Local ranking factors for your website -3
Local ranking factors for your website
I’m going to expose myself here – I knew nothing about ranking a website!
I’m an electrician by trade, and I’ve learnt a lot about
website rankings and SEO since I started this intriguing journey some three
years ago.
When I’m not teaching others how to boost their Internet
profile, I’m running my own electrical install and testing company – www.zaelectrical.com
For a long time, my company struggled to even rank on the
first few pages or even the Google map pack.
Clearly, this was an issue I needed to resolve – and ASAP.
The problem was, I wasn’t sure where to start. I’m just one guy, and it seemed
ludicrous to think I could compete with established companies with dozens of
staff members and bottomless budgets exceeding thousands of pounds a month.
With lots of trial and error, I realised that this wasn’t
only possible, but I could do it pretty well.
From the outset, it seemed impossible.
One thing I was hoping to do was give internet retail a
whirl, so I tried to sell products on the USA version of Amazon. These were my
listings:
9000 meters of climbing rope – 10m/ 20m /30m denominations /
unbranded
650 units of climbing chalk / branded – XLR8
400 units of unbranded climbing chalk
As much as I studied videos on YouTube and poured over
articles, I was out of my depth and fighting a losing battle. I mean, I barely
broke even once Amazon’s storage fees were deducted and then there were the
monthly charges and then the charges for
delivering my products from their warehouses. They even managed to lose some of
my stock.
I wasn’t about to admit defeat, so I tried Shopify and the
drop shipping model combined with Facebook ads.
This venture did give me a glimmer of hope regarding online
sales, it seemed to me that Facebook was the platform that was working for me
as far as optimising the metrics of my advertising impressions was going.
Finally, I managed to break even and this was enough to
motivate me to keep going. I decided to learn from these experiences and apply
them to my business in the UK
My journey looked something like this:
•
Watching lots of videos on YouTube.
•
Hiring SEO experts for £200 a month for 4
months.
•
Wiring up a friends house, which wasn’t
the easiest – in exchange for a website.
•
Re-doing the website again myself with
help from a freelancer on Fiverr.
•
And then having to do it again with
help from a friend I met through a work contact. (He told me that he was doing
the skeleton site after I had given him an outline explaining that I had been
let down so many times).
Thankfully, he pulled the site together.
I admit I was really pumped, and I hoped my website would
rank immediately.
Let’s just say that’s not what happened.
I threw myself into research. I would work on my company
during the day and I would come home to devote my time to studying.
It was then that everything started making sense.
I realised I can’t possibly out-think everyone else – any
big company will effortless out-budget and out-staff you.
Reinventing the wheel would be a pointless endeavour.
What are they doing and how is that working?
At that point, I struck me that everything depended on
having the right tools at my disposal.
So:
Get a domain from Google Domains with the main
keyword in the title.
Get a domain Host from Green Geeks - the fastest Host and 24/7 Helpline.
The first thing I learnt is Google My Business – GMB.
In the UK you have a big authority for trades called
Checkatrade with unlimited budget and 2 million back links – yes you read that
right, 2 million.
You can’t outwit these big companies, so...
Imitate – and over-ride them.
Step 1: Cue- Moz Pie Chart
This is such an indispensable tool and it’s legitimately
what started me on the road properly. It essentially gives you a % of every
item on the checklist to be completed for local and organic map positioning.
Through my studies I realised that the basics are:
•
Buy a Domain on Google domains with your keyword in the title.
•
Purchase hosting on a superfast host - Green Geeks.
Links and Authority:
1.
Google Index Count
2.
Link Count
3.
Linking Domains
4.
Majestic C Flow
5.
Domain Authority
6.
Website Age
Rank Checking:
1.
Google
2.
Google Mobile
3.
Google Maps
4.
Bing
5. Bing Local
Google My Business:
1.
This is claiming your business on the
GMB app and building your profile.I will elaborate further down on this blog.
On Site SEO of Your Website:
1.
Page Load Speed
2.
Robots.txt
3.
XML Sitemap
4.
Errors
5.
Internal Links
6.
URLs
7.
SSL
8.
SEO
9.
Page Titles
10.
Page Descriptions
11.
Open Graph Tags
12.
Twitter Card Tags
13.
Image.alt Tags
14.
H1 Tags
15.
Word Count
16.
Flash
17.
Responsive Design
18.
Mobile Friendly
19.
Mobile Load Speed
20.
Mobile Rendering
Content:
1.
Address
2.
Phone Number
3.
Schema.org Markup
4. Top Keywords
Something which really helped me is the
road boak Local Viking for GMB Listings.
You can find it here -Local Viking.
In order to avoid unnecessary headache,
it’s also important to find a program that is easy to navigate and understand.
Personally, I found that BrightLocal ticked all of the boxes..
Once I felt that my website was
relatively well-designed and operational, I started ordering citations on Fiverr.
The more specialised, the better.
I would highly recommend looking at
your top competitors with Brightlocal and matching or ordering more citations through them.
I also looked at Fiverr, which may certainly be the cheapest option – but you have to
research credentials and levels.
Then look at your top competitors'
keywords and optimise your GMB listing together with your website to match
those keywords and get content written for you on Fiverr/
Backlinks, well, well, well....
There are not shortcuts for this, and
whilst the citations you order will help get backlinks, the quickest way is to
ask other sites in your trade or profession to reference your site. This was my
route on my budget, but there are of course so many other ways to do this. Now,
Google doesn’t exactly approve if you buy them because this is against their terms
and conditions, so purchase them on Fiverr at your own risk.
I gave myself a little crash course about Wordpress, which is generally the easiest to
self teach with tutorials on the web. What’s more, the SEO and vast range of
plug-ins, paid and free, outweigh any other website builder by far.
I’d also try to gather reviews from each customer, and I
found that once I began approaching 70+ reviews I started to see my rank
increase in the local rankings for "near me" search terms
The image below is dated 6/6/2020 ranking me organically 3rd
on page 1 from page 5-6 - ZA Electrical Ltd.
Step 2: Study Some More - a Different Set of Tools
You tube – probably one of the best things to come out of
the 21st century.
I used it to learn more about my GMB listing and how to
maximise it.
•
Step 1 - I started on the logo,
reviews, regular photos, weekly posts, geo location and alt tag stuffed photos
•
Step 2
- Study Greg Gifford – pure brilliance.
•
Step 3 – Superior analytical tools such
as Semrush.
This tool has a free trial period, so you can give it a whirl and then cancel
before the trial expires without being charged anything.
With so much more tools at my disposal, I was feeling really
confident.
Whilst my DA is only 16, my other signals, including local
authority and citations and reviews, outweigh my competitors. This happened
after changing my rich snippets, SEO title, slug, meta description, featured
image of the rich snippets alt text, title, captions, descriptions, etc.
My rank really went way up. .
Basically, what I've learnt is that you can rank any website
by starting locally and then moving to a wider audience – you can rank any
website as long as you have the right tools.
My process looked a little like this:
1.
Buy domain with keyword in the title /
URL- Google
domains.
2.
Get hosting on a super fast host/ Green geeks/ English support for your website 24/7
/ Simply amazing service.
3.
Get WordPress, the rest are tedious but
a second option is a landing page. I recommend another builder for small one
page sites called Swipe pages.
4.
Get a GMB - Google my Business profile,
its free and from Google and can be operated from your smartphone.
5.
Get Citations on Fiverr, biggest draw card in local search - NAP being consistent.
6.
Learn Basic SEO and web page
optimization via the Moz Pie chart - this is your bible.
7.
Get a tracking software as you start
your journey – Brightlocal is $49 per month and you can help out 5 other businesses once
you've taught yourself.
8.
Use the Semrush/ Moz/ Ahreffs free trial periods to learn SEO to a higher level.
9.
Build up your portfolio and get reviews
for your GMB listing, Facebook reviews, Trustpilot reviews, and be religious
about this.
10.
Using Google analytics, free from
Google analyse your traffic and see what content - search terms are relevant to
your industry and site and add these with Fiverr to your site, so get content written on Fiverr.
11.
Level Up - Get the paid version of Semrush - search your competitors back link profile.
12.
Brightlocal has a great citation checking service you can properly check your
competitors sites and emulate their strategy, get the same back links as them and
get the same citations.
13.
Get reviews and add widgets to your
website from Trustpilot, Facebook and GMB widgets - Wordpress has all of these plugins to add widgets for free and it improves
multi platform credibility.
I did all of these things, and it
really paid off.
At the moment, I’m usually between 1-2
position on Google maps and 2nd and 2-3rd position on organic rankings on
Google.
Have fun, and I wish you all the best
on your journey to ranking your website.
This blog honestly contains everything
you’ll ever need!
Dune R Mac Donald
+447460037733
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