8 Can't-Miss Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by ronell-smith

Off-page SEO is the act of optimizing your brand’s online and offline footprint through the use of content, relationships, and links to create an optimal experience for prospects and search engine crawl bots. It typically leads to gradual increases in positive brand mentions, search rankings, traffic to your site, and conversions.

Sounds fairly straightforward, right?

Well, for the attorney seated in front of me in my kid’s elementary school lunchroom, I might as well have just told him the earth is flat.

"That makes no sense to me," he said, pushing his chin forward and tilting his head, as if waiting for me to admit that I was pulling his leg. "You mean, there’s all this stuff [an SEO] does on my site? And there is stuff that we — me, my team and [the SEO] — should be doing off our site as well? That’s like telling me, 'It’s not enough that you live and pay for a nice house in a gated community. You also need to guard the gate to the community and pick up trash along the road leading up to your driveway.'"

His example could not have been more apt.

"Not caring about off-site SEO is like having that great house in the gated community, but none of your friends want to visit because they’ve heard from others that it smells like vomit on the inside, and no one they talk to can either confirm or deny it."

By imagining your website as a home you'd like people to visit, it's easier to see the value of off-site SEO.

I continued: "It’s not enough to only care about your website/brand or your house/neighborhood; you must always be working to enhance its reputation to ensure others will desire to visit/learn more about it."

He saw the light.

"So basically we do off-site SEO to ensure the work we do onsite and as a brand are most effective?" he asked.

Exactly!

What off-page SEO is and why your brand cannot afford to ignore it

In the SEO world, we don’t need to be convinced of the value of off-page SEO.

We know that well before people seek our brands out, they have formed an opinion of it based on reviews, comments from friends, family members, or online acquaintances, and whatever information we can glean online or offline (apart from your website).

Therefore, we’d be fools to disavow making off-page SEO a priority, given how important it is.

However, the more common mistake — among SEOs at least — is to see off-page SEO through only the prism of link building, which, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of off-page SEO.

That is, in working to build your brand’s off-page SEO prowess, links are certainly a benefit, not the goal.

Think of it this way:

• Goal of off-page SEO: To accumulate positive signals and interactions for your brand, with the hope of those factors being a net positive.
• Benefit(s) of off-page SEO: Brand mentions, positive reviews, links, etc.

So while it’s important to think of links when making off-page SEO a priority, it’s also vital that you (a) view them in context (important but not singularly so) and (b) give priority to the host of factors that lead to off-page SEO providing a boost for your brand.

Those factors include, but are not limited to, creating an excellent, worthwhile product or service; guest posting on popular, relevant blogs; building relationships with influencers; earning positive press; capturing positive reviews and responding to negative reviews; and monitoring mentions of your brand, to name a few.

Because our goal is to create a post that’s accessible, interesting and immediately useful, we’ll break down what we think are 8 key areas worth focusing on for off-page SEO under three umbrellas:

• Brand
• Audience
• Content

The intention is to provide a prism through which you can more easily categorize your efforts and a framework by which you can make those efforts a reality.

Brand

"No amount of SEO in the world can help a crappy product or service (at least not for long)." This is a sentence I frequently utter to folks who refuse to prioritize what they offer in favor of trying to put lipstick on a pig.

#1: Create a 10X product or service

When your product or service is recognized as the best in its class, your job as SEO becomes much, much easier.

That’s because both online and offline, people are likely saying great things about the product and brand, which leads to visits to your website, positive reviews on third-party sites, and increased sales of the product.

This only occurs, however, if you focus first and foremost on creating the best product you can.

Easier said than done, I know.

Here’s a great place to start, depending upon where your product/service is in the evolution cycle:

• Existing product: Deliver the goods on features customers would most benefit from based on requests and complaints online regarding competing products.
• New product: Focus on the most essential benefits your new product can provide to the prospective audience. When you do this, you remove objections and features present themselves.

#2: Customer service

No one who’s watched the United Airlines meltdown needs to be sold on the value of customer service as an effective asset for off-site SEO. The brand will be paying for that epic disaster for years as millions of folks continue to share the video and images of the event.

It’s not hard to imagine how poor customer service has made the brand’s SEO and PR teams’ reputation management efforts a nightmare.

For your brand, focus on a singular goal: Leaving everyone your brand/brand spokespeople comes into contact with — online or offline — feeling as though the interaction could not have been more positive.

For example, at in-person events, make sure staffers wear a smile, empathetically interact with everyone they meet, and go out of their way to answer questions or provide general help. It also means ensuring any content you create leaves people feeling good about your brand.

It’s unlikely this billboard was much of an off-page SEO benefit to SouthBendOn.com.

# 3: Focus on web searchers' intent

Turns out the old cliche that “you attract more flies with honey than vinegar” is very relevant to SEO. People are typically more willing to buy and use your products and services if they can first find them.

A lot of times, our products and services fail to live up to their full potential because we aren’t matching our offering to the needs of our prospective audiences.

A great example of this is creating and sharing content without keywords the audience might be using to look for a similar product.

In addition to matching titles, descriptions, and keyword phrases to searcher’s intent, make sure you focus on where the content is shared and discussed.

It also starts with putting the needs of the audience first.

“For uncovering searcher intent…[s]earch, refine, broaden queries, talk to people, read discussion threads, have empathy,” wrote Rand Fishkin in a recent tweet.

Use Google Autosuggest, Keywordtool.io, and Answerthepublic.com to get in front of what it is people are looking for online relative to your product or service.

Audience

The better you know your audience, the more easily you can interact with, share with, and learn from them.

What does this have to do with off-page SEO? Everything.

Next to no one wakes up and decides to interact with your brand.

#4: Have a responsive social media presence

A typical search comes about because a person has an unmet need (e.g., "where is the nearest pizza joint?") or has a question they’d like answered (e.g., “how tall is the biggest building in Tokyo?”).

After using Google Autosuggest to find the answer, they’re likely to visit social media to learn more, ask questions, and interact with their friends, family members, and acquaintances.

You see where we’re going here, right?

Social media must be an invaluable component of your off-page SEO strategy.

It’s much easier than most brands think, too:

• Be there: If you have a social media account, make sure someone is monitoring it and can answer questions and respond to comments in a timely fashion.
• Be human: People online expect genuine interaction, not robotic responses or constant brand promotion.
• Be proactive: One of the best things you can do to help your brand is to use social media to be seen as a resource for the online community in the vertical you serve. Even if someone asks a question about a product or service you don't offer or that is offered by a competitor, don’t be afraid to chime in and offer praise when due.

As you can see, the price of unresponsiveness on social media negatively impacts far more than SEO:

Source

#5: Build connections with social media/online influencers

When people say “Social media does nothing for my brand,” most SEOs must think, “Oh, but how wrong you are.”

Whether it’s the largely unmeasurable dark traffic social sends to your site or the connections with a base of people who could be customers or supporters at some point, social media can be an asset for any brand, if used wisely.

For off-page SEO, one of the biggest benefits of social is the ability to create and nurture lasting relationships with influencers, those people with huge reach in the way of name recognition, myriad followers and fans, and connections with numerous high-ranking websites.

They’re also typically very much connected with other influencers.

As we see in the image below, even if Google isn’t using social signals to help determine rankings, the interplay of influencers and the sites they represent, like, and visit makes being on their radar a positive.

Image source

An effective strategy for enlisting the help of influencers to boost your off-page SEO is to get to know them in person, at events, and online via group chats/tweets and such, which puts you on their radar without much heavy lifting on your part.

Then, in the future, when you do create and share content, they’re more likely to recognize you and your brand and might share the content themselves.

Even better, later on, after you’ve developed a stronger relationship, you might even collaborate on a piece of content — for their site, your site, or a publisher such as an online magazine.

#6: Recommit to frequenting forums and discussion boards, and comment blogging

Want to get noticed by your desired audience and the influencers they follow?

Visit the most popular blogs in your vertical, and leave comments. In recent years, comment blogging has fallen off in popularity, in large part because comment spam led to most blogs no-following their links.

For the purpose of off-page SEO, links are less of a priority.

Your goal is simply to be where the action is and to leave a thoughtful comment that might catch the eye of the blogger, the platform’s editor, and any influencers who might be reading the content.

The same applies for sites like Reddit and Quora, where you can follow topics specifics to your brand or vertical and quickly get noticed for being knowledgeable, thoughtful, and empathetic in answering others’ questions or helping to drive discussion.

The SEO subreddit is very popular, frequented by many of the big names in SEO.

The relationships formed on these platforms have a way of paying huge dividends and can be invaluable for off-page SEO and reputation management.

Often someone notices your comments on one of these platforms, starts following you there, and then later does a Google or LinkedIn search to learn about you or your brand, which ultimately leads them to your website, where they might sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your blog.

#7: Quit guest blogging for links

You read that right.

Instead of guest blogging solely for links, use this tactic to help you build a rapport with some of the top publishers, editors, influencers, and brands online.

If done correctly, the links do come. But as long as you make links the priority, whereby it’s obvious that you’re looking for a transactional relationship as opposed to one that is mutually beneficial, the tougher it’ll be for you to use guest blogging effectively for off-page SEO.

Read, leave comments on their blogs, and connect with the top publishers in your vertical — or publishers that cover your vertical. Once you have developed a rapport and, hopefully, have a reputation for creating quality content, inquire about creating a guest post for the platform, assuming that option is available.

Even if that door doesn’t open, you’ll be able to hone your pitch and eventually get a foot in the door with other publishers.

Remember, too, that your website is but one tiny fish in a vast ocean of options. You need to connect with others in many places off-site to build the reach and influence that’ll drive attention and visits to your site, which is where guest blogging can big a huge asset.

Your brand's success depends upon a lot of factors outside your website. Image source

“Should you do guest posting for SEO? As a primary objective, I’d say no. But… reality is that the indirect impact remains very powerful,” wrote Stone Temple Consulting’s Eric Enge. “There is nothing like building your reputation and visibility to cause people to want more of your content. You get to build up your own audience, and ultimately some of these people will find their way to your site, find great content there, and link to it.”

Content

When most people say, think, or write "content," they most often think of text, images, videos, and information shared via social media.

In reality, content represents the entirety of the experience your brand designs, creates, and shares online and offline, from logos and tag lines to personnel, phone calls, signage, blog text, images, videos, etc.

If a prospect or customer can interacts with it, you’d better believe it’s content.

And before you offer up, "Well, Ronell, what if one of my staffers has mustard on her shirt in a video we post online?" (Trust me, someone would ask that.) "Is that content, too?" Yes, that faux pas is part of the content experience a prospect or customer could have with your brand.

In fact, it's the sort of thing that can lead to someone seeing your company as not having all of its ducks in a row, injuring your reputation in the process.

#8: Experiment with content types

But don't fret. When it comes to off-site SEO, the main thing I want you to focus on with regard to content is to see beyond text.

I’m a writer. I love words.

As a newspaper reporter, I always argued with my editor when he said “Words without images lead to words getting ignored. Images sell.”

The same for video. People eat it up.

You’ve no doubt heard that mobile is gobbling up the world as I write this. Well, guess what those untold millions are doing on their mobile devices?

Largely consuming videos, which are expected to account for 85% of the content being shared online by 2019. Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook Live, anyone?

Image source

Videos and images can be a huge boon to your brand's off-page SEO, largely because they can both be a low-investment/high potential vehicle used to drive awareness and traffic back to your site, enhancing your off-page reputation in the process.

A few low-cost, low-effort ways to use video and images include:

• Post how-to videos on YouTube, which is the second-most visited website in the world and the #2 search engine behind parent company Google. What's more, popular videos can and do rank in the SERPs.
• Share daily musings or recaps of distillations of recent events via Facebook Live
• Snap meeting or office funnies via Snapchat
• Compose image albums on Imgur, Flickr, and other popular photo-sharing sites
• Tweet videos of interesting things you notice throughout the day

Video and images are great way to show some personality and make your brand feel human, real, and alive to people who might not have heard of your company, or who've only recently discovered it.

They can also work wonders for your off-site SEO.

For example, say your brand has found that customers who visit your white papers have an increased likelihood of becoming customers. You might shoot video interviews of the subjects or clients featured in the most popular websites, then post the videos to YouTube, in addition to sharing them with the clients to post on their site and disseminate via social media.

This increases the likelihood of even more people seeing the videos and wanting to learn more about your brand.

It's time to think holistically

The complete list of off-site SEO tactics that can bring your brand success contains far more than eight elements.

Our goal with this post is to spur you to think beyond what's comfortable or convenient, and instead consider what's (a) doable in a reasonable amount of time and a reasonable degree of effort, and that (b) has the potential to yield a significant amount of success.

We're convinced that a brand who works diligently to deploy the tactics listed above will be better able to thrive.

Recommended resources:

Brand

• Why You Must Become a 10x Brand
• The Brand Halo Effect: Does Brand Awareness Impact Organic Search Rankings?
• Why is Building Your Brand an SEO Strategy?

Audience

• Do Social Signals Drive SEO?
• Tips and Tactics for Amplifying Your Content
• How to Earn the Amplification of Influencers
• How to Hack the Amplification Process
• Discovering Which Sites Your Target Audience Visits

Content

• YouTube SEO: The Ultimate Guide
• The 100 Best Infographics
• Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing 1 Million Articles

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Offline & Organic: The Two Rivers That Feed Modern Local SEO

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by MiriamEllis

The craft that is your business navigates the local waterways. Whether yours is an independently owned natural foods store or a medical enterprise with hundreds of locations, it can be easy to get lost cresting all of the little waves that hit our industry, week by week, year after year.

Google endorses review kiosks and then outlaws them. They pop your dental practice into a carousel and then disband this whole display for your industry. You need to be schema-encoded, socially active, mobile-friendly, voice-ready… it’s a lot to take in. So let’s weigh anchor for a few minutes, in the midst of these never-ending eddies, to evaluate whether all of the developments of the past few years add up to a disjointed jumble of events or represent a genuine sea change in our industry. Let’s see which way the wind is really blowing in local search marketing.

The organic SEO journey is now our own

If you’ve only been working in SEO for a couple of years, you may think I’m telling you a fishy yarn when I say there was a time not long ago when this otherwise brilliant industry was swamped with forum discussions about how much you could move the ranking needle by listing 300 terms in a meta keywords tag, putting hidden text on website pages, buying 5,000 links from directories that never saw the light of day in the SERPs and praying to the idol of PageRank.

I’m not kidding — it was really like this, but even back then, the best in the business were arguing against building a marketing strategy largely based on exploiting search engines’ weaknesses or by pinning your brand to iffy, spammy or obsolete practices. The discourse surrounding early SEO was certainly lively!

Then came Panda, Penguin, and all of the other updates that not only targeted poor SEO practices, but more importantly, established a teaching model from which all digital marketers could learn to visualize Google’s interpretation of relevance. There were many updates before these big ones, but I mention them because, along with Hummingbird, they combine to set much of the stage for where the SEO industry is at today, after 17 years of signals from Google schooling us in their worldview of search. If I could sum up what Google has taught us in 3 points, they would be:

1. Market to humans, and let that rule how you write, earn links, design pages and otherwise promote your business
2. Have a technician handy to avoid technical missteps that thwart growth
3. Your brand will live or die by the total reputation it builds, both in terms of search engines and the public

Most of what I see being written across the SEO industry today relates to these three concepts which form a really sane picture of a modern marketing discipline — a far cry from stuffed footers and doorway pages, right? Yes, I’m still getting emails promising me #1 Google rankings, but by and large, it’s been inspirational watching the SEO industry evolve to earn a serious place in the wide world of marketing.

Now, how does all this relate to local SEO?

There are two obvious reasons why the traditional SEO industry’s journey relates to our own:

1. Organic strength impacts local rankings
2. Local businesses need organic (sometimes called local-organic) rankings, too

This means that for our agencies’ clients, we’ve got to deliver the goods just the way an organic SEO company would. I’d bet a nickel there isn’t a week that goes by that you don’t find yourself explaining to an SAB owner that you’re unlikely to earn him local rankings for his service cities where he lacks a physical location, but you are going to get him every bit of organic visibility you can via his website’s service city landing pages and supporting marketing. And for your brick-and-mortar clients, you are filling the first few pages of Google with both company website and third-party content that creates the consumer picture we call “reputation.”

It’s organic SEO that populates your clients’ most important organic search results with the data that speak most highly of them, even if this SEO is being done by Yelp or TripAdvisor. Because of this, I advocate studying the history of Google’s updates and how it has impacted the organic SEO community’s understanding of Google’s increasingly obvious emphasis on trust and relevance.

And, I will go one further than this. You are going to need real SEO tools to manage the local search marketing for your clients in the most competitive geo-industries. Consider that with the release of the Local Search Ranking Factors 2017 study, experts have cited that:

• 5 of the top 20 local pack/finder factors relate to links
• Quality/authority of inbound links to domain was chosen as the #1 local-organic ranking factor.

Add to this the top placement of factors like domain authority of website and the varieties of appropriate keyword usage.

In other words, for your client who owns a bakery in rural Iowa, you’ll likely need basic organic SEO skills to get them all the visibility they need, but for your attorney in Los Angeles, your statewide medical practice and your national restaurant chain with 600 locations, having organic SEO tools at the professional level of something like Moz Pro in your marketing kit is what will enable you to grab that competitive edge your bigger clients absolutely have to have, and to hold onto it for them over time.

The organic river is definitely feeding the local one, and your ability to evaluate links, analyze SERPs, and professionally optimize pages is part of your journey now.

The offline PR journey is now our own

I sometimes wonder if my fellow local SEOs feel humbled, as I do, when talking to local business owners who have been doing their own marketing for 20, 30, or even 40 years. Pre-Internet, these laudable survivors have been responsible for deciding everything from how to decorate the storefront for a Memorial Day sale, to mastering customer service, to squeezing ROI instead of bankruptcy out of advertising in newspapers, phone directories, coupon books, radio, billboards and local TV. I call to mind the owner of a family business I consulted with who even sang his own jingle in an effort to build his local brand in his community. Small business owners, in particular, really put it all on the line in their consumer appeals, because their survival is at stake.

By contrast, our local SEO industry is still taking baby steps on a path forged by the likes of Wayside Inn (est. 1797), Macy’s (est. 1858), and the Fuller Brush Man, (est. 1906). These stalwarts of selling to local consumers have seen it all (and tried much of it) in the search for visibility, from Burma-Shave billboards to “crazy” local car dealer ads.

In the 1960’s, Pillsbury VP Robert Keith published an anecdotal article which promoted, in part, a consumer-centric model for marketing, and though his work has been criticized, some of his concepts resemble the mindset we see being espoused by today’s best marketers.

Very often, being consumer-centric is nearly analogous to being honest. Just as the organic SEO world has been taught by Google that “tricking” Internet users and search engines with inauthentic signals doesn’t pay off in the long run, making false claims on your offline packaging or TV ads is likely to be quickly caught and widely publicized to consumers in the digital age. If your tacos don’t really contain seasoned beef, your 12-packs of soda aren’t really priced at $3.00, and your chewing gum doesn’t really kill germs, can your brand stand the backlash when these deceptions are debunked?

And even for famous brands like Macy’s that have successfully served the public for decades, the simple failure to continuously create an engaging in-store experience or to compete adeptly in a changing market can contribute to serious losses, including store closures. Offline marketing is truly tough.

And, how does all this relate to local SEO?

Yes, the “three grumpy woman” price gouging and doing “the dodgy”, the desk clerk who screams when asked about wi-fi, and the unmanaged but widely publicized wrong hours of operation — they say local business owners fear negative reviews, but local SEOs are the ones who walk into these situations with incoming clients and say, “My gosh, just what have these people been doing? How do I fix this?”

The forces of organic SEO (high visibility) and offline marketing (consumer-centricity) face off on our playing field, and often, the first intimation we get of our clients’ management of the in-store experience comes from reading the online reputation they’ve built on the first few pages of Google. Sometimes we applaud what we discover, sometimes we quake in our boots. It’s become increasingly apparent that, as local SEOs, we aren’t just going to be able to concentrate on optimizing title tags or managing citations, because the offline world we work to build the online mirror image of will reflect all of the following attributes pertaining to our clients:

• Consumer guarantee policies
• Staff hiring and training practices
• Cleanliness
• Quality
• Pricing
• Convenience
• Perception of fairness/honesty
• Personality of owner/management/staff

This list has nothing to do with online technical work, but everything to do with the company culture of the businesses we serve.

Because of this, local SEOs who lack a basic understanding of how customer service works in the offline world won’t be fully equipped to consult with clients who may need as much help defining the USP of their business as they do managing its local promotion. Predominantly, we work remotely and can’t walk into our client’s hotel or medical practice. We glean clues from what we see online (just like consumers) and if we can build our knowledge of the history of traditional marketing, we’ll have more authority to bring to consultations that address in-store problems in honest, gutsy ways while also maximizing overlooked opportunities.

I once walked into a small, quaint bakery selling dainty little cakes and expensive beverages, decorated in a cozy floral scheme; a place my auntie might have liked to take tea with a friend. The in-store music in this haven of ladylike repose? Heavy metal so loud it hurt my ears, despite being popular with the two kids left to man the shop while the owner was nowhere in evidence. The place was gone within a year.

As local SEOs, we can’t fix owners who aren’t determined to succeed, but our study of traditional marketing principles and consumer behavior can help us integrate the offline stream into the local, online one, making us better advisors. Likely you are already teaching the art of the offline review-ask. Whether your agency builds on this to begin managing billboards and print mailers directly for clients, or you are only in on meetings about these forms of outreach, the more you know, the better your chances at running successful campaigns.

It’s all local now, plus....

In communities across the US, townsfolk have long carried out the tradition of gathering on sidewalks for the pageantry of the annual parade in which the hallmarks of local life stream by them in procession. Local school marching bands, the hardware store’s float made entirely out of gardening tools, the church group in homemade Biblical costumes, the animal shelter with dogs in tow, and the Moose Club riding in an open car, waving to the crowd.

This is where we step in, leading the the local parade to march it past the eyes of digital consumers. We bring the NAP, citations, locally optimized content and review management into the stream, teaching clients how to be noticed by the crowd. And, we do this on the shoulders of the organic SEO and offline marketing communities’ constantly improving sense of the importance of truth in advertising.

In other words, everything that is offline, everything that is organic is now our own. We are simply adding the digital location data layer and a clear sense of direction to bring it all together. And, just to clarify, it’s not that the organic and offline streams weren’t feeding our particular river in the past — they always have been. It’s just that it has become increasingly obvious that a multi-disciplinary understanding does really belong to the work we do as local SEOs.

Manning a yare local SEO boat & charting a savvy course for the future

In the lingo of old salts at sea, a “yare” ship is one that is that is quick, agile and lively, and that’s exactly what your business or agency needs to be to handle the small but constant changes that impact the local SEO industry.

From the annals of local SEO history, you can find record after record of some of the top practitioners stating after each new update, filter or guideline change that their clients were only minorly affected instead of sunk deep. How do they achieve this enviable position? I’ve concluded that it’s because they have:

1. Become expert at seeing the holistic picture of marketing
2. Base their practices on this, sticking to basic guidelines and seeing human connections as the end goal of all marketing efforts

It’s by building up a sturdy base of intelligent, homocentric marketing materials (website, citations, social contributions, in-store, print, radio, etc.) that businesses can stand firm when there’s a slight change in the weather. It doesn’t matter whether Google hides or shows review stars, hammers down on thin content or on suspicious links because the bulk of the efforts being made by the business and its marketers aren’t tied to the minutiae of search engines’ whims — they’re tied to consumers.

It’s because of this dedicated consumer tie that enough that is good has been built to protect the business against massive losses with each new update or rule. Even a few bad reviews are really no problem. Consumers are still finding the business. Revenue is still coming in. Because of this sturdy base, the business can be yare, making quick, agile adjustments to fix problems and maximize the benefits of new opportunities which arise with each small change, rather than having to bail themselves out on a ship that has been sunk due to lack of broader marketing vision.

Let’s sum it up by saying that to chart a good course for future success, your company must know the technical aspects and historical tenets of local, organic, and offline marketing — but above all else, you must know consumers and have a business heart dedicated to their service. A mature heart is one that wisely balances the needs of self with the needs of others. I, for one, find my own heart all-in participating in this exciting and necessary maturation of our industry.

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There's No Such Thing as a Site Migration

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by jonoalderson

Websites, like the businesses who operate them, are often deceptively complicated machines.

They’re fragile systems, and changing or replacing any one of the parts can easily affect (or even break) the whole setup — often in ways not immediately obvious to stakeholders or developers.

Even seemingly simple sites are often powered by complex technology, like content management systems, databases, and templating engines. There’s much more going on behind the scenes — technically and organizationally — than you can easily observe by crawling a site or viewing the source code.

When you change a website and remove or add elements, it’s not uncommon to introduce new errors, flaws, or faults.

That’s why I get extremely nervous whenever I hear a client or business announce that they’re intending to undergo a "site migration."

Chances are, and experience suggests, that something’s going to go wrong.

Ouch. #ecomchat #seo http://pic.twitter.com/flgncLVJBT
— Mark Cook (@thetafferboy) February 26, 2017

Migrations vary wildly in scope

As an SEO consultant and practitioner, I've been involved in more "site migrations" than I can remember or count — for charities, startups, international e-commerce sites, and even global household brands. Every one has been uniquely challenging and stressful.

In each case, the businesses involved have underestimated (and in some cases, increased) the complexity, the risk, and the details involved in successfully executing their "migration."

As a result, many of these projects negatively impacted performance and potential in ways that could have been easily avoided.

This isn’t a case of the scope of the "migration" being too big, but rather, a misalignment of understanding, objectives, methods, and priorities, resulting in stakeholders working on entirely different scopes.

The migrations I’ve experienced have varied from simple domain transfers to complete overhauls of server infrastructure, content management frameworks, templates, and pages — sometimes even scaling up to include the consolidation (or fragmentation) of multiple websites and brands.

In the minds of each organization, however, these have all been "migration" projects despite their significantly varying (and poorly defined) scopes. In each case, the definition and understanding of the word "migration" has varied wildly.

We suck at definitions

As an industry, we’re used to struggling with labels. We’re still not sure if we’re SEOs, inbound marketers, digital marketers, or just… marketers. The problem is that, when we speak to each other (and those outside of our industry), these words can carry different meaning and expectations.

Even amongst ourselves, a conversation between two digital marketers, analysts, or SEOs about their fields of expertise is likely to reveal that they have surprisingly different definitions of their roles, responsibilities, and remits. To them, words like "content" or "platform" might mean different things.

In the same way, "site migrations" vary wildly, in form, function, and execution — and when we discuss them, we’re not necessarily talking about the same thing. If we don’t clarify our meanings and have shared definitions, we risk misunderstandings, errors, or even offense.

Ambiguity creates risk

Poorly managed migrations can have a number of consequences beyond just drops in rankings, traffic, and performance. There are secondary impacts, too. They can also inadvertently:

• Provide a poor user experience (e.g., old URLs now 404, or error states are confusing to users, or a user reaches a page different from what they expected).
• Break or omit tracking and/or analytics implementations, resulting in loss of business intelligence.
• Limit the size, shape, or scalability of a site, resulting in static, stagnant, or inflexible templates and content (e.g., omitting the ability to add or edit pages, content, and/or sections in a CMS), and a site which struggles to compete as a result.
• Miss opportunities to benefit from what SEOs do best: blending an understanding of consumer demand and behavior, the market and competitors, and the brand in question to create more effective strategies, functionality and content.
• Create conflict between stakeholders, when we need to "hustle" at the last minute to retrofit our requirements into an already complex project (“I know it’s about to go live, but PLEASE can we add analytics conversion tracking?”) — often at the cost of our reputation.
• Waste future resource, where mistakes require that future resource is spent recouping equity resulting from faults or omissions in the process, rather than building on and enhancing performance.

I should point out that there’s nothing wrong with hustle in this case; that, in fact, begging, borrowing, and stealing can often be a viable solution in these kinds of scenarios. There’s been more than one occasion when, late at night before a site migration, I’ve averted disaster by literally begging developers to include template review processes, to implement redirects, or to stall deployments.

But this isn’t a sensible or sustainable or reliable way of working.

Mistakes will inevitably be made. Resources, favors, and patience are finite. Too much reliance on "hustle" from individuals (or multiple individuals) may in fact further widen the gap in understanding and scope, and positions the hustler as a single point of failure.

More importantly, hustle may only fix the symptoms, not the cause of these issues. That means that we remain stuck in a role as the disruptive outsiders who constantly squeeze in extra unscoped requirements at the eleventh hour.

Where things go wrong

If we’re to begin to address some of these challenges, we need to understand when, where, and why migration projects go wrong.

The root cause of all less-than-perfect migrations can be traced to at least one of the following scenarios:

• The migration project occurs without consultation.
• Consultation is sought too late in the process, and/or after the migration.
• There is insufficient planned resource/time/budget to add requirements (or processes)/make recommended changes to the brief.
• The scope is changed mid-project, without consultation, or in a way which de-prioritizes requirements.
• Requirements and/or recommended changes are axed at the eleventh hour (due to resource/time/budget limitations, or educational/political conflicts).

There’s a common theme in each of these cases. We’re not involved early enough in the process, or our opinions and priorities don’t carry sufficient weight to impact timelines and resources.

Chances are, these mistakes are rarely the product of spite or of intentional omission; rather, they’re born of gaps in the education and experience of the stakeholders and decision-makers involved.

We can address this, to a degree, by elevating ourselves to senior stakeholders in these kinds of projects, and by being consulted much earlier in the timeline.

Let’s be more specific

I think that it’s our responsibility to help the organizations we work for to avoid these mistakes. One of the easiest opportunities to do that is to make sure that we’re talking about the same thing, as early in the process as possible.

Otherwise, migrations will continue to go wrong, and we will continue to spend far too much of our collective time fixing broken links, recommending changes or improvements to templates, and holding together bruised-and-broken websites — all at the expense of doing meaningful, impactful work.

Perhaps we can begin to answer to some of these challenges by creating better definitions and helping to clarify exactly what’s involved in a "site migration" process.

Unfortunately, I suspect that we’re stuck with the word "migration," at least for now. It’s a term which is already widely used, which people think is a correct and appropriate definition. It’s unrealistic to try to change everybody else’s language when we’re already too late to the conversation.

Our next best opportunity to reduce ambiguity and risk is to codify the types of migration. This gives us a chance to prompt further exploration and better definitions.

For example, if we can say “This sounds like it’s actually a domain migration paired with a template migration,” we can steer the conversation a little and rely on a much better shared frame of reference.

If we can raise a challenge that, e.g., the "translation project" a different part of the business is working on is actually a whole bunch of interwoven migration types, then we can raise our concerns earlier and pursue more appropriate resource, budget, and authority (e.g., “This project actually consists of a series of migrations involving templates, content, and domains. Therefore, it’s imperative that we also consider X and Y as part of the project scope.”).

By persisting in labelling this way, stakeholders may gradually come to understand that, e.g., changing the design typically also involves changing the templates, and so the SEO folks should really be involved earlier in the process. By challenging the language, we can challenge the thinking.

Let’s codify migration types

I’ve identified at least seven distinct types of migration. Next time you encounter a "migration" project, you can investigate the proposed changes, map them back to these types, and flag any gaps in understanding, expectations, and resource.

You could argue that some of these aren’t strictly "migrations" in a technical sense (i.e., changing something isn’t the same as moving it), but grouping them this way is intentional.

Remember, our goal here isn’t to neatly categorize all of the requirements for any possible type of migration. There are plenty of resources, guides, and lists which already try do that.

Instead, we’re trying to provide neat, universal labels which help us (the SEO folks) and them (the business stakeholders) to have shared definitions and to remove unknown unknowns.

They’re a set of shared definitions which we can use to trigger early warning signals, and to help us better manage stakeholder expectations.

Feel free to suggest your own, to grow, shrink, combine, or bin any of these to fit your own experience and requirements!

1. Hosting migrations

A broad bundling of infrastructure, hardware, and server considerations (while these are each broad categories in their own right, it makes sense to bundle them together in this context).

If your migration project contains any of the following changes, you’re talking about a hosting migration, and you’ll need to explore the SEO implications (and development resource requirements) to make sure that changes to the underlying platform don’t impact front-end performance or visibility.

• You’re changing hosting provider.
• You’re changing, adding, or removing server locations.
• You’re altering the specifications of your physical (or virtual) servers (e.g., RAM, CPU, storage, hardware types, etc).
• You’re changing your server technology stack (e.g., moving from Apache to Nginx).*
• You’re implementing or removing load balancing, mirroring, or extra server environments.
• You’re implementing or altering caching systems (database, static page caches, varnish, object, memcached, etc).
• You’re altering the physical or server security protocols and features.**
• You’re changing, adding or removing CDNs.***

*Might overlap into a software migration if the changes affect the configuration or behavior of any front-end components (e.g., the CMS).

**Might overlap into other migrations, depending on how this manifests (e.g., template, software, domain).

***Might overlap into a domain migration if the CDN is presented as/on a distinct hostname (e.g., AWS), rather than invisibly (e.g., Cloudflare).

2. Software migrations

Unless your website is comprised of purely static HTML files, chances are that it’s running some kind of software to serve the right pages, behaviors, and content to users.

If your migration project contains any of the following changes, you’re talking about a software migration, and you’ll need to understand (and input into) how things like managing error codes, site functionality, and back-end behavior work.

• You’re changing CMS.
• You’re adding or removing plugins/modules/add-ons in your CMS.
• You’re upgrading or downgrading the CMS, or plugins/modules/addons (by a significant degree/major release) .
• You’re changing the language used to render the website (e.g., adopting Angular2 or NodeJS).
• You’re developing new functionality on the website (forms, processes, widgets, tools).
• You’re merging platforms; e.g., a blog which operated on a separate domain and system is being integrated into a single CMS.*

*Might overlap into a domain migration if you’re absorbing software which was previously located/accessed on a different domain.

3. Domain migrations

Domain migrations can be pleasantly straightforward if executed in isolation, but this is rarely the case. Changes to domains are often paired with (or the result of) other structural and functional changes.

If your migration project alters the URL(s) by which users are able to reach your website, contains any of the following changes, then you’re talking about a domain migration, and you need to consider how redirects, protocols (e.g., HTTP/S), hostnames (e.g., www/non-www), and branding are impacted.

• You’re changing the main domain of your website.
• You’re buying/adding new domains to your ecosystem.
• You’re adding or removing subdomains (e.g., removing domain sharding following a migration to HTTP2).
• You’re moving a website, or part of a website, between domains (e.g., moving a blog on a subdomain into a subfolder, or vice-versa).
• You’re intentionally allowing an active domain to expire.
• You’re purchasing an expired/dropped domain.

4. Template migrations

Chances are that your website uses a number of HTML templates, which control the structure, layout, and peripheral content of your pages. The logic which controls how your content looks, feels, and behaves (as well as the behavior of hidden/meta elements like descriptions or canonical URLs) tends to live here.

If your migration project alters elements like your internal navigation (e.g., the header or footer), elements in your <head>, or otherwise changes the page structure around your content in the ways I’ve outlined, then you’re talking about a template migration. You’ll need to consider how users and search engines perceive and engage with your pages, how context, relevance, and authority flow through internal linking structures, and how well-structured your HTML (and JS/CSS) code is.

• You’re making changes to internal navigation.
• You’re changing the layout and structure of important pages/templates (e.g., homepage, product pages).
• You’re adding or removing template components (e.g., sidebars, interstitials).
• You’re changing elements in your <head> code, like title, canonical, or hreflang tags.
• You’re adding or removing specific templates (e.g., a template which shows all the blog posts by a specific author).
• You’re changing the URL pattern used by one or more templates.
• You’re making changes to how device-specific rendering works*

*Might involve domain, software, and/or hosting migrations, depending on implementation mechanics.

5. Content migrations

Your content is everything which attracts, engages with, and convinces users that you’re the best brand to answer their questions and meet their needs. That includes the words you use to describe your products and services, the things you talk about on your blog, and every image and video you produce or use.

If your migration project significantly changes the tone (including language, demographic targeting, etc), format, or quantity/quality of your content in the ways I’ve outlined, then you’re talking about a content migration. You’ll need to consider the needs of your market and audience, and how the words and media on your website answer to that — and how well it does so in comparison with your competitors.

• You significantly increase or reduce the number of pages on your website.
• You significantly change the tone, targeting, or focus of your content.
• You begin to produce content on/about a new topic.
• You translate and/or internationalize your content.*
• You change the categorization, tagging, or other classification system on your blog or product content.**
• You use tools like canonical tags, meta robots indexation directives, or robots.txt files to control how search engines (and other bots) access and attribute value to a content piece (individually or at scale).

*Might involve domain, software and/or hosting, and template migrations, depending on implementation mechanics.

**May overlap into a template migration if the layout and/or URL structure changes as a result.

6. Design migrations

The look and feel of your website doesn’t necessarily directly impact your performance (though user signals like engagement and trust certainly do). However, simple changes to design components can often have unintended knock-on effects and consequences.

If your migration project contains any of the following changes, you’re talking about a design migration, and you’ll need to clarify whether changes are purely cosmetic or whether they go deeper and impact other areas.

• You’re changing the look and feel of key pages (like your homepage).*
• You’re adding or removing interaction layers, e.g. conditionally hiding content based on device or state.*
• You’re making design/creative changes which change the HTML (as opposed to just images or CSS files) of specific elements.*
• You’re changing key messaging, like logos and brand slogans.
• You’re altering the look and feel to react to changing strategies or monetization models (e.g., introducing space for ads in a sidebar, or removing ads in favor of using interstitial popups/states).
• You’re changing images and media.**

*All template migrations.

**Don’t forget to 301 redirect these, unless you’re replacing like-for-like filenames (which isn’t always best practice if you wish to invalidate local or remote caches).

7. Strategy migrations

A change in organizational or marketing strategy might not directly impact the website, but a widening gap between a brand’s audience, objectives, and platform can have a significant impact on performance.

If your market or audience (or your understanding of it) changes significantly, or if your mission, your reputation, or the way in which you describe your products/services/purpose changes, then you’re talking about a strategy migration. You’ll need to consider how you structure your website, how you target your audiences, how you write content, and how you campaign (all of which might trigger a set of new migration projects!).

• You change the company mission statement.
• You change the website’s key objectives, goals, or metrics.
• You enter a new marketplace (or leave one).
• Your channel focus (and/or your audience’s) changes significantly.
• A competitor disrupts the market and/or takes a significant amount of your market share.
• Responsibility for the website/its performance/SEO/digital changes.
• You appoint a new agency or team responsible for the website’s performance.
• Senior/C-level stakeholders leave or join.
• Changes in legal frameworks (e.g. privacy compliance or new/changing content restrictions in prescriptive sectors) constrain your publishing/content capabilities.

Let’s get in earlier

Armed with better definitions, we can begin to force a more considered conversation around what a "migration" project actually involves. We can use a shared language and ensure that stakeholders understand the risks and opportunities of the changes they intend to make.

Unfortunately, however, we don’t always hear about proposed changes until they’ve already been decided and signed off.

People don’t know that they need to tell us that they’re changing domain, templates, hosting, etc. So it’s often too late when — or if — we finally get involved. Decisions have already been made before they trickle down into our awareness.

That’s still a problem.

By the time you’re aware of a project, it’s usually too late to impact it.

While our new-and-improved definitions are a great starting place to catch risks as you encounter them, avoiding those risks altogether requires us to develop a much better understanding of how, where, and when migrations are planned, managed, and start to go wrong.

Let’s identify trigger points

I’ve identified four common scenarios which lead to organizations deciding to undergo a migration project.

If you can keep your ears to the ground and spot these types of events unfolding, you have an opportunity to give yourself permission to insert yourself into the conversation, and to interrogate to find out exactly which types of migrations might be looming.

It’s worth finding ways to get added to deployment lists and notifications, internal project management tools, and other systems so that you can look for early warning signs (without creating unnecessary overhead and comms processes).

1. Mergers, acquisitions, and closures

When brands are bought, sold, or merged, this almost universally triggers changes to their websites. These requirements are often dictated from on-high, and there’s limited (or no) opportunity to impact the brief.

Migration strategies in these situations are rarely comfortable, and almost always defensive by nature (focusing on minimizing impact/cost rather than capitalizing upon opportunity).

Typically, these kinds of scenarios manifest in a small number of ways:

• The "parent" brand absorbs the website of the purchased brand into their own website; either by "bolting it on" to their existing architecture, moving it to a subdomain/folder, or by distributing salvageable content throughout their existing site and killing the old one (often triggering most, if not every type of migration).
• The purchased brand website remains where it is, but undergoes a design migration and possibly template migrations to align it with the parent brand.
• A brand website is retired and redirected (a domain migration).

2. Rebrands

All sorts of pressures and opportunities lead to rebranding activity. Pressures to remain relevant, to reposition within marketplaces, or change how the brand represents itself can trigger migration requirements — though these activities are often led by brand and creative teams who don’t necessarily understand the implications.

Often, the outcome of branding processes and initiatives creates new a or alternate understanding of markets and consumers, and/or creates new guidelines/collateral/creative which must be reflected on the website(s). Typically, this can result in:

• Changes to core/target audiences, and the content or language/phrasing used to communicate with them (strategy and content migrations -—more if this involves, for example, opening up to international audiences).
• New collateral, replacing or adding to existing media, content, and messaging (content and design migrations).
• Changes to website structure and domain names (template and domain migrations) to align to new branding requirements.

3. C-level vision

It’s not uncommon for senior stakeholders to decide that the strategy to save a struggling business, to grow into new markets, or to make their mark on an organization is to launch a brand-new, shiny website.

These kinds of decisions often involve a scorched-earth approach, tearing down the work of their predecessors or of previously under-performing strategies. And the more senior the decision-maker, the less likely they’ll understand the implications of their decisions.

In these kinds of scenarios, your best opportunity to avert disaster is to watch for warning signs and to make yourself heard before it’s too late. In particular, you can watch out for:

• Senior stakeholders with marketing, IT, or C-level responsibilities joining, leaving, or being replaced (in particular if in relation to poor performance).
• Boards of directors, investors, or similar pressuring web/digital teams for unrealistic performance goals (based on current performance/constraints).
• Gradual reduction in budget and resource for day-to-day management and improvements to the website (as a likely prelude to a big strategy migration).
• New agencies being brought on board to optimize website performance, who’re hindered by the current framework/constraints.
• The adoption of new martech and marketing automation software.*

*Integrations of solutions like SalesForce, Marketo, and similar sometimes rely on utilizing proxied subdomains, embedded forms/content, and other mechanics which will need careful consideration as part of a template migration.

4. Technical or financial necessity

The current website is in such a poor, restrictive, or cost-ineffective condition that it makes it impossible to adopt new-and-required improvements (such as compliance with new standards, an integration of new martech stacks, changes following a brand purchase/merger, etc).

Generally, like the kinds of C-level “new website” initiatives I’ve outlined above, these result in scorched earth solutions.

Particularly frustrating, these are the kinds of migration projects which you yourself may well argue and fight for, for years on end, only to then find that they’ve been scoped (and maybe even begun or completed) without your input or awareness.

Here are some danger signs to watch out for which might mean that your migration project is imminent (or, at least, definitely required):

• Licensing costs for parts or the whole platform become cost-prohibitive (e.g., enterprise CMS platforms, user seats, developer training, etc).
• The software or hardware skill set required to maintain the site becomes rarer or more expensive (e.g., outdated technologies).
• Minor-but-urgent technical changes take more than six months to implement.
• New technical implementations/integrations are agreed upon in principle, budgeted for, but not implemented.
• The technical backlog of tasks grows faster than it shrinks as it fills with breakages and fixes rather than new features, initiatives, and improvements.
• The website ecosystem doesn’t support the organization’s ways of working (e.g., the organization adopts agile methodologies, but the website only supports waterfall-style codebase releases).
• Key technology which underpins the site is being deprecated, and there’s no easy upgrade path.*

*Will likely trigger hosting or software migrations.

Let’s not count on this

While this kind of labelling undoubtedly goes some way to helping us spot and better manage migrations, it’s far from a perfect or complete system.

In fact, I suspect it may be far too ambitious, and unrealistic in its aspiration. Accessing conversations early enough — and being listened to and empowered in those conversations — relies on the goodwill and openness of companies who aren’t always completely bought into or enamored with SEO.

This will only work in an organization which is open to this kind of thinking and internal challenging — and chances are, they’re not the kinds of organizations who are routinely breaking their websites. The very people who need our help and this kind of system are fundamentally unsuited to receive it.

I suspect, then, it might be impossible in many cases to make the kinds of changes required to shift behaviors and catch these problems earlier. In most organizations, at least.

Avoiding disasters resulting from ambiguous migration projects relies heavily on broad education. Everything else aside, people tend to change companies faster than you can build deep enough tribal knowledge.

That doesn’t mean that the structure isn’t still valuable, however. The types of changes and triggers I’ve outlined can still be used as alarm bells and direction for your own use.

Let’s get real

If you can’t effectively educate stakeholders on the complexities and impact of them making changes to their website, there are more "lightweight" solutions.

At the very least, you can turn these kinds of items (and expand with your own, and in more detail) into simple lists which can be printed off, laminated, and stuck to a wall. At the very least, perhaps you'll remind somebody to pick up the phone to the SEO team when they recognize an issue.

In a more pragmatic world, stakeholders don’t necessarily have to understand the nuance or the detail if they at least understand that they’re meant to ask for help when they’re changing domain, for example, or adding new templates to their website.

Whilst this doesn’t solve the underlying problems, it does provide a mechanism through which the damage can be systematically avoided or limited. You can identify problems earlier and be part of the conversation.

If it’s still too late and things do go wrong, you'll have something you can point to and say “I told you so,” or, more constructively perhaps, “Here’s the resource you need to avoid this happening next time.”

And in your moment of self-righteous vindication, having successfully made it through this post and now armed to save your company from a botched migration project, you can migrate over to the bar. Good work, you.

---

Thanks to…

This turned into a monster of a post, and its scope meant that it almost never made it to print. Thanks to a few folks in particular for helping me to shape, form, and ship it. In particular:

• Hannah Thorpe, for help in exploring and structuring the initial concept.
• Greg Mitchell, for a heavy dose of pragmatism in the conclusion.
• Gerry White, for some insightful additions and the removal of dozens of typos.
• Sam Simpson for putting up with me spending hours rambling and ranting at her about failed site migrations.

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The Best Types of Content for Local Businesses: Building Geo-Topical Authority

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by MiriamEllis

Q: What kind of content should a local business develop?

A: The kind that converts!

Okay, you could have hit on that answer yourself, but as this post aims to demonstrate:

1. There are almost as many user paths to conversion as there are customers in your city, and
2. Your long-term goal is to become the authority in your industry and geography that consumers and search engines turn to.

Google’s widely publicized concept of micro-moments has been questioned by some local SEOs for its possible oversimplification of consumer behavior. Nevertheless, I think it serves as a good, basic model for understanding how a variety of human needs (I want to do, know, buy something, or go somewhere) leads people onto the web. When a local business manages to become a visible solution to any of these needs, the rewards can include:

• Online traffic
• In-store traffic
• Transactions
• Reviews/testimonials
• Clicks-for-directions
• Clicks-to-call
• Clicks-to-website
• Social sharing
• Offline word-of-mouth
• Good user metrics like time-on-page, low bounce rate, etc.

Takeaway: Consumers have a variety of needs and can bestow a variety of rewards that directly or indirectly impact local business reputation, rankings and revenue when these needs are well-met.

No surprise: it will take a variety of types of content publication to enjoy the full rewards it can bring.

Proviso: There will be nuances to the best types of content for each local business based on geo-industry and average consumer. Understandably, a cupcake bakery has a more inviting topic for photographic content than does a septic services company, but the latter shouldn’t rule out the power of an image of tree roots breaking into a septic line as a scary and effective way to convert property owners into customers. Point being, you’ll be applying your own flavor to becoming a geo-topical authority as you undertake the following content development work:

Foundational local business content development

These are the basics almost every local business will need to publish.

Customer service policy

Every single staff member who interacts with your public must be given a copy of your complete customer service policy. Why? A 2016 survey by the review software company GetFiveStars demonstrated that 57% of consumer complaints revolve around customer service and employee behavior. To protect your local business’ reputation and revenue, the first content you create should be internal and should instruct all forward-facing employees in approved basic store policies, dress, cleanliness, language, company culture, and allowable behaviors. Be thorough! Yes, you may wear a t-shirt. No, you may not text your friends while waiting on tables.

Customer rights guarantee

On your website, publish a customer-focused version of your policy. The Vermont Country Store calls this a Customer Bill of Rights which clearly outlines the quality of service consumers should expect to experience, the guarantees that protect them, and the way the business expects to be treated, as well.

NAP

Don’t overlook the three most important pieces of content you need to publish on your website: your company name, address, and phone number. Make sure they are in crawlable HTML (not couched in an image or a problematic format like Flash). Put your NAP at the top of your Contact Us page and in the site-wide masthead or footer so that humans and bots can immediately and clearly identify these key features of your business. Be sure your NAP is consistent across all pages for your site (not Green Tree Consulting on one page and Green Tree Marketing on another, or wrong digits in a phone number or street address on some pages). And, ideally, mark up your NAP with Schema to further assist search engine comprehension of your data.

Reviews/testimonials page

On your website, your reviews/testimonials page can profoundly impact consumer trust, comprising a combination of unique customer sentiment you’ve gathered via a form/software (or even from handwritten customer notes) and featured reviews from third-party review platforms (Google, Yelp). Why make this effort? As many as 92% of consumers now read online reviews and Google specifically cites testimonials as a vehicle for boosting your website’s trustworthiness and reputation.

Reviews/testimonials policy

Either on your Reviews/Testimonials page or on a second page of your website, clearly outline your terms of service for reviewers. Just like Yelp, you need to protect the quality of the sentiment-oriented content you publish and should let consumers know what you permit/forbid. Here’s a real-world example of a local business review TOS page I really like, at Barbara Oliver Jewelry.

Homepage

Apart from serving up some of the most fundamental content about your business to search engines, your homepage should serve two local consumer groups: those in a rush and those in research mode.

• Be sure the former is being given must-have information to understand your business at a glance and contact it immediately.
• For the latter, the homepage should offer clear navigation, consumer-centric content, and inducements to further explore additional pages of the website (take advantage of a special, look at products, see project photos, read a blog post, etc.) as they seek to get to know your business better before choosing it for a transaction.

Pro tip: Don’t think of your homepage as static. Change up your content regularly there and track how this impacts traffic/conversions.

Contact Us page

On this incredibly vital website page, your content should include:

• Complete NAP
• All supported contact methods (forms, email, fax, live chat, after-hours hotline, etc.),
• Thorough driving directions from all entry points, including pointers for what to look for on the street (big blue sign, next to red church, across the street from swim center, etc.)
• A map
• Exterior images of your business
• Attributes like parking availability and wheelchair accessibility
• Hours of operation
• Social media links
• Payment forms accepted (cash only, BitCoin, etc.)
• Mention of proximity to major nearby points of interest (national parks, monuments, etc.)
• Brief summary of services with a nod to attributes ("Stop by the Starlight tonight for late-night food that satisfies!")
• A fresh call-to-action (like visiting the business for a Memorial Day sale)

Store locator pages

For a multi-location businesses (like a restaurant chain), you’ll be creating content for a set of landing pages to represent each of your physical locations, accessed via a top-level menu if you have a few locations, or via a store locator widget if you have many. These should feature the same types of content a Contact Us page would for a single-location business, and can also include:

• Reviews/testimonials for that location
• Location-specific special offers
• Social media links specific to that location
• Proofs of that location’s local community involvement
• Highlights of staff at that location
• Education about availability of in-store beacons or apps for that location
• Interior photos specific to that location
• A key call-to-action

For help formatting all of this great content sensibly, please read Overcoming Your Fear of Local Landing Pages.

City landing pages

Similar to the multi-location business, the service area business (like a plumber) can also develop a set of customer-centric landing pages. These pages will represent each of the major towns or cities the business serves, and while they won’t contain a street address if the company lacks a physical location in a given area, they can contain almost everything else a Contact Us page or Store Locator page would, plus:

• Documentation of projects completed in that city (text, photos, video)
• Expert advice specific to consumers in that city, based on characteristics like local laws, weather, terrain, events, or customs
• Showcasing of services provided to recognized brands in that city ("we wash windows at the Marriott Hotel," etc.)
• Reviews/testimonials from customers in that city
• Proofs of community involvement in that city (events, sponsorships, etc.)
• A key call-to-action

Product/service descriptions

Regardless of business model, all local businesses should devote a unique page of content to each major product or service they offer. These pages can include:

• A thorough text description
• Images
• Answers to documented FAQs
• Price/time quotes
• Technical specs
• Reviews of the service or product
• Videos
• Guarantees
• Differentiation from competitors (awards won, lowest price, environmental standards, lifetime support, etc.)

For inspiration, I recommend looking at SolarCity’s page on solar roofing. Beautiful and informative.

Images

For many industries, image content truly sells. Are you "wowed" looking at the first image you see of this B&B in Albuquerque, the view from this restaurant in San Diego, or the scope of this international architectural firm’s projects? But even if your industry doesn’t automatically lend itself to wow-factor visuals, cleaning dirty carpets can be presented with high class and even so-called “boring” industries can take a visual approach to data that yields interesting and share-worthy/link-worthy graphics.

While you’re snapping photos, don’t neglect uploading them to your Google My Business listings and other major citations. Google data suggests that listing images influence click-through rates!

FAQ

The content of your FAQ page serves multiple purposes. Obviously, it should answer the questions your local business has documented as being asked by your real customers, but it can also be a keyword-rich page if you have taken the time to reflect the documented natural language of your consumers. If you’re just starting out and aren’t sure what types of questions your customers will ask, try AnswerThePublic and Q&A crowdsourcing sites to brainstorm common queries.

Be sure your FAQ page contains a vehicle for consumers to ask a question so that you can continuously document their inquiries, determine new topics to cover on the FAQ page, and even find inspiration for additional content development on your website or blog for highly popular questions.

About page

For the local customer in research mode, your About page can seal the deal if you have a story to tell that proves you are in the best possible alignment with their specific needs and desires. Yes, the About Us page can tell the story of your business or your team, but it can also tell the story of why your consumers choose you.

Take a look at this About page for a natural foods store in California and break it down into elements:

• Reason for founding company
• Difference-makers (95% organic groceries, building powered by 100% renewable energy)
• Targeted consumer alignment (support local alternative to major brand, business inspired by major figure in environmental movement)
• Awards and recognition from government officials and organizations
• Special offer (5-cent rebate if you bring your own bag)
• Timeline of business history
• Video of the business story
• Proofs of community involvement (organic school lunch program)
• Links to more information

If the ideal consumer for this company is an eco-conscious shopper who wants to support a local business that will, in turn, support the city in which they live, this About page is extremely persuasive. Your local business can take cues from this real-world example, determining what motivates and moves your consumer base and then demonstrating how your values and practices align.

Calls to action

CTAs are critical local business content, and any website page which lacks one represents a wasted opportunity. Entrepreneur states that the 3 effective principles of calls to action are visibility, clear/compelling messaging, and careful choice of supporting elements. For a local business, calls to action on various pages of your website might direct consumers to:

• Come into your location
• Call
• Fill out a form
• Ask a question/make a comment or complaint
• Livechat with a rep
• Sign up for emails/texts or access to offers
• Follow you on social media
• Attend an in-store event/local event
• Leave a review
• Fill out a survey/participate in a poll

Ideally, CTAs should assist users in doing what they want to do in alignment with the actions the business hopes the consumer will take. Audit your website and implement a targeted CTA on any page currently lacking one. Need inspiration? This Hubspot article showcases mainly virtual companies, but the magic of some of the examples should get your brain humming.

Local business listings

Some of the most vital content being published about your business won't exist on your website — it will reside on your local business listings on the major local business data platforms. Think Google My Business, Facebook, Acxiom, Infogroup, Factual, YP, Apple Maps, and Yelp. While each platform differs in the types of data they accept from you for publication, the majority of local business listings support the following content:

• NAP
• Website address
• Business categories
• Business description
• Hours of operation
• Images
• Marker on a map
• Additional phone numbers/fax numbers
• Links to social, video, and other forms of media
• Attributes (payments accepted, parking, wheelchair accessibility, kid-friendly, etc.)
• Reviews/owner responses

The most important components of your business are all contained within a thorough local business listing. These listings will commonly appear in the search engine results when users look up your brand, and they may also appear for your most important keyword searches, profoundly impacting how consumers discover and choose your business.

Your objective is to ensure that your data is accurate and complete on the major platforms and you can quickly assess this via a free tool like Moz Check Listing. By ensuring that the content of your listings is error-free, thorough, and consistent across the web, you are protecting the rankings, reputation, and revenue of your local business. This is a very big deal!

Third-party review profiles

While major local business listing platforms (Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp) are simultaneously review platforms, you may need to seek inclusion on review sites that are specific to your industry or geography. For example, doctors may want to manage a review profile on HealthGrades and ZocDoc, while lawyers may want to be sure they are included on Avvo.

Whether your consumers are reviewing you on general or specialized platforms, know that the content they are creating may be more persuasive than anything your local business can publish on its own. According to one respected survey, 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations and 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews to form a distinct impression of your business.

How can local businesses manage this content which so deeply impacts their reputation, rankings, and revenue? The answer is twofold:

1. First, refer back to the beginning of this article to the item I cited as the first document you must create for your business: your customer service policy. You can most powerfully influence the reviews you receive via the excellence of your staff education and training.
2. Master catching verbal and social complaints before they turn into permanent negative reviews by making your business complaint-friendly. And then move onto the next section of this article.

Owner responses

Even with the most consumer-centric customer service policies and the most detailed staff training, you will not be able to fully manage all aspects of a customer’s experience with your business. A product may break, a project be delayed, or a customer may have a challenging personality. Because these realities are bound to surface in reviews, you must take advantage of the best opportunity you have to manage sentiment after it has become a written review: the owner response.

You are not a silent bystander, sitting wordless on the sidelines while the public discusses your business. The owner response function provided by many review sites gives you a voice. This form of local business content, when properly utilized, can:

• Save you money by winning back a dissatisfied existing customer instead of having to invest a great deal more in winning an entirely new one;
• Inspire an unhappy customer to update a negative review with improved sentiment, including a higher star rating; and
• Prove to all other potential customers who encounter your response that you will take excellent care of them.

You’ll want to respond to both positive and negative reviews. They are free Internet real estate on highly visible websites and an ideal platform for showcasing the professionalism, transparency, accountability, empathy, and excellence of your company. For more on this topic, please read Mastering the Owner Response to the Quintet of Google My Business Reviews.

Once you have developed and are managing all of the above content, your local business has created a strong foundation on the web. Depending on the competitiveness of your geo-industry, the above work will have won you a certain amount of local and organic visibility. Need better or broader rankings and more customers? It’s time to grow with:

Structural local business content development

These are options for creating a bigger structure for your local business on the web, expanding the terms you rank for and creating multiple paths for consumer discovery. We’ll use Google’s 4 micro-moment terms as a general guide + real-world examples for inspiration.

I want to do

1. A homeowner wants to get her house in Colorado Springs ready to sell. In her search for tips, she encounters this Ultimate Home Seller’s To-Do Checklist & Infographic. Having been helped by the graphic, she may turn to the realty firm that created it for professional assistance.
2. A dad wants to save money by making homemade veggie chips for his children. He’s impressed with the variety of applicable root vegetables featured in this 52-second video tutorial from Whole Foods. And now he’s also been shown where he can buy that selection of produce.
3. A youth in California wants to become a mountain climber. He discovers this website page describing guided hikes up nearby Mount Whitney, but it isn’t the text that really gets him — it’s the image gallery. He can share those exciting photos with his grandmother on Facebook to persuade her to chaperone him on an adventure together.

I want to know

1. A tech worker anywhere in America wants to know how to deal with digital eye strain and she encounters this video from Kaiser Permanente, which gives tips and also recommends getting an eye exam every 1–2 years. The worker now knows where she could go locally for such an exam and other health care needs.
2. A homeowner in the SF Bay Area wants to know how to make his place more energy efficient to save on his bills. He finds this solar company’s video on YouTube with a ton of easy tips. They’ve just made a very good brand impression on the homeowner, and this company serves locally. Should he decide at some point to go the whole nine yards and install solar panels, this brand’s name is now connected in his mind with that service.
3. A gardener wants to know how to install a drip irrigation system in her yard and she encounters this major hardware store brand’s video tutorial. There’s a branch of this store in town, and now she knows where she can find all of the components that will go into this project.

I want to go

1. While it’s true that most I-want-to-go searches will likely lead to local pack results, additional website content like this special gluten-free menu an independently owned pizza place in Houston has taken the time to publish should seal the deal for anyone in the area who wants to go out for pizza while adhering to their dietary requirements.
2. A busy Silicon Valley professional is searching Google because they want to go to a "quiet resort in California." The lodgings, which have been lucky enough to be included on this best-of list from TripAdvisor, didn’t have to create this content — their guests have done it for them by mentioning phrases like "quiet place" and "quiet location" repeatedly in their reviews. The business just has to provide the experience, and, perhaps promote this preferred language in their own marketing. Winning inclusion on major platforms’ best-of lists for key attributes of your business can be very persuasive for consumers who want to go somewhere specific.
3. An ornithologist is going to speak at a conference in Medford, OR. As he always does when he goes on a trip, he looks for a bird list for the area and encounters this list of local bird walks published by a Medford nature store. He’s delighted to discover that one of the walks corresponds with his travel dates, and he’s also just found a place to do a little shopping during his stay.

I want to buy

1. Two cousins in Atlanta want to buy their uncle dinner for his birthday, but they’re on a budget. One sees this 600+ location restaurant chain’s tweet about how dumb it is to pay for chips and salsa. Check this out @cousin, he tweets, and they agree their wallets can stretch for the birthday dinner.
2. An off-road vehicle enthusiast in Lake Geneva, WI wants to buy insurance for his ride, but who offers this kind of coverage? A local insurance agent posts his video on this topic on his Facebook page. Connection!
3. A family in Hoboken, NJ wants to buy a very special cake for an anniversary party. A daughter finds these mouth-watering photos on Pinterest while a son finds others on Instagram, and all roads lead to the enterprising Carlo’s Bakery.

In sum, great local business content can encompass:

• Website/blog content
• Image content including infographics and photos
• Social content
• Video content
• Inclusion in best-of type lists on prominent publications

Some of these content forms (like professional video or photography creation) represent a significant financial investment that may be most appropriate for businesses in highly competitive markets. The creation of tools and apps can also be smart (but potentially costly) undertakings. Others (like the creation of a tweet or a Facebook post) can be almost free, requiring only an investment of time that can be made by local businesses at all levels of commerce.

Becoming a geo-topical authority

Your keyword and consumer research are going to inform the particular content that would best serve the needs of your specific customers. Rand Fishkin recently highlighted here on the Moz Blog that in order to stop doing SEO like it’s 2012, you must aim to become an entity that Google associates with a particular topic.

For local business owners, the path would look something like when anyone in my area searches for any topic that relates to our company, we want to appear in:

• local pack rankings with our Google My Business listing
• major local data platforms with our other listings
• major review sites with our profiles and owner responses
• organic results with our website’s pages and posts
• social platforms our customers use with our contributions
• video results with our videos
• image search results with our images
• content of important third-party websites that are relevant either to our industry or to our geography

Basically, every time Google or a consumer reaches for an answer to a need that relates to your topic and city, you should be there offering up the very best content you can produce. Over time, over years of publication of content that consistently applies to a given theme, you will be taking the right steps to become an authority in Google’s eyes, and a household brand in the lives of your consumers.

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