming more important to organic search.

So…what now?

As you might imagine, businesses which no longer appear at the top of local search results are not going to be happy about this change. Reduced visibility of even one spot in search results can mean the difference between getting a phone call or losing one to your competitor. If a business has banked on their local search result visibility in the past, then now is the time to reevaluate their SEO or inbound marketing strategy.

Have any questions about this update? Click below to contact Clix today.

The post Google Reduces Local Pack From 7 Results to 3 appeared first on Clix.

This past summer, Google launched yet another algorithm update that deeply impacted the local search results in the United States. Now, that Google algorithm update has reportedly began to roll out into other countries: Canada, United Kingdom and Australia.  It’s just a matter of time before this update reaches even farther.

A few key differences from this update are the tightening of the map radius and decreasing the number of results in the local pack-taking results from seven to three. Some internet marketers have said their clients have higher rankings while others have noticed a shift in the opposite direction- finding themselves several positions lower in the results.

As a result of this local search update it will be more competitive than ever before to get y our local listings at the top of the search results. As always, it’s important to have consistency on all local listings.

Still not doing local SEO for your business? Any business that gets several or all of its clientele locally should consider local search engine optimization.  If you have a physical address and expect people to visit it, you are an ideal candidate for local SEO.

It’s a new year. Let the Clix team help you get where you want to be in the search results. Contact us today!

The post Google Widens The Roll Out Of Recent Local Update appeared first on Clix.

These duplicate listings could also cause reviews to split up. If there is more than one listing out there, people could find either one of those listings and leave a review on the wrong one. As you probably know, having all of your reviews under one listing can help you rank better and can also help you gain more customers.

A potential customer could also come across a listing that is old and has out-of-date business information on it. This could cause them to get in their cars and drive to an old location or pick up the phone and call a number that is no longer in service. There’s a high possibility they would think your business is closed and might not take the time to check to see if there was different information on another listing, which could lead to losing the customer.

Overall, duplicate listings have become harder and harder to find on Google, and I am starting to think Google is doing that on purpose. Recently, when calling Google support to have two local listings merged, the representative I spoke with made it seem like having duplicate listings wasn’t a big deal, when clearly it is. I was told that if the local listing isn’t verified, it won’t show up in the search engines, even though unverified listings routinely show up in search results. As if this weren’t a big enough problem, according to Google guidelines an automatically-created listing will still be counted as a duplicate.

Do you think it’s possible the Google representatives aren’t aware that duplicate listings are a problem, or do you think they are trying to downplay the severity of the issue?

To learn more about local seo and other relevant topics, visit our website or contact us directly. We look forward to hearing from you!

The post Problems With Duplicate Google Plus Listings appeared first on Clix.

When Google rolled out the Google Carousel in 2013, finding local business has been easier than ever—until now. When a user searched on Google for a steakhouse, the Google Carrousel would populate a variety of near by steakhouses or similar restaurants, as well as details about each one, such as reviews, photos, menus and more. Now, all of that has changed.

Late last week, the rollout of the new design has taken affect. The new design appears where the local listings/map are, just below the top AdWords results. Similar to the carousel, users will have the ability to click on the results, but this time users will land on a new business page similar to the look and feel of the Google Knowledge Graph.

Not only do the new business pages provide the basic information such as address, phone number, and hours of operation, but it provides users with search results pertaining to the restaurant they clicked on, like local listings.

The new design creates a simpler way to display the information users want to see. Google has made it more efficient for its users to gather information about local businesses. When searching for “steakhouse in St. Louis” the listings appeared and provided the top three restaurants that best matched the search.

Users are also able to filter through all of the results by rating, price and hours, which then shows other options for users to pick from.

While this new design promotes an more efficient way to find the local business information, it is currently only available for desktop searches. At this time, it has not been disclosed whether they will roll this feature out on mobile or not.

Want help implementing your business’ local SEO strategy? Contact Clix today to speak with one of our team members!

The post Google Drops Local Carousel appeared first on Clix.