4 Local SEO Myths That Just Won’t Die

Certain local SEO misconceptions refuse to budge. No matter what you do, these absurd myths keep cropping up.

Local SEO is in huge demand and for good reason. It’s easier to rank for regional keywords and more worthwhile and lucrative for businesses who are targeting a specific region or county based on their own physical location. The immense interest in the topic, unfortunately, leaves the door open for misconceptions to form and circulate. These range from assigning false importance to certain information to the role Google My Business support staff plays in local SEO rankings.

Although we’re not sure why these myths keep making a comeback time and again, we do know that it’s important for online businesses—of any organizational size—to learn the reality of local SEO.

In this post, we discuss the top 4 local SEO myths and explain exactly why they simply Will. Not. Work.

Myth #1—A Unique NAP Listing Will Influence The Ranking Factor

NAP is short for name, address, phone number.

There is a myth that the suite number of your office address mentioned in the Contact web page is going to make a difference in your website’s ranking because Google values it heavily in the search rankings.

Somehow they are convinced that this will make their office address gain more online visibility. So they include the suite number in their office address in the hopes of standing out from the competition.

Google uses suite numbers as nothing more than a visual aid. In fact, it often completely ignores suite numbers in addresses.

This means that if you’re adding suite numbers so that customers will have an easier time finding your location, that’s great. However, if you’re doing it for a ranking boost, you’re just wasting your time.

Myth #2—Your Ranking Is Penalized If You Don’t Follow Every Google Guideline

There are one of two things that can happen if you fail to follow a Google My Business guideline.

A) You get a soft suspension

B) You get a hard suspension

  • Soft suspension: This means that you cannot use Google My Business to manage your local business. This creates a huge issue as you are no longer able to respond to customer reviews, use Google Posts, or receive any notifications regarding your listing.
  • Hard suspension: This has a more severe impact on your business as Google effectively eradicates your entire local business from its listing. This includes reviews, images, maps, and more. Since the listing has been taken down completely, there’s no way for your online business to rank in any of the local search pages.

However, what Google doesn’t do is use an algorithmic method to diminish the ranking of your business listing. Doing so would violate their own guidelines.

Myth #3—Your Ranking Is Impacted By Your Service Area

Business owners can display a visual indicator of the distance they will travel to service their customers. They do this by adding their service area for listings in the Google My Business dashboard.

They believe that doing so influences their Google rankings.

It does not.

Even if you service 10+ cities, there will be no effect on your search engine ranking for those particular cities. The main factor which determines local rankings is which city your business is based in. This information is given in the address location on your web page.

Myth#4—Google My Business’s Support Team Can Fix Ranking Issues

There is an extensive support team at Google My Business. They interact with clients on popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as well as via email, phone, chat, and their online forum.

Since it’s incredibly easy to access their service, companies usually get in touch with them when they face an issue involving Google My Business features.

When we say issues with features, we mean features and not ranking problems. Keep in mind that the on-call support staff at Google My Business isn’t comprised of SEO experts. This means that they have very limited technical knowledge of the way that the algorithm works.

The team of people is not engineering staff who deal with the algorithm, but only the platform experts. There’s no use reaching out to them to help you resolve local SEO ranking issues.

Conclusion

Don’t fall for myths. Local SEO is a goldmine for businesses if done right. Hire professional who know fact from fiction to do the job. Search Berg is a leading local SEO service provider with a team of talented professionals hailing from various industries. If you want your local business to show up on the first page of Google, our services are all you need!

Our top-of-the-line SEO services guarantee a major increase in rankings in just 30 days. With a 100% money back guarantee, you don’t have anything to lose.

Our packages are competitively priced and start from $199 only. All packages include detailed, customizable local SEO strategies to ensure that your business achieves the number one spot on SERPs.

Give us a call at 855-444-4777 to see a drastic boost in your local SEO rankings!

Does SEO Work for Small Businesses – We Show You How To Make Your Business A Commercial Success

The SEO game is considered quite technical.

Believe it or not, but SEO success is mostly about getting the basics right. This is especially true for small business websites. And we’re sure plenty of high profile SEO gurus will agree with us on that.

Which brings us to the Pareto Principle?

Here’s what it says:

“…80% of the results come from 20% of the action.”

Talk about perfectly timed coincidences.

Today, all we see on the surface is the glitz and glamor of advanced SEO techniques, and all we aggressively pursue. So many ignore the fact that small business SEO success is still built on a strong foundation of the basics. We seem to have forgotten that basics are still the keys to being successful with SEO, and they play a HUGE role.

Here’s a very popular case study.

Back in 2016, Yoast SEO experts experimented with a series of optimizations to help improve traffic to their website; including keyword optimization.

They incorporated keywords into their catchy headlines.

The result?

This very simple improvement gave their website a traffic boost of almost 30%. That’s right! A whopping 30% boost.

So it’s clear that if you want SEO success for small businesses, you should start with the basics first! Build a strong SEO foundation. Hold tight to the Pareto Principle. Work on the 20-percent, and you’ll reach the 80-percent in no time.

What type of basics, you ask?

Start with the keywords and headlines

Since we’ve already discussed how SEO experts at Yoast used keyword optimization to accomplish SEO success, we think it will be perfect to use the strategy as a starting step.

The very first thing you need to do is find keywords that are relevant to your business and customer-niche. At the same time, these keywords should have low competition and a high search volume.

You can use a keyword research tool to help you out with this. Our personal favorites are:

Come up with multiple keywords.

Once you have the right keywords, craft keyword-incorporated creative headlines for your webpages. Make sure the headings are not more than 60-characters long.

Try to place the keywords at the beginning of the headlines.

You can use CoSchedule’s headline analyzer to craft catchy headlines for your webpages.

While you’re at it, also optimize the URL of your webpages to include the keywords.

Move to a search-engine-friendly CMS

This is arguably the most fundamental mantra in small business SEO success.

Without a search-engine-friendly content management system, you simply can’t go anywhere; all your other SEO success strategies are ineffective.

Clay Cazier explains it really well in his post on Search Engine Land about what makes a CMS search engine friendly. You should definitely read it in your free time.

Our personal recommendation will be to use WordPress.

Here, at Search Berg, we’ve designed and redesigned many websites for our clients on WordPress, and we can safely say it’s one of the best search engine friendly CMS.

Optimize internal and outbound links

Internal links serve as gateways between your web pages. Outbound links on the other hand are reference links directing to webpages outside your website.

Quite often (and to our surprise), we see lack of internal linking on websites. For some reason, small business owners don’t use this practice as extensively as they use other practices.

Neil Patel gives a detailed argument of how internal linking helps SEO.

Don’t let internal linking slip from your SEO net.

Internal linking helps your website visitors easily navigate your website. Plus, it generates valuable leads for your business.

As for your outbound links, run a check to make sure they are functional (not broken) and directing to credible, high authority websites. There are many tools available online that can help you assess the quality of your outbound links. This is important, considering how Google considers outbound links so significant.

Don’t forget the site structure

Your site structure is crucial to helping Google understand what your site and business is all about.

Google uses the structure of your website to guide its indexing process. If the structure is too complex or disorganized, Google might not be able to index it the way you want it to. This is certainly not good for your website’s rankings, and thus your business.

Make sure the content on your website is properly organized, with a clear hierarchy and easy to crawl structure.

Maintain a uniform hierarchy through all your webpages.

Work towards increasing your website speed

Website speed has been used as a ranking factor by Google since 2010.

And it’s not going anywhere, anytime soon.

Why Google places such high importance to website speed?

Because Google believes (and rightly so) that website speed directly influences online experience.

Fast websites improve a user’s online experience, while slow websites make it infuriating.

Consequently, websites with slower uploading speeds have high bounce rates. In turn, they’re ranked lower.

For small business SEO success, it’s critical to have a fast website.

To identify if your website is fast or slow, you can use a tool like Pingdom.

If you notice that your website’s speed is slow, there’s a range of things you can do to fix speed issues:

There are multiple strategies you can pursue, such as:

  • Optimizing your website’s design and code
  • Compressing the size of your CSS, JavaScript and HTML files
  • Investing in a CDN network
  • Changing your hosting service provider

Enlist your business on Google My Business

This is a local SEO-specific strategy.

Google My Business is basically Google’s business directory.

By enlisting your business on Google My Business, you provide your business information to Google and the search engine then uses it to improve your business’s visibility during local searches.

It’s quite easy and straightforward to sign up for the service.

Suffice to say, it’s a very powerful platform for small businesses and you must use it.

And that’s pretty much it!

Need help with small business SEO?

Search Berg is at your service!

We’re one of the leading small business SEO service providers in the United States. Employing an experienced and knowledgeable SEO team, we can transform your small business website, making it more effective at helping you achieve your business goals.

Get in touch with us today.

The Right Approach To Online Reviews And Testimonials For Hospitality Businesses And What It Means For Reputation Management In 2018

Consumer trust is of the utmost importance for businesses that work in the hospitality industry such as hotels, lodges, and luxury resorts. The more reliable, efficient and cost effective your services are, the higher the chances you have of expanding your existing customer base quickly. In the online arena, trust means positive reviews and testimonials left by actual individuals who have used the services at a hospitality establishment and are rating their experience. This makes popular review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google Reviews, essentially goldmines.

This post will highlight some recent research on the crucial role reviews and testimonials play for businesses in the hospitality industry. It will also highlight some strategies companies can employ to create custom benchmarks to conquer their competition.

Industry Stats—What Does The Research Say?

Here are some enlightening stats regarding the importance of customer reviews for hotel chains, lodging providers, etc.

According to an Ipsos MORI study, 97% of TripAdvisor users agree that customer approval was a key factor contributing to their purchase decision.

Moreover, 98% of those surveyed maintained that they considered online reviews, testimonials, and citations to be a leading cause of increased sales.

Yet another survey conducted by Static Brain established that 49% of customers refuse to make reservations at a hotel with no reviews. With such conclusive research, it’s evident that online reputation management is an indispensable part of the corporate strategy of businesses in the hospitality industry.

What Positive Online Reviews & Testimonials Mean For Your Business

There are several ways businesses in the hospitality industry stand to gain for favorable online customer reviews and testimonials. Some of these include:

  • It’s Great for Search Engine Optimization—Customer reviews consist of a client’s genuine opinion and are a treasure trove of useful data like keywords, customer perception about your brand, service hits and misses, etc. Reviews make reliable content for search engines, strengthening your digital media presence and SEO efforts.
  • Gives You an Opportunity To Improve Corporate Strategy—The reviews you receive should be used to learn something specific about your business. For instance, you might think that branding yourself as a ‘Bread and Breakfast’ aligns with your vision. However, the opinions of hundreds of customer reviews may open your eyes to other marketing pathways. Likewise, testimonials on your site about a particular service which has become a customer favorite should tell you a lot about which direction you need to go in.
  • Little Effort Is Required From Your Behalf—When it comes to reviews, clients are the ones creating content for. Depending on the size of your business and the current season, you could get thousands of reviews on a monthly basis.

The Right Approach To Managing Online Customer Reviews

Now that we’ve established how important good customer reviews are for the productivity of the hospitality businesses, let’s discuss how we can get them.

Independent platforms like TripAdvisor allow existing customers to express their opinions about a company—good or bad—without the company’s interference.

This is the ultimate reputation management technique because it dispels negative or false information about your business. Customers are assured that the review platform has no stakes in the game and therefore, is providing genuine customer feedback.

The following are a few effective tips on generating positive reviews.

  • Provide Top Quality Service—There’s no way around it; without genuine hard work, your dream of becoming a 5-star hospitality business will stay a dream. You can’t deliver a sub-standard experience to customers and expect great reviews. If you feel like your service management could use some more work, start investing the necessary time and resources into that department today
  • Respond To All Kinds of Reviews—Even if you think a review is fake, don’t ignore it. Leave a polite, non-committal response to the review instead of leaving a blank space in the designated area. The simple fact that you didn’t ignore such a review shows that you have confidence in the quality of your services and are always willing to consider customers’ feedback. This gives readers a chance to judge your brand’s personality and know exactly what kind of company you run.
  • Make Social Media Handles Public—More than TripAdvisor, social media platforms like Instagram are taking the lead as the number one source of customer reviews for some businesses like restaurants. Make your Instagram handle public so that every mention of your company on listings leads readers to your business. Typical Instagram searches for a business show photos and comments of customers who’ve visited your business. From the photos customers share to their comments, and even the emojis they use, all of these tacitly point to the quality of service you provide.

While it’s true that SEO is crucial for any industry, the hospitality industry depends on favorable customer reviews and testimonials from sites like Yelp. Unfortunately, where there are positive reviews, there are also negative ones and often times negative reviews are left with the purpose of hurting a business rather than sharing an actual experience. This is where SEO-based reputation management—one of the most effective ways to counter negative SEO, improve brand perception and increase consumer trust—comes in. A positive company image, powerful brand identity, and a high level of trust are the key benefits businesses enjoy from hiring professional reputation management services.

Final Word

If you want to put your best side forward, consider the reputation management services we provide. Search Berg understands exactly how great customer trust can help businesses in the hospitality industry to gain web authority and strengthen their brand.

This is why our RM services are customizable and designed to boost a company’s online reputation and increase the level of trust customers have in your services.

Our repertoire of services includes SEO, SMM, PPC, Content Marketing, and more.

Contact us today if you want to avail exemplary reputation management services to win the game.

The Art of Linkbuilding by “Earning” Links Through Content in 2018 and Beyond

Google has undeniable dominance in the world of search engines. It’s unparalleled. It’s undisputed and its unmatched because no other search engine even comes close to offering the level of information and accuracy that Google does.

But what makes Google so powerful, so accurate and so reliable?

Its user-focused algorithms!

Google algorithms simply leave no page unturned (*pun intended*) when it comes to providing internet users (like us) with a matchless search experience. If a page is ranked high on Google, it’s because the algorithms have found it authoritative, important, reliable and most importantly, relevant to the user’s search query and most likely to lead to a positive search experience.

To gauge websites across all these parameters, Google assess them on multiple ranking factors. One such ranking factor is links or the number of “backlinks” indexed to the page to be more specific.

Think of backlinks as references in the offline world.

In the offline world, companies and individuals endorse and promote various products and services. The more different types and number of recommendations, the more popular that brand becomes.

Same is the case here.

Backlinks are a recommendations or citation for a webpage. The websites and social media profiles backlinking to the webpage are the media, companies and the people.

When a webpage has more backlinks coming from quality sources, Google considers that page of high value. Consequently, Google ranks that page higher in the SERPs.

The process of acquiring backlinks for a webpage is known as link building; a very popular and in-demand digital marketing service today.

Some common ways to build backlinks to a webpage (or website) include:

  • Link requests, where the website administrator simply asks other admins of other websites to link back to their webpage. They may agree as is, or they may ask for a reciprocating backlink in favor.
  • Leveraging online directories, where web admins create free listings and build backlinks to their webpages. It’s similar to link buying, but it’s not considered a “bad link buying” practice as per Google’s guidelines.
  • Guest blogging, where you submit a blog or article to another website and create backlinks via the submitted content piece.
  • Creating high-value content, where you create content that is truly unique, acting as an authority (and reference-worthy) content piece on the subject of discussion.

Through link building, SEO expect generate web traffic, brand awareness, search engine rankings and higher web page visibility and higher domain or page authority.

However not all links are created equal and over the years, focus has shifted from building links to earning links. SEO’s today have a much better understanding of how search engines work and what entails a good link building process.

As a result, web admins and SEO experts have started focusing more on earning backlinks than building them.

Anna Crowe writes for Search Engine Journal:

To build a high-quality, credible backlink profile, you need to stop working on building links and start working on earning links.

What’s the difference between Link Building and Link Earning

The concept is same, to get more backlinks to your website or webpage. However, link earning specifically focuses on establishing generic associations as opposed to establishing reciprocated or paid associations.

Link earning is like a subset of link building.

Since you’re seeking generic associations in link earning, the only link building technique which then remains relevant in the context is creating high value content. If you create high value, authority content, website administrators are likely to cite your content on their webpage or website. This way you get to generically generate backlinks for your webpage. Readers who end up on your page also acknowledge the content as worthy of earning backlinks, and it enables them to see it through their skepticism and appreciate the information.

Creating High Value Linkable Content

So how to create high value linkable content?

It all starts with a strategy.

Ask yourself: What theme would you like to have for your content? Does the theme align with your business goals? Is the theme relevant to your target audience? How strongly it resonates with their problems?

These questions will help you create a strategy for your content.

Once you have a strategy in place, the next step is to research the facts and information. Study everything there is to be studied about the topic.

Using the gathered information from your research, create a compelling content for your audience. Use visuals where possible. Bake in the resources. Maintain clarity. Discuss your point comprehensively. Spoon feed them. One thing to note is that quality viral content doesn’t have to come in the shape of a blog. There are many avenues you can pursue. Make a short video about a product you are selling. Create a visually stunning infographic on the benefits of a particular service that your business is offering. Make your content standout. It doesn’t have to be a blog post

In addition, you can promote your content through influencers and industry leaders. Of course, they won’t just facilitate your request (as they’ve a reputation to maintain), so you’ll have to work towards building a partnership with them first. You’ll have to earn their trust to convince them to promote your content. This will further help you generate more backlinks to your web page.

Hire Search Berg for Link Building Services

In this age of content skeptics and critics, link building is all about link earning links through quality content!

Do you run a business that needs online presence?

Looking to monetize your site through quality link building and link earning techniques?

Do you want your product or service pages to rank on the first in Google?

Search Berg is at your service!

We’re one of the leading digital marketing service providers in the United States. We are an award winning agency. In 2017 we won the Site Jabber Customer Choice award. In mid-2018, we were ranked in the top 10 web agencies in New York. We completed our 15,000th SEO project and cemented our place as a leading SEO services provider in the US. Employing an experienced and knowledgeable SEO team that is always up to date with industry developments and standards, we can transform your website, making it more effective at helping you achieve your business goals.

Get in touch with us today to discuss your link building project.

Search Berg Ranked In Top 15 Local SEO Companies In New York

After 10 years of hard work, the accolades and recognition is finally pouring in from all over the world. After winning the 2017 Customer Choice Award for Best SEO by Site Jabber, Search Berg is has now been ranked in the top 15 Local SEO Companies in New York.

Digital marketing is all the rage in the ever-changing face of online marketing today. With over 1 trillion searches made on Google in 2017 alone, its popularity has a massive influence on what people see about a brand. People want to win at SEO and the best way to go about it is to go with an Award winning SEO agency that specializes in Local SEO.

…But What IS Local SEO?
Local SEO is an instrument that enables you to promote the visibility of your business online through location-based searches.

It is simply a variation of standard SEO practices aimed specifically at ensuring that your business is found online by people making searches related to your industry in their particular localities. That means you have higher chances of turning a potential visitor to a confirmed customer/client.

These searches include certain geo qualifiers like city, state, etc. along with “near me” searches that Google provides based on the person’s location and then displays search results based on that area and information.

Why Is It Important?
Local SEO is crucial for maintaining an online presence for businesses that have brick-and-mortar stores or service providers for specific localities.

According to Forbes, 9 out of 10 mobile searches result in action—over half of which result in sales.

Moreover, 95% of smartphone users used their phones to search for local information.

How Can We Help?
Search Berg is ranked as one of the top New York City SEO Companies. We provide full-scale digital marketing services with a strong focus on SEO, PPC, web services and reputation management. With an experience of over 10 years in the digital marketing industry and over 15,000 projects completed, we are proud to be one of the leading agencies out there.

If you’re on the search for the top, professional, reliable and result-driven digital marketing agencies for local SEO services, call us at 8555-444-4777 to mark your local online presence.

Take a look at how Search Berg made the list, right here: https://upcity.com/local-marketing-agencies/lists/top-local-seo-agencies-in-new-york