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The Best Local SEO Experts in Birmingham, AL

Local SEO isn’t just another service we offer at Webology. It’s probably the most important service we offer for local businesses. Here’s why:

46% of all searches in Google are seeking LOCAL information.

Out of those searches, about 88% either called or visited a local business within 24 hours. That’s why local SEO is possibly the most important service we can offer to help you grow your business. It connects your brand to local customers who are actively seeking the product or service you offer. Local SEO is earned media that captures highly qualified leads at the point of making a purchasing decision. More on that in just a bit… But if you already have a good understanding of how SEO can help your local business, feel free to skip the rest of this article and give us a call. Otherwise, let’s take a look at what local SEO is and why it needs to be a big part of your overall marketing strategy.

What is Local SEO?

To understand Local SEO, you need to understand how all search marketing works first. Search Engine Optimization is simply the practice of helping search engines like Google and Bing to better understand the content of your website. Search engines rely on advertising revenue. As such, they only want to serve up the best content on page #1 so that users consistently use their service instead of the other search engines. It’s commonly referred to as satisfying user intent.     This allows them to sell more ads, and it’s the reason Google gets more visits than Bing and other search engines. Generally speaking, Google does a better job at serving relevant information that matches what we are looking for when we search. That’s why Google gets about 63% of all the search traffic in the US. So, how does that work locally?

Mastering Local SEO to take market share away from your competition

Local SEO specifically targets a geographic region to improve brand visibility around location-specific terms like:

• in Birmingham, AL
• Where can I find near me?
• Who is the best

By improving your website’s visibility in Google around these terms, we can increase your market share, thereby capturing leads that otherwise would have gone to your competitors. Local SEO helps you grow your brand presence and increase sales.

Local SEO: How To Rank Your Local Business

Now that you know what local SEO is and how it can benefit your brand, you need to find the best way forward.

• Is local SEO important for a small local business website like mine?
• As a small business, should I be using an SEO marketing agency?
• What are the best local SEO strategies for small businesses?
• Are there any affordable SEO services within my budget?

These are all very important questions you might be asking yourself. If that’s the case, feel free to reach out for a 100% free SEO strategy consultation. We won’t try to sell you during the consult. Our goal is simply to help you make the right decision for your business.

What are the best ranking strategies to improve local SEO?

This is the subjective part of local SEO that tends to confuse and cause distrust. It’s a common sales tactic within the industry for an agency or freelancer to call you and point out what your current SEO provider is not doing. With over 200 different ranking factors used to determine who ranks on page # 1, this is an easy conversation-starter for any salesperson. However, these sales tactics deceptively ignore what your SEO team is doing and whether or not your current strategy will produce a better ROI than focusing on other areas first. A good local SEO expert will constantly test and benchmark different tactics to see what delivers the best returns for their clients. Does a particular task consistently improve local map rankings? Is it something we can do safely without risking a Google penalty? Are there better uses of our time that will deliver better results for the client? Those are the questions the salesperson doesn’t want you to think about. These are all important things to consider in any local SEO campaign, and any good agency is going to test tactics before they implement them on client websites. It’s not always the case that you need a ‘2nd set of eyes’ on your SEO strategy. Chances are, your current provider is doing what they have proven to work over time. If you’re still not sure though, reach out for a free consult. We’ll let you skip the sales pitch and speak directly with an SEO strategist who can dig deep and find new opportunities to improve your local brand awareness…even if that means you take those ideas back to your current SEO provider. We want you to do what works best for your business, even if that means going elsewhere or doing the work yourself.

Specific Tactics that work for Local SEO:

At the time of writing, we’re seeing the most improvements by focusing on the tasks listed below. SEO is a constantly changing industry though, so we must continue to do our R&D to make sure we’re not wasting your time on fads and trends that don’t really deliver. Here’s what’s working for our clients right now:

Google My Business Optimization – Savvy Local SEO Tips for Google My Business

Your Google My Business listing is probably the 2nd most important digital real estate you own, with your website being first. This is the listing that displays in the local map results when someone searches for a business like yours. Most GMB listings are incomplete and not fully optimized to rank in the local maps. At a minimum, your listing should include:

• Properly categorized business descriptions
• Accurate NAP data (Name, Address, Phone Number)
• As many relevant photos as possible that are:
  • Unique representations of your brand
  • Personal and genuine
  • Spread out over the different categories
  • Geotagged with EXIF descriptions and local Lat/Long data
• Videos that showcase your brand and include a call to action
• An informative business description
• Frequent posts that include a mix of information and offers
• Accurate hours of operation
• Genuine customer reviews and responses to each review

That’s the foundation of your local SEO campaign. Listing optimization is critical to your success and it only takes a little time to setup a profile correctly. After your initial setup, your listing should be actively managed. You should consistently post updates from your blog and mention unique offers. Add new photos as often as possible, and be sure to respond to all reviews on your profile. Once this is done, you can move on to optimizing your website for local search.

Locally Focused Content Marketing

Content is king, right? But what does that really mean? If you’re a local business it means you have to pull double duty in your content writing efforts. You have to be relevant to your industry while also writing about locally important topics. Before you jump right into blogging about the next upcoming local event though, it’s important to step back and look at your existing content. Do you have enough quality content on the main pages of your website? Probably not…

Optimizing Content on your Main Pages

Do you even have all the pages that you need to take full advantage of local content marketing? Probably not, but here’s a good place to begin. Sit down and spend some time listing out every possible service you can offer. If you’re a marketing agency it might look something like this:

• Content writing
• PR Services
• Social Media Management
• Google Ads Management
• Website Design

Even if it’s a service you rarely offer, it probably needs to make the list. Why? If you rarely offer it, chances are your competition didn’t bother to create a page around that product or service. That’s an opportunity your brand needs to exploit, and it can often be very lucrative… One of our clients does glass work. He’s the only person in his market who has bothered to write service pages for things like bulletproof glass, buffet table sneeze guards, and glass partitions. Guess what… That business has already closed multiple 5 figure jobs off a single page with less than 1,000 words that we wrote 60 days ago. A single piece of content that cost the business less than $100 has already produced an exponential ROI that is well over 1000% for our client. Effective content marketing starts by understanding both the services you offer and the local markets you’re selling to. It doesn’t always work out as well as it did in the example above, but it might. Can you afford to miss out on those big deals just because you didn’t take the time to explain each and every service you offer to online shoppers?

Making your Content Speak to the Local Market

Once you’ve identified all the product or service pages you need on your site, it’s important to tailor your content to the right (local) audience. Buyer persona exercises can help identify who you’re marketing to. Once you’ve done those, find ways to integrate locally relevant topics onto each product or service page. Just be sure to avoid the appearance of keyword stuffing by writing naturally and only focusing on what’s relevant to the local audience…satisfy user intent and Google will reward you. Once you’ve built up your main pages, be sure to blog as frequently as possible while also focusing on quality. Here’s a few tips for effective local blogging:

• Post on a consistent schedule – Publish on the same dates and times each month
• Post a mix of locally relevant topics along with your industry topics
• Interlink your posts with other related posts and important pages on your site

Once you get these basics out of the way, move on to technical SEO and other important tasks, but never stop improving your content. Advanced content optimization tactics can allow you to optimize for featured snippets which get 8.6% of all search traffic when they are present.

Local Business Directory Submissions

The next big area of focus needs to be on local business directory submissions, which are also commonly referred to as citations. These are any of the places your brand’s name, address, and phone number (NAP data) are found online. We suggest exercising caution here and not wasting too much time doing the work yourself. It’s easy to do citations the wrong way. Even if you get it right, this is a time-consuming process that’s best outsourced and automated whenever possible. Consistency and accuracy in listing data is still very important to your overall ranking. One of the easiest ways to make sure your data is accurate is to manage it through a service like Yext, the main data aggregators, or a combination of both. When we do local SEO we start with Yext and the aggregators. After that, we submit manual listings to about 250 different sites that aren’t covered in those services. Next, we use several tools to identify both local directories and industry specific directories that provide a powerful citation source for our clients. It’s important to note that these are considered to be ‘foundational’ links. They help balance out anchor text ratios and make your site look reputable to Google and other search engines.

On-Page SEO Strategy

That’s definitely admirable, and it tells me you take your business seriously. Most of what we’ve discussed so far can be handled DIY if you have some basic skills…and lots of spare time. If time’s an issue though, definitely reach out for help with your content and basic setup. Even if it’s not, you should consider outsourcing the technical SEO work to a specialist. And that probably isn’t your web developer… SEO strategy is a highly-specialized skill that requires years to master. It goes way beyond just understanding PHP/HTML development and good landing page design. No offense intended if you’re reading this and you also happen to be a pro coder! It’s just a completely different skillset, and very few have mastered both. Time and experimentation are required to truly understand what works and what doesn’t in local search. Here’s what we’ve found to be important over the last few years:

• Local NAP data displayed on each page of the site
• Keywords in meta titles
• Image alt tags
• Internal linking
• Structured data
• Proper heading tags
• Social Media and Google Maps API integration
• Robots.txt and sitemap setup
• Keywords in URLs

That’s some of the most important tasks, but they all rely on a keyword strategy that has to be decided on before beginning any work. Planning that strategy can take an expert days in some cases. It’s best to outsource this work to someone who does SEO on a daily basis.

Building Backlinks with LOCAL Relevancy

Once you’ve gotten all the other fundamentals out of the way, it’s time to look at building links. This is a topic that gets a bad reputation in the SEO world, but links are just as critical as they always have been. Focus on earning links from sites that have local relevance while also getting link placement on authority sites within your industry. What does that even mean? I know…there’s a version of that statement on almost every website that deals with local SEO. It doesn’t help our reputation for being vague and mysterious, does it? The answer to what that really means is best learned in a classroom or over many months of research though. I can’t really explain it fully without adding a few thousand extra words to this section! A knowledgeable link builder looks at several metrics to evaluate the quality and impact a single link will most likely produce. Think 3D Chess… -What’s the current anchor text ratio of the client site? -How about the page we’re linking to? -What’s the Domain Score of the linking site? -How about the PageRank of the linking page? -Is there any link spam in the 2nd tier we should be aware of? My best advice is to exercise caution when building links. SEMrush has an excellent tool that allows you to enter a set of keywords and competitors. Once you do that, it crawls the web to find the most important backlinks based on your criteria. If you’re new to SEO, that tool will keep you on the straight and narrow for the most part. If you don’t have access though, you can always just focus on blogs that write about your industry and local news publications in your link-building efforts.

How to find the best local SEO company for your brand?

All that work! It can seem overwhelming to think about everything you need to do to really leverage SEO the right way. If you’re busy, it might make more sense to outsource the work to an expert SEO. But how do you find a reputable company that’s excellent at local SEO? To start, check out their website. Do they have informative content that seems to be genuinely written internally by an expert? How do they rank in Google when you type in SEO agency ? It’s true that this is a highly competitive industry, but a legitimate firm should have some exposure on the first page. While you’re there, take a look at their reviews. Those are just a few of the steps you should take when searching for a new company to handle your SEO.

Want to chat with Webology about your local SEO?

Chances are, if you bothered to read this whole section, you must be committed to growing your brand through organic search marketing. We’d love to help you get started by offering a free consultation and overview of your existing digital presence. As a full service agency, we can also help in other areas like web design, social media, and paid search advertising. More importantly, we can help you decide on the right mix of strategies to grow your brand through digital marketing. Reach out to schedule your free consultation today.

Proven eCommerce SEO Services to Grow your Brand

At Webology we take a consultative approach to developing the right strategy to grow your business through organic search. We begin by working with you to determine the best plan of action based on the products you sell, their profit margins, and overall competitiveness within the niche.

That knowledge allows us to approach keyword research with the strategic vision to deliver a high ROI early on in the campaign.

Careful analysis of keywords and competition allows us to implement a custom strategy that’s 100% focused on sales growth. We take a holistic approach to SEO that goes beyond traditional metrics like backlinks and content length. Our comprehensive approach looks at areas other SEO providers might overlook like conversion rate optimization, crawl budgets, and user behavior signals. We deliver advanced SEO work to eCommerce brands just like yours.

Google Penalty Audit

Pandas, penguins, and possums got your revenue down?

We can relate! Over the years we’ve been approached by website owners who have lost revenue as a result of one of the named Google penalties.

Our team of SEO specialists can help you quickly diagnose the root cause of the issue and put your organic ranking back on track.

While not as common of an issue as they used to be, Google penalties do still happen from time to time. Hacked sites and thin content are often the source of problems today.

If you think lost organic ranking may be the cause of a drop in sales numbers, don’t hesitate to give us a call. We can quickly diagnose the issue for free. After we know the most likely cause, we can either consult with you to outline best practices for recovery, or do all the work for you. In either case, we will have to provide you with a custom quote after our diagnosis because no two penalties are exactly alike.

Identifying a Google Penalty

Micro Case-Study on Malware Cleanup

Often, business owners aren’t even aware that such an issue is possible until it’s too late. In one case, a local business approached us in mid-September after the phones mysteriously stopped ringing. They are a local automotive business whose aged domain had always kept them ranked in a low competition market.

This particular case was quite easy to troubleshoot. A quick crawl with SEMrush bot identified several outbound links to pharmaceutical sales sites. Those links were live for over three months before triggering a penalty.

The site had been hacked, and there were over 1,200 hidden landing pages with spammy anchor text that the client was completely unaware of.

It was the perfect case to highlight the importance of professional web hosting and maintenance.

Recovering From a Google Penalty

The recovery process was simple, but took about 60 days. We started with the obvious, and removed the malware from the site files. Google Search Console had a notification of the penalty, so we submitted a reconsideration request there.

Of course, the rank didn’t recover fully to the levels they were enjoying before the hack. We proceeded with on-page strategy, content optimization, citation building, and we took it to the next level with a few editorial backlinks from related sites.

Within a couple of months, call volume was back to the levels they had enjoyed for years. It all goes to show the importance of regular site maintenance and following SEO best practices.

Think your site may have been hit by a Google penalty? Reach out for a free initial evaluation.

Link Building Service

Backlinks are such a controversial subject in the SEO community. On one hand, you have white hat purists and technical SEO aficionados telling us that we either shouldn’t build links at all or that they see sites ranking with only a dozen or so referring domains against authority sites.

In some niches, that’s absolutely true. Technical SEO carries a lot of weight in today’s algorithm and in some cases, that’s all you need to rank. In other cases though, I have to seriously wonder about claims of sites ranking without many links in a competitive niche.

We live in a world where popular Private Blog Network (PBN) providers block 3rd party crawlers like AHREFS and Majestic to keep their networks secure. Can an SEO really say with certainty in that case that the site in question is really ranking ‘without a lot of backlinks’? It could just be grey hat magic fooling us into thinking ‘links don’t matter’.

On the other hand, SEO’s who leverage link-building as a strategy will suggest things like competitor link analysis, citation building, and aggressive outreach or PR efforts to increase domain ranking over time. Are they right, and do links still make up a big portion of Google’s algorithm?

Our opinion is that there is no right or wrong answer until you have looked at the industry you’re trying to rank in thoroughly. Google SERP results are very specific to any given niche. In some cases, very few links are required to rank. In others, you won’t rank without a high number of quality inbound links. As SEO strategists, our job is to help you find the fastest path to generating quality traffic, whether that be links, content, technical SEO, or (more likely) a combination of everything.

Which Backlinks Work Best?

Again, it all depends on your niche and what you’re trying to do with your SEO. If you’re a local business, local news stories, chamber of commerce listings, and links from other local businesses tend to work well.

eCommerce or blog sites get good results by reaching out to other bloggers with similar topics on their blog. Authority sites like Forbes or The New York Times can benefit almost any website but they are difficult to get, which brings up another point…

Easy to acquire links don’t help your rank as much as something that’s rare and hard to acquire.

Earlier versions of the Google algorithm were easier to span with low quality links. To combat this, Google took measures to evaluate new links coming to your site. In some cases, those links can be devalued if they appear to be low quality or spammy in nature.

Which Backlinks are Dangerous?

Yet another controversial subject and one that even many SEOs are confused about. Let me start by asking you a question. Don’t you just hate movies or books with gaping plot holes or inconsistencies? What about when the author/director decides to go back and change stuff up after the fact?

I can’t stand it either, and by the way…Han shot first!

If that sort of thing bothers you in movies or books, then don’t bother reading press releases from Google over the years.

How Google’s Algorithm Contradicts Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

One minute guest posts are taboo, the next they’re okay.

Here’s my favorite statement from the Webmaster Guidelines:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

Okay Google…If I’m a legit local business and I subscribe to Yext, will it increase the PageRank of my homepage that didn’t already have any existing backlinks?

Is this manipulation or am I just trying to spread awareness of my business everywhere?

Let’s be real for once Google…Please?

We all know it boosts PageRank. So is everything a business does online manipulation? Technically, yes. Are you going to penalize sites for doing stuff like that? No.

So don’t overthink SEO…

Reading between the lines allows good SEO’s to understand what’s really acceptable to Google versus risky stuff like:

-PBN’s

-SAPE Links

-‘Excessive’ Guest Posting

…but at the end of the day all link building is manipulation on some levels. It’s just that some of it is justified and other methods are not.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is simply the text where a link occurs. In some cases, we link to an important page like our homepage with generic text like click here, learn more, etc.

In other cases, anchor text contains keywords that are or are related to what the page is meant to rank for.

Still links can also be ‘naked’ in the case where the hyperlink itself is used as the anchor.

There are a few other link types, but the last one we will mention here is branded anchors. This is where either the brand name or a variation of the brand is used as anchor text. In our case, we will reference Webology or Webology SEO, LLC as our anchor for a backlink.

Part of Google’s effort to combat link spam includes searching for unnatural anchor text profiles that are an obvious sign of manipulation.

How do I Optimize Anchor Text?

The Internet is full of different theories on this. However, the safest way for brands to build links is to follow a natural anchor text profile. In most industries, this means that the majority of your links will be either branded text or naked URL links.

Additionally, most sites with a legitimate link profile have the majority of the backlinks going to the homepage with fewer links going to service or product pages and blog posts.

Blog posts may pick up a diverse mix of related anchors and a few that exactly match the post’s meta title.

Pro Tip: If you’re actively building links to rank for a particular keyword, take a look at the top ranking sites when you search for that phrase. Plug their URL into AHREFS and take note of their anchor text and link sources. The links and anchors you see most commonly for your top ranking competitors are the types of links you should be building in most cases.

Does Anchor Text Influence Ranking?

Yes, absolutely. We have data to prove it. If anyone says otherwise, they aren’t paying attention to their keyword tracking. However, optimized anchor text is dangerous if used incorrectly. Even white hat link building strategies run the risk of triggering a penalty.

Simply building links with the same keywords over and over without any other link types going to a particular page will eventually cause that page to be deindexed from Google’s SERP. That’s why the best SEOs start with ‘foundational’ links which are a mix of branded, naked, and unoptimized anchors like ‘click here’. Those link types will diversify your anchor text ratios and allow for a few keyword anchors which tend to really increase rank dramatically.

Is SEO Right for my Business?

If you’ve read this document in its entirety, you understand just how complicated the world of SEO is. It’s one of the most highly specialized marketing disciplines, and recent changes have made internally managed SEO next to impossible for all but the biggest brands.

At Webology, we strive to be honest and upfront with our clients. As much as we love SEO, it’s not the right fit for everybody. If you’re just getting your toes wet in the world of digital marketing, you should probably start with a basic website and paid traffic via search or social. Doing SEO right requires big budgets. Most organizations will be better served by starting with paid advertising channels first and reinvesting the ROI into SEO for long-term gains.

We can help you get started with a good strategy for paid search or social that will put you on the right path to growing your business through digital marketing. Once we make your website profitable with paid traffic, we’ll be ready to help you start your SEO journey. Or if you already have the budget and patience to begin SEO today, we’re also ready to get started immediately to help you continue building your digital presence.

Contact Webology for SEO Help Today

Ready to take your brand to the next level? If you’re serious about sales growth and committed to your business for the long-term, we want to work with you.

Webology is a team of highly talented internet marketers who understand the complexities of modern SEO. Partner with us and we’ll hit a home run for your brand. Just fill out the form below to get started.