The Top 15 Free SEO Tools You Should Be Using

Search engine optimization (SEO) is more important today than ever before.

New trends (e.g., the rise of voice search, the AI revolution) mean that if you want to stay afloat today, you need to up your SEO game.

If you’re looking to get started with SEO or want to achieve better results with minimal financial investment, here are the 15 best free SEO tools to use.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an invaluable resource that is virtually indispensable to any digital marketer serious about SEO.

It provides a lot of handy data about websites such as the number of site visits, traffic sources, and location demographics.

With the detailed information from Google Analytics, digital marketers can tweak their content strategy and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Google analytics is one of the best free SEO tools that every digital marketer should be using. Google also provides a number of other nifty tools such as PageSpeed Insights, Keyword Planner, Search Console, and Sheets.

2. Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a nifty tool that provides content marketers with valuable data about the questions people ask online.

Once you input a keyword, it fetches popular queries based on that keyword and generates a cool graphic with the questions and phrases people use when they search for that keyword.

This data gives content creators insight into the concerns and desires of potential customers and enables them to craft highly targeted content that addresses those needs.

Answer the Public also provides keyword suggestions using prepositions such as “versus,” “like,” and “with.”

It is an excellent research tool that can help you create better content that people will enjoy and be more likely to share.

3. MozBar

MozBar is a free SEO toolbar that works with the Chrome browser. It provides easy access to advanced metrics on webpages and SERPs.

With MozBar, you can easily access the Page and Domain Authority scores of any page or site.

The Page Analysis feature lets you explore elements on any page (e.g., markup, page title, general attributes, link metrics).

You can find keywords on the page you’re viewing, highlight and differentiate links, and compare the link metrics of different sites in SERPs.

If you need to do detailed SEO research on the go, MozBar is one of the best options to consider.

You can unlock even more advanced features such as Page Optimization and Keyword Difficulty with a MozPro subscription.

4. SEMrush

SEMrush is an excellent keyword research SEO tool that, among other things, makes it easy to find out what keywords any page on the web is ranking for.

It provides detailed information about those keywords including their position in SERPs, the URLs to which they drive traffic and the traffic trends over the past 12 months.

With this feature packed tool, you can easily find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for and craft great content around those terms and phrases.

SEMrush also offers more features and unlimited access with various paid plans. While they’re not cheap, you can get started with a 14-day free trial, if you want to test out the premium features.

5. Keyworddit

Another fantastic tool for finding keyword ideas is Keyworddit, a free tool that sources keywords from subreddits on Reddit and provides context –  a list of threads where a particular keyword was used.

You type in a specific subreddit (e.g., /r/askreddit), and it’ll extract a handful of keywords, as well as the monthly search volume for those terms in the U.S.

Keyworddit is very easy to use and provides valuable insight into the interests of specific audiences.

6. Woorank

Woorank is a handy website analyzer that provides useful insights that can help you improve your site’s SEO.

It generates an SEO score for your site and an actionable “Marketing Checklist,” which outlines steps you can take to fix any problems with your site’s SEO.

Another cool feature of this free tool is the social shareability pane. This section provides social network data such as the number of likes, shares, comments, backlinks, and bookmarks across popular social networks.

Woorank also has a great mobile section where you can find information on how your pages render on mobile devices and how quickly they load.

7. Mobile Friendly Test

Google’s search algorithm places a lot of emphasis on how mobile-friendly a site is.

To that end, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool is designed to help you determine if your site is correctly optimized for smartphones and tablets.

You just type in your site’s URL, and it will plainly inform you whether your website is mobile-friendly.

The tool also offers suggestions on how you can improve the mobile-friendliness of your site.

The Page Loading Info feature lets you know if Google can properly access all the resources on a particular page and what to do if it can’t.

8. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a simple keyword research tool that scrapes data from Google’s Keyword Planner for keyword ideas based on a keyword you provide.

The tool also returns handy data for each keyword including the search volume, CPC, and level of competition.

An excellent feature of Ubersuggest is its ability to filter out keywords that you’re not interested in from search results.

With the recently updated version – Ubersuggest 3.0, you can now input URLs and get domain metrics.

9. BROWSEO

BROWSEO lets you see how your website looks to a search engine.

It basically strips your webpage of any styling and shows you the underlying structure. This helps you figure out if Google’s bot has any difficulty accessing important content on your site.

A neat feature of this free SEO tool is the SERP preview. This shows a preview of how your site appears in search results.

You can see if your titles and meta descriptions are adequately optimized and make changes as needed.

10. CanIRank

As the name implies, CanIRank helps you find out if you can rank on the first page of search engines for a particular keyword.

Unlike other tools that merely provide data about how competitive keywords are, CanIRank lets you know the probability that you’ll rank for a search term and uses AI to give you suggestions on how to better target keywords.

CanIRank provides great competitive analysis data and actionable steps to get your site ranking higher with better SEO.

11. Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a must-use keyword research tool due to the massive list of sites that it provides free search volume, CPC and competition data for:

• Google Search
• Google Trends
• eBay
• Answer The Public
• Google Keyword Planner
• Bing
• Etsy
• Soovle
• Google Search Console
• YouTube
• Ubersuggest
• Majestic
• Google Analytics
• Amazon
• Keyword Shitter
• Moz Open Site Explorer

Did I mention it’s completely free?

And, that’s available for Chrome and Firefox?

12. Check My Links

Check My Links is a nifty Chrome Extension that will crawl through your webpage and identify the status code for each link on the page – including broken links.

Each status code is color coded with 200 status codes returning dark green, 300 status codes light green, and 400 status codes returning red.

Once identified, you can then copy all bad links to your clipboard with one click.

13. Counting Characters Google SERP Tool

While counting characters has been a long-standing approach to evaluating meta description and title tag length, the reality is Google doesn’t count the meta title and description in number of characters. It uses pixels instead.

The Counting Characters tool will provide both the character count and the pixel count to ensure you are creating meta tags that are not cut off by an ellipsis – represented by (…).

14. Redirect Path

The Redirect Path Chrome extension will flag 301, 302, 404, and 500 HTTP Status Codes.

Additionally, client-side redirects like meta and JavaScript redirects will also be flagged ensuring any redirect issue can be uncovered immediately.

HTTP Headers such as server types and caching headers as well as the server IP address can also be displayed with the click of a button.

Furthermore, all of these details can be copied to your clipboard for easy sharing or addition to a technical audit document.

15. Google Search Console

Last but certainly not least, this list wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Google Search Console.

Aside from the fact, the data comes from Google, Google Search Console is rich with insights related to:

• Keyword and URL performance.
• Indexation issues.
• Mobile usability.
• Sitemap status.
• And much more!

Hitting the SEO Highway in 2019

Getting started with SEO has never been easier than it is today.

There are numerous free SEO tools such as the ones above that are available to SEO newbies and digital marketers on a tight budget. These tools offer a lot of great features and when used properly, can produce remarkable results.

So find a tool that works for you and make the best of it.

Source: www.searchenginejournal.com/top-free-seo-tools/302553/

Facebook Tests 'Suggested Time' Feature for Scheduled Posts

This is interesting - Facebook is reportedly testing a new 'Suggested' option within its post scheduling options for Pages which would enable Page admins to reach their audiences when they're most active on the platform.

As you can see in this image, posted by Facebook Page admin @GIFChaseH (and shared by social media expert Matt Navarra), the new scheduling screen includes a 'Suggested' option which provides a recommendation of when you should post to maximize engagement.

The explanation below the marker reads:

"Schedule your post based on when your fans were most active last week"

Similar functionality is available in various social media management tools, but this variation, using Facebook's own, internal data, and via Facebook's own native posting tools, could be worth checking out, and may help generate better results based on engagement.

Facebook's Page scheduling options can, at times, be problematic, with Facebook switching the schedule option away from the main post UI and limiting auto-generated previews when using the scheduled list. But, in general, Facebook has made native posting and scheduling for Pages the best option, with clear indicators of what your post will look like and additional targeting options to zero-in on your audience.

The capacity to also use more specific targeting tools could also help - and again, because these insights are linked directly to Facebook's internal data, it could prove more reliable, and a better indicator of when to post.

That doesn't necessarily mean it would be better than the options available in third-party tools, but it would add another element to Facebook's native posting options, which could help drive results.

The functionality is in testing - we have no word on a full rollout as yet.

Source: socialmediatoday.com

7 Powerful Benefits of Using PPC Advertising

Whether you’re trying to convince your boss or a client about the value of Google AdWords (or Bing Ads), there’s a powerful case to be made.

For starters, PPC:
• Offers quick entry.
• Results are easy to measurable and track.
• Works well with other marketing channels.
• Provides a wealth of useful data

PPC can have a major – and positive – impact on most businesses and brands.
If you aren’t doing any PPC marketing, you’re likely losing out on valuable traffic and revenue.
Need to make the case for PPC advertising? Here are just seven powerful benefits of using PPC.

1. PPC Contributes to Business Goals

This is often the most compelling reason to use PPC advertising. PPC can help you achieve a vast number of business and marketing goals. These goals range from high-level brand exposure and thought leadership to a hot lead submission or e-commerce sale.

Nearly any type of conversion goal can be tracked. PPC is a powerful tool for aligning website traffic drivers to end-goals.

In the era of content marketing and thought leadership, PPC can foster the middle ground of nurturing and serving the middle of the funnel through advertising content downloads, seeking newsletter signups, contest entries, and pushing for app downloads.

PPC can support many parts of the sales funnel and the path that your prospects take from awareness to becoming a customer. Regardless of the set of identified goals, PPC campaigns can be set up effectively.

2. PPC Is Measurable & Trackable

A major benefit of PPC advertising run through AdWords is that it’s easy to measure and track. Simply use the AdWords tool in combination with Google Analytics.

You’ll see high-level performance details including impressions, clicks, and conversions (based on the defined business goals).

There’s no mystery to your PPC performance. Stats are readily available and show how your campaigns are performing and what kind of traffic and results they are driving for your budget.
In other advertising and marketing channels, the picture isn’t as clear for attribution of the budget to direct results.

When you send your PPC traffic to dedicated landing pages and track it all the way to conversion using Google Analytics, you’re able to clearly see what you spent and what it drove in terms of your end goals. No billboard or magazine ad can attribute to sales like that.

3. Quick Entry

Even if you’re a decade behind your competitors on jumping into PPC marketing, you can get up and running quickly with a little bit of optimization. This is often a big contrast to starting up SEO efforts, which often take a lot of time and attention to get the same type of positioning and traffic that AdWords offers within minutes of launch.

When compared to other channels like email and organic social, you have the advantage of targeting people outside of those who are already aware of your brand, and you aren’t limited to your existing followers or customer lists.

PPC lets you quickly cast a wide net to find new prospects and customers.

Plus, most of the work is done within the PPC advertising platform — from the research to campaign build out, to writing ads. You can get up and running quickly with minimal involvement of your development teams, aside from help setting up conversion tracking and any desired landing pages.

4. You’re in Control

While there are several nuances regarding default campaign settings, you ultimately have control over a wide range of options for how you reach potential customers. This starts with the keywords or placements you choose to target and how restrictive you want to be.

You also have a lot of budget flexibility if you want to start small. You can set your own ad budget and bids, and choose what you’re willing to spend (though you have to pay at least close to a market rate to play in most cases).

If you’re seeing positive results, you can scale up immediately. And if you want to take a break, you can always pause and stop your ad spend right away. This is hard to do with other ongoing marketing campaigns, giving you the advantage and budget flexibility to move quickly when necessary or desired.

Google’s AdWords auction and the algorithm involved has the final say as to where your ads will be positioned and what you’ll spend when compared to competitors. The alignment of relevance between your landing pages and the keywords and ad copy can hurt or help you.

The good news is that you have the flexibility to make quick edits and to optimize while your ads are running, and to try new tests every day if you wish. There’s not a long cycle from edit to deployment that you see in other mediums, and if an ad stinks, you can pull it without having to let it finish out a contracted media cycle.

5. PPC Works Well With Other Marketing Channels

Content marketing has taken over the digital marketing world and content plans and calendars are the norm in most businesses now. With the investment in producing original and unique content to support the customer buying cycle and establish thought leadership positioning, AdWords is an engine that can drive visitors to content more quickly and improve the ROI on your content investment.

PPC and SEO work well together as the impressions and opportunities for traffic are often to the same audience — the people using Google to find information, services, or products. The performance data of impressions, clicks, and conversions from AdWords can provide great insight and direction on a keyword-by-keyword basis for where to prioritize SEO efforts.

On the flip side, organic traffic performance data and SEO strategy can also advise PPC if the data is available. All of this helps align with content marketing and ensures that efficiencies are gained and business end goals are not siloed.

AdWords remarketing is a great avenue to keep site visitors engaged, regardless of how they found your site. Remarketing ads are shown to people who visited and left your site and are based on specific rules or audiences you select.

There are other cases where PPC can help provide data or an alternative to traditional direct marketing activities. PPC can also be directly compared to traditional mail with costs per impression and conversion. If you can shift away from more expensive traditional marketing to methods that provide real-time data and have better tracking, it can be a big win.

6. Incredible Targeting Options

Many advertisers take a multi-layered approach in AdWords to test and ensure full coverage across the networks and targeting types that can gain brand exposure.

This ranges from targeting keywords through text ads, to running ads through remarketing based on their past behaviors, or focusing on specific audience demographics on the display network.

By testing and trying out a mix, you can ensure the full scope of AdWords is leveraged and that you’re getting as many impressions as possible while staying targeted to the personas in your prospective audience.

Going back to the business goals conversation, you can also see what performs best and set expectations on what the tolerance is for cost per click and cost per acquisition to compare the different targeting methods with each other.

Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the PPC targeting options available is that you are able to reach people who aren’t already in your audience as well as those that have been exposed to your brand. You have many options for how wide of a net you want to cast.

7. A Wealth of Marketing Data

While there’s a lot of data and performance information directly available in Google AdWords, the value of information gained goes beyond just PPC performance.

Impression, click, and conversion data for each keyword can be used to advise SEO strategy and content marketing efforts.

Beyond that, you can use the built-in keyword planner and display planner tools to find where your audience is.

You can also cross-reference where your competition is through third-party tools like SpyFu, KeywordSpy, and iSpionage to build a solid profile of what you’re up against and what market share you can gain.

Summary

PPC advertising has proven to be a reliable and profitable channel for tons of B2B, B2C, nonprofits, and other companies seeking quick, quality traffic and conversions.

Considering all the benefits PPC offers, there’s little risk in testing it out to see where it can move the needle and to gain a wealth of valuable data you can use to inform your other marketing and optimization efforts.

Source: searchenginejournal.com

The Benefits of Google My Business

Since pulling the plug on Google +, Google has been putting more effort and focus into providing businesses with more options to maximize their exposure through its platform.

Google has created Google My Business and in the past year they have been adding more options to improve the ability for businesses to be discovered online. Google My Business is particularly effective for small, local businesses.

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a free tool that allows you to promote your Business Profile and business website on Google Search and Maps. With your Google My Business account, you can see and connect with your customers, post updates to your Business Profile, and see how customers are interacting with your business on Google. (Google)

Why Should Small Businesses Use Google My Business?

Google My Business provides more ways for your business to attract and engage with customers searching for your business or your services/products.

Google My Business is particularly useful to small businesses because:

• 4 out of 5 customers use search engines to find local information/businesses/services.
• 70% of customers visit a store to make a purchase after an online search.
• 85% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

What Tools are Provided to Help My Business Succeed?

Business Website – Even though you may have a business website of your own, a Google My Business website complements your website by providing more visibility with Google Search and Google Maps. The free website builder pulls the information from your Business Profile to auto-generate a website. You can then choose a specific template design, add photos, and create updates to customize your website.

Accessible Dashboard – The Google My Business allows you to view useful information for your business, including your online performance, customer photos, customer reviews, company updates, and a variety of helpful insights for you to determine if your marketing strategy is creating results, allowing you enough information to update your strategy or continue with what is working.

Insights – Google My Business insights provides information on how customers are using Search and Maps to find your listing or businesses providing your services/products. Insights provides information on how people are searching for your business, how they are searching for the services/products you provide, how many clicked through to your website, where they are located, whether they called your business, and more. (For more on Insights see Google’s About Insights)

Google My Business Posts – While these updates are called “posts” they are not actually Social Media updates. These posts are visible on your Google My Business listing during a search and on the Google My Business website. The posts are a great way to showcase your business at the exact time someone is searching for your business online.

Customer Communication – Google My Business now provides a great way for customers to connect with your business. Customers viewing your listing now can call, message, or leave a review. Providing more ways for people to find you and reach you so you can do more business.

Keep an Eye on Your Competitors – You can also see what your competitors are posting and see who is in direct competition for searches in your area. Allowing you to re-strategize your campaign to put your business ahead of your opponents. (This means YOUR posts are showing up on their listing too.)

What is the Difference Between Google My Business, Google Places, Google Listings, etc.?

Google My Business now incorporates Google Places, Google Listings, and Google + Business Pages. IT is the main place to manage and update your business information and Business Profile. This is now what you need in order to update your information on Google and optimize your business for search rank.

Still Not Convinced?

Case studies have shown that businesses in a highly competitive industry should be using Google My Business to optimize their business online in order to get a jump on their competition.

You need to be where customers are looking, if you aren’t, they won’t find you, they will find your competition.

Source: business2community.com

What are the 5 Types of Digital Marketing that Can Grow Your Business?

Many people know what digital marketing is but they don’t fully implement all the aspects in their campaign. If you look at the leading websites in the search results, you will find that they are in various types of digital marketing techniques. So, if you want to compete, it is vital that you take into account all the various digital marketing techniques in your marketing online campaign.

Types of Digital Marketing

1. Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to marketing activities that aim to help you gain traffic on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It can be organic, that is you manually perform on and off-site optimization on your website. This method is harder as it takes time for the website to climb up to the search engine ranking. If it is successful, you will get a constant stream of traffic with promising ROI for free from the search engine. Another method is to purchase an ad on the search engine. PPC advertising is expensive and it doesn’t guarantee immediate traffic to your website.

2. Social Media

Social media marketing is about marketing effort that is carried out on the social media platform. To establish your brand as an authority, you must share quality content relevant to your niche. In your blog, you should also place the social media button to enable people to share the content conveniently. You can also buy ads on social media to get a lot of traffic quickly. Hashtag campaign involves starting a discussion with a hashtag. The hashtag you choose should be witty and related to the audience. Influencer marketing allows you to reach out to a large audience via a post on an influencer’s account.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is sending emails that are related to your product promotion to your subscriber’s base. There are various types of emails you can send in your campaign including newsletters, confirmation email, discount codes, freebies, notification about an update in your product, and thank you emails. You will have to invest in a subscription to an email marketing automation platform like MailChimp to efficiently schedule your email marketing campaign. With the automation tool, you can customize your email design and monitor the CTR with the analytics on your account.

4. Banner Advertising

You can also attract traffic to your website by purchasing banner advertisement spots on other websites. You can directly contact the webmaster of the website that you want to advertise. You can purchase ads on CPM networks like Tribal Fusion, Burst Media, and BuySellAds. You can pay for the ad based on CPM or by per click rate. In your ad network account, you can customize the parameters on when your ad will appear such as keyword and the search habits of the audience. You may have to test different types of banner until you find one that converts well.

5. Landing Page

If you want more targeted traffic, you should consider creating a landing page. A landing page is a domain with a single page that talks solely about the product. The pictures and buttons must be put at the right place to entice visitors to take action. This type of marketing also relies on recapping the main points of the product review over and over. A successful landing page can convert at least 2 – 5 customers per 100 visitors. If your landing page is well written, people will not be hesitated to enter their name and email in your subscription form.

Here is a quick overview of the 5 types of digital marketing that is discussed: 

1. Optimize your site with organic SEO or buy PPC ads
2. Post regularly on social media platforms
3. Send email marketing campaigns to prospective customers
4. Buy banner spots on popular websites
5. Create a targeted landing page

Source: newsgram.com

How to Setup a Corporate Blog: 8 Rules to Making Your Blog Successful

One of the best ways to grow your business is through a corporate blog.

Here's how to set it up correctly:

First, figure out what you want to blog on. It's not just about blogging on your own products or services. It is about helping your potential customers.

If your content helps solve your potential customers' problems, they will turn into customers.

Also setup your URL structure correctly. Your blog should be placed on yourdomain.com/blog/. Using a subdirectory will help with search engine rankings.

Once you have your blog setup, ask yourself: who's the voice of your blog? Are you going to have one author or multiple? Either one works, but make sure you put the writer's image at the bottom of each post as well as their bio.

This helps create a personal connection with your readers.

Now when you have writers you need to give them a rule book. That way everyone is writing with one main goal in mind.

Here are some of the rules you can use:

1. Only write content that benefits the readers.
2. Use the words "you" and "I" within your content. It makes it seem more conversational.
3. Use sub-headings to make your content skimmable.
4. Keep your paragraphs to 5 or 6 lines.
5. Wrap up each post with a conclusion. And at the end of the conclusion should be a question, which will help encourage more comments.
6. Respond to every comment left on your blog. It's just proper blog etiquette.
7. Cross link your blog posts together. This will help get them indexed.
8. Write at least one post a week.

6 Signs That Your Company Needs Local SEO Services

If your business has physical locations, then you more than likely already know the importance of attaining and maintaining prominent visibility in the local search engines. Nearly half of all web searches have a local intent, using queries such as “[keyword] [city] [state]” to find products and services specifically in locations where you do business.

These searchers are generally deep in the purchase funnel and are ready to spend money. If they don’t find your location listed on page one of the SERPs, they will find your competitors.

There are several tell-tale signs when a company should consider professional local SEO services. Let’s dig deeper and discover whether your business is covered or if you need additional support.

Sign #1 – All of your locations are listed on the same page on your website

A common oversight that can cripple local visibility is placing all location details on a single webpage. To optimize effectively for each specific location, you need a unique webpage that provides the ability to target the main keywords and location in the HTML title and meta description. This is not possible with one landing page serving all locations.

Use a Logical Site Structure

Locations pages should all be structured within a logical hierarchy, so search engines understand how each page fits together within the entire section of content. Depending on how many locations you have, a typical structure for this content might be: domain-URL/locations/state/city/store.

Individual pages also provide the indexable content area needed to adequately describe unique characteristics, services or features that each location offers. Presenting them all on a single page is very limiting to the optimization, and not very user-friendly.

Deep Links to Locations

When updating your Google myBusiness listings, or other maps feed, always provide deep links that take the searcher directly to the details for the location they’re interested in, rather than dropping them on a high-level page or homepage where they would have to search again for details.

Most often, local searchers are looking for an address, phone number, or services that a specific location provides. Don’t make it harder for them to find! They will find the information they need (and convert) somewhere else.

Optimize Your Pages Effectively

Another common challenge is chasing high search volume keywords based on metro areas effectively. All location pages should be optimized for their exact city. Google knows exactly where you are – right down to longitude and latitude coordinates.

If you only have one location in a suburb of a major city (i.e. Mesa, Arizona), then also optimizing for the metro area of Phoenix would make sense. However, if you have multiple locations within a metro area, targeting the major city on all of them will cause confusion.

It would be more effective to go after Phoenix searchers by adding another level to your hierarchy, such as: domain-URL/locations/arizona/phoenix/store

Add as much content as possible for search engines to index that describes the unique characteristics, features, services or products that each location offers.

Be sure to use any schema that applies, such as Local Business or Location for any related events. Use all the values and all relevant sub-properties that are relevant.

Sign #2 – You have no idea know how much traffic is being driven from local search

If you’re struggling to track the performance of your local landing pages, it might be time to consult an expert who can dive into your local analytics and provide a report with clear action items. There are at least two sources of data that can provide valuable insight with your local search campaign – maps and organic local traffic. Both should be tracked and reported on to provide granular insight on the current performance of each location.

Tag your locations

Tracking maps traffic is easy to do and allows you to see traffic that’s coming directly from map engines. Google even provides a campaign URL builder, which makes this process painless to implement and see in Google Analytics.

Ex: URL/locations/arizona/mesa/store101?utm_source=local-search

You could go one step further and set up a tracking URL for each search engine to provide more granular data. When you’ve created one for each location, add them to your feed or platform so it is updated.

Ex: URL/locations/arizona/mesa/store101?utm_source=local-google

Set Canonical Tags

Be sure that canonical tags are implemented on your location pages. This will inform the search engines of the preferred version of the URL to keep in their index, and all other variations of the URL will be dropped.

If you’re not sure if canonical tags have been implemented on your website, it’s easy to check. Load the page in your browser, right-click on a content area, and select “view page source”. Then, search the HTML for “canonical”.

The canonical tag for the example campaign URL above should be:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.domain.com/locations/arizona/mesa/store101” />

This guarantees that URLs with the UTM tracking codes used above are dropped from the index and only the correct version remains.

Use Unique Phone Numbers

Another great measurement tool is the use of unique phone numbers to track calls. Research shows that 61% of mobile users prefer to call a business when they are in the process of buying. This is even truer if they’re shopping for a high-value item. If you’re not tracking these, these conversions will be counted as an exit from the website.

If this type of attribution is critical to your business, consider setting up a bank of numbers that provide the ability to track per location. Google recommends local phone numbers, instead of a call center. If that’s not possible, at the very least use a unique number for your local search efforts. This will differentiate it from regular website traffic and allow you to analyze the channel more effectively.

Call to Action Buttons

Enable “call to action” on your Google myBusiness listings to help convert searchers directly from your local listing. You now can add five pre-defined buttons to your local profiles:

• Learn More
• Reserve
• Sign Up
• Buy
• Get Offer

You can also track views and interactions. This provides an additional way for searchers to interact or convert directly from your listing.

Sign #3 – You aren’t aware of where your business citations need work

An important aspect of local SEO that’s often overlooked or even avoided is managing citations. They are listed by Moz as the #4 ranking factor for the local pack, and #5 ranking factor for organic local.

A citation is any mention of your business’ name, address, and phone number (NAP) – with or without a link – that appears on any local-oriented website or directory across the entire web. Examples of influential websites to keep your listing data updated on: Yelp, YellowPages, Merchant Circle and even Facebook and Foursquare.

Completeness of Listings

It’s very important that your citation data is complete (a listing is present for each location), accurate (no variances exist with the data), and that no duplicates exist. Duplicates are common for a variety of reasons. For example, different teams within a company can open a different listing for the same location. Or worse, if your listing isn’t claimed and verified, unscrupulous marketers have also been known to create fake listings to try and steal your local traffic away.

Citation Management Platform

Management of citations is challenging due to the number of resources necessary to manage this to scale. In fact, it’s nearly impossible for a one or two-person in-house team to manage citations effectively for anything over a handful of locations.

Companies with many locations will need to invest in a citation management solution. There are several on the market, and they come at a wide variety of price points and levels of effectiveness. However, very few provide updates with the major websites and directories at a frequency to deliver a significant increase in performance. Our proprietary platform provides real-time updates to many of the top 45 local websites.

Sign #4 – You don’t know if your online reviews are good or bad

Don’t believe the saying that “ignorance is bliss”. If you don’t know whether your reviews are good or bad, your company’s reputation is at stake – and you may already be behind the curve.

Reviews are powerful. BrightLocal research shows that 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business. And, 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.

Online Reviews are Trusted

Research also shows that 84% of searchers trust online reviews as much as a personal reference. This is mind-blowing to fully grasp. But, this indicates that website visitors will trust a random stranger’s opinion of your company as much as a trusted friend!

Knowledge is Power

You need to be aware of what’s being said about your business before you can develop an effective local SEO strategy. An easy first step in knowing where you stand is to conduct a search for your business name and locations to see what is popping up in the search results. Or add superlatives like “[company name] [city] worst” or “[company name] best” to your search, it can be very enlightening – and sometimes frightening.

Reward good reviews. When someone takes the time to leave a good review, respond to it and let them know that you saw it and appreciate it. Not only will this reward the reviewer, but it lets other readers know that you’re active online and care about your customers (and reputation).

Respond to bad reviews. Customers are generally more willing to share bad experiences online rather than good ones. When someone does post about a bad experience, it’s critical to get in front of it and respond quickly.

If one person had a bad experience, it’s very likely that others have too. So, you may be reaching others with that one post. Consider offering them a way to communicate directly with your team to take it offline and make it right. ReviewTrackers reports that 94% of customers were convinced to avoid a business because of negative online review. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it will be ok.

Sign #5 – You have no idea how to build links to your website

Links that point to your website from other sites are one of the top two factors for ranking, as Google themselves has said. Backlinks to your location pages are even more important, as they will validate and strengthen your business’ authority and relevance for your vertical and specific locations.

There are a variety of tactics that all businesses can use for earning local backlinks. Advanced search commands are effective for identifying unlinked mentions of your brand, and often result in fast and easy opportunities where it’s valuable to link to a relevant location page. Additionally, combing through a competitor’s backlink profile has a high potential of uncovering competitive local opportunities.

Sign #6 – You understand how much work there is to do, but don’t have the resources

It’s very possible that everything mentioned so far is already on your radar, but there just isn’t enough time and resources to tackle it. Executing an effective local search strategy is time-consuming and requires long-term commitment to see a return. Most companies do not have that luxury of hiring specialized in-house teams and settle for trying to solve this complex challenge with one or two people, who generally have other tasks on their plate.