Top 10 Tips That Can Fire Up Your Local SEO 

• Small local businesses can compete with big businesses by doing local SEO since the earliest days or with businesses featuring auto-generated local listings.
• The ever-changing ranking factors raise the bar higher and higher for local businesses.
• The following local SEO tips will give you some advantage over your nearest competitors.

#Include Location Pages to Your Website

• Having a designated lending page for each of your business locations is excellent for your local SEO efforts.
• That makes it easy for search engines to pinpoint your listing and send the right location to the searcher.

#2 Update GMB

• Updated with accurate info Google My Business account is essential for local SEO. It doesn’t just keep your basic business information accurate, but it also looks visually pleasing.
• You can upload your logo on your avatar, add photos of your products in high resolution, as well as exterior and interior photos of your business premises.

#3 Claim All Listings

• It is essential to claim every listing with your business name; make sure that every piece of information on the listings is up-to-date, and there aren’t duplicates.
• To speed up the process, you can use tools such as Moz Local which can help you swiftly detect all listings that contain your business name.

#4 Use Google’s Keyword Planner to Identify Relevant Keywords

• Use Google’s keyword planner, a free tool that allows you to find all the relevant keywords used by your targeted audience to find companies and services within your niche.
• You can base your local SEO strategy on those keywords. For best results search for high search volume keywords featuring low competition.

#5 Make the Most of Social Media

• Many don’t know that it can be very beneficial to local SEO as Google crawls and draw data from social platforms. That’s why you need to keep your social profiles current.
• Google will crawl Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Twitter, or even your YouTube profile.

#6 Implement Local Link Building as Part of Your Local SEO Strategy

• Earn links from authoritative websites in your nearby area related to your niche. This is one of the most important strategies for any successful local SEO.

#7 Aquire Backlinks from Business Partners

• Let them know that by adding your link they will be doing you a massive favour. It’s free, so it’s kind of no brainer on their side.
• You can also offer to add their links on your website, so it’s win-win on both sides.

#8 Focus on Local Content

• Add content that is relevant to your local customers and specific for your area.
• Add new content regularly for the best results. This is also super important for local SEO in acquiring backlinks.

#9 Attain Positive Google Reviews

• Great reviews not only allow for your listing to stand out, but they are an essential ranking factor.
• When searchers see a bunch of five-star reviews, they know that they are looking at a reputable business that is highly recommended by its customers.

#10 NAP Consistency

• If you want search engines to provide your business to searchers, the name of your business, address, and phone number (NAP) need to be the same on every listing. Your business name needs to include Inc, Co., or LLC.
• Additionally, keep an eye on how suite numbers, street, and road are written on the listings. You can check all that via the Moz Local search tool and make the proper adjustments if needed.

How to Push Your Website on Google Discovery?

• In a recent post, Google officially provided a glimpse into the new and updated conditions under which your website can show on Google Discovery. This holds a massive significance to content publishers as it can provide a massive load of traffic on their respective websites.
• Google Discovery is aggregated content that is shown on the Android phone’s homepage, both the app and the web version. Each Discovery feed is based on the user’s search preferences, history, favorite topics, and places they follow.

How to show your content on Google Discovery?

Before we get into what it takes for your content to be shown on Google’s Discovery, one needs to learn what is unacceptable to be shown on Google Discovery. The list of things that are against their basic principles includes:

• Spammy content
• Confidential and personal information
• Medical content
• Profanity
• Gore content
• Adult content
• Dangerous and harassing content

On the other hand, if you aim for your content to be shown on Google Display, the latest guidelines include having:

• Content that offers a unique insight into an event, product, or topic.
• Content that describes a recent and popular event event
• Content that is not misleading in any way, but provides clear data, bylines, information, and is backed by a reputable media organization
• Content that includes high-quality images. Large images (minimum 1200px wide) are always favored.
• Titles that capture the essence of the content and in no way are misleading.

Other things that matter

• No structured data or special tags are needed so your content becomes eligible for Google Discovery.
• Just because your content is eligible for Google Discovery it doesn’t mean that it will be shown in its feed
• If your content is picked for Google Discovery you can follow your performance via the Performance Report for Discovery.

The Importance of Video Marketing for SEO

• People love great video, and it is one of their favourite types of content.
• There are several types of videos that you can produce: testimonials, product videos, ads, blogs, and so on.
• It is an extensive list, and your only limit should be your niche and what works best for your potential customers.

SEO and Video Marketing

• Your target demographic might love your videos, but how that contribute to organic traffic? What is the effect of video marketing on your SEO?
• Some experts would start first by explaining the purpose of the videos, the size of your business, the industry you are part of, the audience, and so on.
• Even if they love to talk about it for hours, the final answer will always be the same – YES, video marketing is useful for SEO.

Video SEO 101

• Video SEO is a process in which you optimize a video so that search engines can comprehend what’s the video about.
• With a well-done video SEO, search engines can match relevant search queries with your video content.
• The most straightforward way to do so is to include JSON-LD schema markup to the video. 
• The metadata in the schema markup will tell search the engine pieces of information such as title, image thumbnail, length, transcript (if possible it is very recommendable), and description. Here how a markup schema looks:

Tips to make the most of your video SEO efforts

• For best results, you need to generate schemes through schema.org.
• Google’s structured data testing tool is a great online tool to check whether internet search engines can read your markup.
• Always follow Google’s official blogs, where you can learn about the best practices that lead to top results.

Additional SEO factors to consider

• If you want to be sure that your video can be crawled by Google, it needs to be in one of the following formats: 3g2, .3gp, .asf,.divx, .avi, .mp4, .mpe, .flv, .f4v, .m2v,.m4v, .m3u8, .ram, .rm, .mkv, .mov,.mpg, .mpeg, .ogv, .qvt, .wmv, .webm, .xap., vob.
• In case the video is on the landing page, make sure that its title is different from the landing page title. At the same time, make sure that the video title is the same as the title in your schema markup.
• The thumbnail needs to be viewable even when brought down to 116 x 65 pixels and can be crawled by search engines. 
• Having a transcript is excellent as it can help Google get a better grasp of what’s in the video.

Google has posted a set of instructions that explain how to prepare your video so users can easily find it. 

Reasons why video needs to be an integral part of your SEO strategy

Video Content Lowers Bounce Rates and Increases Conversion

• According to research conducted by Wistia, video content significantly decreases bounce rates. On average, people tend to spend 2.5x more time on web pages featuring video content than on webpages without one. 
• It’s even more important that video dries conversion. A 2018 study revealed that more than 80% of consumers were more convinced into buying a certain service/product after watching a video.
• With a video, you get an increase in conversion of around 80%. This video needs to be professional and persuasive to get that effect. 

Shares & Links

• For the most part, SEO is mainly about content and links. A single blog post with a video in it will draw 33 times more inbound links than a post without a video.
• Social videos are typically shared 12x times more than text and images. The point is well-crafted content that includes a video can lead to multiple links and numerous shares. 

Video Answers & Google Snippets

• Google has a crush on videos because people love them, too. According to a statistic released by Moovly, webpages with embedded videos are 50x more likely to appear on SERP than webpages without one.
• Google will especially appreciate if your embedded video comes from YouTube, its video hosting platform.

Platforms for Hosting and Sharing Videos: There are many video platforms where you can upload, host, and share your videos. YouTube is, by far the most popular one, which is owned by Google.  Each platform comes with specific characteristics that are tailored to suit certain types of users.

YouTube: If you care greatly about SERP, then your focus should be primarily on YouTube videos. It is a free platform whose popularity is ever-expanding. 

Vimeo: This is an excellent platform for hosting high-quality videos, collaborating with others on your videos, sharing, and so on. It offers powerful analytics that can help you get some insights on how your video performs, your viewers, and so on. 

Wistia: This is quite a unique video marketing platform as it creates the JSON-LD markup for your video. Perhaps it is one of the best for raising brand awareness and video SEO.  

Conclusion: Google is particularly interested in video answers that serve search queries. Suppose, you plan to focus more on video marketing. In that case, you need to figure out what your targeted audience wants to see, how to create the best possible videos for your targeted audience, how to make the most of SEO for videos and choose the best platform that will serve your business goals best.

Big Google Search Update Turns Out to be a Search Results Glitch

• A week ago, the entire SEO community was on its feet, wondering what hit them? Was it a new Google update they didn’t see coming?
• At that point, websites from the 5th and the 6th page jumped to page one, whereas many websites from page one got demoted to other pages.
• That pretty much got the entire SEO community in a panic mode. 

However, there’s a catch

• What everyone thought was a new massive update turned out to be a glitch on Google’s side.
• John Mueller from Google later tweeted saying that it was a glitch on their side and that their engineers have fixed it in the meantime.
• After they confirmed that it was big on their side, the SEO community felt at peace, knowing that things are back in normal once again.
• All websites got its original ranking. The balance in the SEO universe was restored, for the community that lost its breath for a while.

So, what went wrong?

• Later, Gary Illyes from Google went all technical in an attempt to explain what went wrong on their side. He said that something went wrong with the indexing system and that caused havoc.
• In a tweeter thread, he spoke about their indexing system named Caffeine. Caffeine is responsible for various processes such as ingesting fetch logs, scheduling new crawls, rendering data, fetching data, computing signals, extracting structured data, extracting links, and so on. It is a rather long and extensive list of operations performed by their indexing system.

• He also explained how all that is interconnected and how a bug in one of the processes affects another process which eventually down streams to website ranking.
• He was trying to make a point that they run a very complex, interconnected system that is not error-free. 

The bottom line

• If this was an update, then it would have turned the SEO industry upside down.
• “Fortunately”, it was just Google’s indexing system having a bad day, or a bad hour at the very most.
• Things are now back in normal, business goes as usual, and we all pray that there aren’t any shock waves like that one anymore.

Nine “Google My Business” Updates That Can Help Your Business Bounce Back in 2020

• The COVID-19 pandemic sent many brick-and-mortar businesses on a roller coaster full of temporary closures, supply issues, quarantines, and other setbacks. Along the way, many businesses realized the importance of Google My Business listings.
• Google also took note of that and introduced a set of new features so that businesses can easily cope with the chaos from the pandemic. Here’s a closer look at the main features brought to us by Google and how businesses should make the most of them.

Temporary Closed

• The temporarily closed feature is designed to inform people that the business is shut down but only temporarily.
• The feature is not limited to closures due to the pandemic but can also be used by seasonal businesses (i.e., ski rental businesses that are open during the snow season).

New Safety Maps Features

• Google Maps received a set of updates focused on the safety of the people regarding the Coronavirus. As a result, people can find safer travel routes, facility guidelines, businesses that are temporarily closed, and so on.
• For example, Google Maps can now recommend the safest route that avoids crowds, which is extremely important during the pandemic.

Removed Restrictions from Google Post Chain

• Before the pandemic, Google didn’t allow businesses with over 10 locations to automatically update their panels. However, once the pandemic started, all businesses can add dynamic content such as special offers, promotional events, and changes in their work time. 
• Furthermore, businesses are encouraged to inform their potential customers about their health protocols in place. GMB always prioritizes posts related to COVID-19.

New GMB Attributes 

• Thanks to the new GMB attributes, businesses can add no-contact delivery and curbside pickups to their delivery forms, which is crucial during a pandemic. They are especially important for retailers and restaurants.

Local Service Ad Attributes

• Businesses and services can use this feature to inform their potential customers about how they will be protected once they visit their home.
• It is crucial information that reassures the clients that they can safely use your services and products without compromising their health. 

Telehealth

• This feature allows emergency centers to inform people about the COVID-19 pandemics online. That way, people get the necessary information and COVID-19 updates without physically visiting emergency centers and medical facilities.
• As a result, medical professionals spend more time helping patients in need than explaining stuff related to the current pandemic.

Donation Links and Support

• Google lets businesses post information about how their local community can support them by making donations and buying gift cards.
• Retail sales have been up lately, but many small businesses are still struggling to get by. Any type of support is welcome and necessary, especially for small businesses. 

Secondary Hours

• Recently, Google has allowed businesses to publish special hours of operation on their GMBs.
• The idea is to accommodate elderly people, people with special needs, and some other groups to avoid potentially big crowds.

Visual Content on GMB

• Google has enabled businesses to upload images and videos to show how safety protocols are implemented in their place of business, how customers practice social distancing, how their employees are protected, and so on.
• It is about presenting our “new reality” and how we can all go on with our lives without jeopardizing our health and others’ health.

In conclusion

• GMB is getting more and more attention from people who use it to get information about local businesses.
• If you haven’t been paying attention to your GMB listing, it is about time to do so.
• It can make the difference between a closing shop and making it through one of the biggest challenges the world has seen. 

Four Proven Tactics to Speed up Your Shopify Website

• Page speed is particularly important to e-commerce websites because it plays a huge role in the user experience, which has a profound effect on conversion rates.
• Some of the fastest loading Shopify websites share these common traits:

• They rely on a lightweight theme.
• They don’t run too many apps.
• They pay special attention to the images they use.
• If you want your Shopify website to load fast, check out these four tactics: 

Start with a fast theme

• The average theme needs 3.8 seconds to load (FCP), to handle 171 requests and weighs approximately four megabytes.
• Anyone can use these benchmarks to evaluate how their Shopify website performs. 

Integrate lazy loading

• The idea here is to load the images as the user scrolls through the website instead of loading them at once.
• In terms of implementation, this is a pretty straightforward job for most developers.  

Be mindful about the apps you use

• When you own an e-commerce site, you want it to have a chatbot, pop-up ads, and all sorts of apps. That’s great as they all bring something else to the table.
• The more, the merrier doesn’t apply to Shopify websites as it also means slow loading time.
• The trick is not to remove all of them, but only those that don’t drive value to the site. If they don’t help with the conversion, remove them from your Shopify website.

Compress images

• Almost by default, Shopify websites are image-heavy. That can significantly increase the page load time if the images are not compressed.
• Typically, JPEG images are smaller in size compared to PNG images. Scaling down the images can significantly reduce the load time.
• It’s even more convenient that Shopify’s ecosystem offers great solutions to compress and resize your images in a heartbeat.

Fact: Twenty Five People Click the First Google Search Result

• A study by Sistrix analyzed over 80 million keywords and search results. The study aimed to understand user engagement.
• The results revealed average CTR drops considerably after the first search result.
• More than a quarter of Google users click the first search result. The average organic click-through-rate of the first search result in 28.5%.
• The second and third results had an average CTR of 15% and 11%, respectively. The tenth search result had an average CTR of 2.5%.

Google Click-through-Rates

• SEO is critical for ranking and driving traffic.
• According to Sistrix analysis, the second-place web page will generate at least three times more clicks than the sixth place page. The first place page earns ten times more clicks than the tenth place page.
• The CTR for pages on the second page of Google search results had an average of less than 1%.
• Many factors impact the CTR of the pages on each position on the first page of search results.

Factors Impacting Click-through-Rates

• The most significant factor is the layout of SERPs.
• A majority of queries generate the traditional ten blue links SERP layout. Other queries generate other types of layouts.
• Here are other types of SERP layouts and how they affect CTRs.

SERPs with Sitelinks

• Sitelinks extensions are useful for boosting traffic. 
• The first position page with sitelinks extensions will achieve an average CTR of 46.7%.
• One of the possible reasons that sitelinks appear in search results is because the query involves a specific website.
• As such, the first result with sitelinks will receive half the clicks.

Featured Snippets

• The study reveals that there is no benefit for a page to display a featured snippet.
• The click-through-rate of such pages is 5.3%, which is below average.
• When the first search result has a featured snippet, the average CTR for position 2 and 3 is above average.

Knowledge Panels

• Knowledge Panels do not affect clicks as well.
• The average CTR for such pages is 16% rather than 28%.
• These pages receive fewer clicks because the knowledge panel provides the user with the answers they need.

SERPs with Google Ads

• All the top positions in the SERP are affected if the page is full of ads.
• However, the knowledge panel affects organic results more.
• The CTR is reduced by 10% in the presence of Google Ads.
• On the contrary, knowledge panels reduce CTR by 12%.

Bottom line

• The key takeaway from the study is that the keyword search volume should not be the only factor to consider when evaluating links.
• SERPs with Sitelinks extensions perform better.
• Featured Snippets and knowledge panels do not improve clicks for a web page.
• Presence of Google Ads hurt all positions on the first SERP.

Google Adds More Context to Images

• Google has created a new way for site owners to drive traffic using image search results.
• The new feature surfaces quick facts about the context of the image.
• The information is pulled from Google Knowledge Graph and displayed below the image.

Driving Traffic via Image Search

• The update will help searchers explore topics in detail. This includes visiting the webpage where the feature image was published.
• The feature is designed to make images more appealing. It works a lot like adding Meta tags to image search results. The only difference is the fact that appearing below the image comes from multiple sources.
• The results are sourced from all web pages on the internet. On the other side, the corresponding facts come from Google Knowledge Graph.
• Google shared an example that showed the searcher can see where the image is hosted and additional information taken from other sources on the web.
• The downside is that the site owners have little control over the information displayed below the images. The upside is that Google gives the end-user more information about the image that can possible lead to more clicks. The best part about this feature is that it requires no input from the site owners.
• Google enhances the snippets automatically.
• The search engine uses deep learning to understand what is in the image. Then it combines this understanding with the text from the source page. This information is matched to topics on Knowledge Graph before surfacing in Google Images.

Additional Avenues for Traffic

• Webpages that get included into the image search snippets have one more opportunity to have links included in search results.
• Wikipedia is not the only source of information for Google Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph draws information from hundreds of sources to compile billions of facts. In total, the Knowledge Graph has about 500 billion facts and five billion entities.
• A site owner can claim a Knowledge Panel on the Knowledge Graph to submit information. This feature is not open to everyone. It is an extra advantage to sites that can claim a knowledge panel.
• Businesses can benefit from claiming a knowledge panel. Local businesses have the most to gain, especially businesses that feature a lot of images on its web pages. Such businesses have a high chance of surfacing underneath an image alongside a link.
• This feature will be appearing in images of people, places, and things at first.

Bottom Line

• Google Knowledge Graph provides a new way to boost traffic.
• Images are now as effective as SEO strategies, Keywords, and high-quality, relevant, and up-to-date content.
• Features’ sources can also appear in rankings.
• Local businesses can gain the most from the image search feature.

Google Pushes Mobile-First Indexing to March 2021

• Recently Google released a statement in which they prolong the deadline of the mobile-first indexing switchover. Initially, they set the deadline for September 2020, but now it has been pushed to March 2021.
• In March this year, right before we got hit by the pandemic, Google announced that they’ll be switching to mobile-first indexing starting from September 2020.
• Google made another announcement saying they realize that it’s not that easy to focus on business in these uncertain times. So they have decided to postpone it to the end of March 2021.
• At the same time, it is noteworthy that most websites have already done their homework and have shifted towards mobile-indexing first. Many webmasters, developers, and SEOs made the necessary adjustments on their websites.
• As a result, more than 70% of all websites within Google’s reach have already moved to mobile-first indexing. That way, the percentage is even bigger these days.

How to check if your website is ready for mobile-indexing first?

• To check that, you need to head to your account at Google’s Search Console. In case your website still not moved over, here are some potential issues that might be holding it back from an automatic migration:

• The mobile version loads very slowly.
• Your main content is identical both on your mobile and desktop version.
• You’ve blocked something you shouldn’t.
• Issues with your mobile robot meta tags
• Double-check video and images for their quality, image and video placement, differences between URLs for mobile and desktop versions, and so on.  

In Conclusion

• Even if your site has issues that prevent it from being switched to mobile-first indexing, there isn’t something to worry about.
• It is no longer necessary to prepare your website by September 2020. You can also ensure that your ranking won’t take a hit because of the mobile-first indexing switch.
• If your website can use some adjustments, don’t wait till the deadline and risk its ranking. 

Index Your Content Immediately With Bing WordPress Plugin

• Bing is launching a WordPress plugin that will get index your content immediately in search results.
• The entire process is done automatically once a site owner installs the plugin.
• After installation, the plugin has to be configured with an API key from Bing Webmaster Portal.
• The Bing WordPress plugin will detect new pages and updates to existing ones.

Installing Bing WordPress Plugin

• Search “Bing URL Submissions” on the plugin install page on WordPress and download it.
• Configure with your Bing Webmaster Tools API key to activate the plugin.
• The API key is available on the API Access page in the settings.

What next?

• URL for new and updated pages will be submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools API.
• The New Pages will be indexed immediately as they are being published.
• Existing pages will be refreshed as they are being updated.
• The plugin offers some features similar to Bing URL submission tool.
• The maximum daily URL is 10,000, but more can be provided with a special request from Bing Webmaster Tools team.

Plugin Features

• Switch the automatic submission setting on and off
• Submit URL to Bing index manually
• View recent submissions
• Retry failed submission
• Download URL submission

Bing for WordPress only

• The plugin is only available for WordPress. Other content management systems will be supported in the future.
• The code for the plugin is open source.
• Developers and CMS can leverage the idea for their sites.