 Welcome to Workamp Miami. I'm actually really excited to be here this year. My name is Sandy Edwards. I actually work for a company called Live Pulse. We specialize in web design and marketing. And I kind of had up all their projects. I am their project coordinator over there. And one of the things that I love to do is help build our customers brick and mortar businesses in the online space. I will give you a caveat with this presentation. This solely goes along with having an actual brick and mortar location. If you either don't have a brick and mortar location or you don't work with clients that do, this will not pertain to you. So I want to give that caveat up front so that if anybody wants to take off or doesn't need to hear about it, they have that opportunity to catch another talk that does pertain to them. And I will not be offended. So that's a little bit about me. So let's go ahead and get into it. So what is local SEO? That's what I'm here to talk to you guys today about. So the biggest thing with local search engine optimization is understanding that people are always looking for some business that's closest to them. They don't want to go to the pizza place two miles down the road when there's one that's half a block down the road. So how do we capitalize on finding those businesses closest to us and driving customers there if we aren't making sure that all of the listings and things like that are properly updated? So remember when people are searching on a desktop, a lot of times what you'll find is they're going to type in pizza Orlando. I'm from Orlando. I'm going to use Orlando examples, I apologize. And so the idea is how do we make that found? How do I get found for pizza in Orlando? What you'll also find is people are searching more from their mobile devices. Over 50% of searches now are locally based. So that means they're either typing in their location in a browser on their desktop or they're using their phone to search. If you're using your phone to search, we're going to get into how that functions, but you've got to make sure that you're capitalizing on those markets because if you're not, your business isn't going to be located. One more thing, if there's any questions, I'm going to say this to the end because I do have a lot of information to cover. Whenever you're looking at a marketing plan, these are kind of the components of that. So you've got to have an email plan, a social media plan, a search engine optimization plan, a conversion rate optimization plan, and a revenue optimization plan. So we're going to cover the search portion of this today, and we're going to talk a little bit about how that flows into your conversion and your revenue plan, but we're really going to cover heavy on the local aspect. So here is how SEO as a whole for local businesses is comprised. So what you can see is that on-page signals, which is this part right here, actually makes up 25 percent, but that's only a quarter of how you're found online. The only other thing that's related to on-page is the links, which is the 22 percent. Everything else is local based. So looking at the actual pie graph there, you can see that over 50 percent of your traffic is going to come from something locally based and local search based. So that is why, yes, you have to have that base on your website of regular standard search engine optimization. But if you have a physical location, you have to do local SEO. You don't have a choice. You will fail if you don't. So what are the fundamentals? We're all familiar with how if you start something over here with the internet, how it just kind of spreads out because it's all connected. Local SEO is no different. You're going to light one small fire in this arena, and it's going to spread like wildfire. I'm going to show you exactly how that pertains to different aspects, but just remember that concept of lighting. All it takes is one piece of paper lit in a forest to cause an entire forest fire. So let's talk about our local listings. So there are four major names when it comes to local listings. You've got Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yelp. Google has changed their methodology a little bit over the years. A lot of us are probably familiar with Google Plus. Now that it's kind of morphed into Google Pages, and then now it's morphed into Google My Business. It's still connected to Google Plus, so you're going to have to do both. But these are the four main competitors. So let's go into them specifically. Let's talk about Google My Business. This one is the most important of all of the listings that you can do. This is where you start. This is your starting point. With Google My Business, what you want to do is you want to make sure that you understand that this is also a social media platform. So when you start your social media campaign with your Facebook and your Twitter and all of that, make sure you're doing Google Plus as well, because this is where your reviews are going to go. With that, we're going to talk about why reviews are so important. But understand that Google is also the most heavily used search engine. So when you're tapping into this conglomerate of this local listing and the search engine and the social media campaign all in one, you're really doing a heavy hitter on your SEO. So the next one that I want to talk about, the second most important one of those four, is Yelp. Yelp is important because how many people in the room have an iPhone? You all use Yelp and don't know it. Siri, when you ask Siri to help you find a restaurant or help you find a dry cleaners, that's Yelp. That's where Siri is pulling her data. So we want to make sure that we're really tapping in and capitalizing on that as well. It's also one of the most heavily used review apps, mobile. So when you're going to the restaurant, you're like, I just don't know if I want to try this new place. And you look it up on Yelp to see the reviews. Understands that that's why your business needs to be on there. And know that consumers trust it. For whatever reasons, consumers trust other consumers, more so than they trust any advertisement they're ever going to see on TV. So know that that is definitely a place you need to pinpoint. So let's talk a little bit about Bing. Bing's not really one you hear that much about these days, but there's still a Windows phone market. So we've already talked about Google that ties into Android. We've talked about Yelp which ties into iPhone. So we don't want to leave our Windows phone users in the dust. You never want to leave business on the table. So with Bing Maps, you're actually going to be able to tap into those Windows phone users. It's only about 20% of the market segment. So understand that if you don't have the capacity to do this work, Google Yelp, wait till you can with Bing. None of these cost any money so far that I've talked about. So all we're talking is the time that it takes to claim these listings. It takes me about an hour to claim all four. So we're not talking tons of time either. So now we're going to talk about Yahoo. Yahoo has recently in the last five months changed their business model. And I'm not entirely happy with it. They were a free listing. They're now a paid listing. There are ways around that. I'll explain those when we get into citations. But understand that just having your presence on Yahoo, not a paid Yahoo listing, but just having your presence there is all that is necessary. And like I said, I'm going to explain how to get around that. Yahoo does pull the Yelp reviews directly into their listing. So as long as you are there, those reviews are going to pop through as well for the Yahoo users. And remember, there's only 10% of the search market that's using Yahoo. So if for some reason your workarounds and stuff, you don't have time or the money to put into the workarounds, understand that you're only losing out on a 10% market share, so it's not going to be the death of your business. So let's talk about what is the most important part of these listings I just mentioned. It's the NAP, your name, your address, and your phone number. You're going to hear me repeat several times how important this is. Your name, address, and phone number should always be identical on every single listing. Oh, look, it's the first thing on my next slide. Like I said, I'm going to repeat this several times. When you go to claim these listings, you want to make sure that the name, the address, and the phone number are identical. On top of that, you want to make sure that you fill everything in 100%. There are some listings that are going to ask more questions than others. One of those examples is Yelp. Yelp actually asks for an owner bio. Give it. It's one of those things where I have had numerous customers say, well, I don't really want my potential clients to know my history. Give a business bio. Do something that puts some history in that spot. It's going to help your listing show up. If you don't have 100% of your listing filled up and filled out properly, then what's going to happen is your competitor who does is going to be above you. And the last thing that you want is for him to get the business over you. On top of that, there are opportunities to put photos in the listings. You want to make sure that you have at least 10 when possible. If it's not possible or you have to pay to add more photos to get to that 10, don't pay. It's not worth it. The boost is not enough. But for the ones that are free, like Google and Yelp, make sure that you get all 10 photos on there. On top of that, there's also opportunities to put videos as well. Make sure that you have at least one when it's free. Again, the boost is not enough for you to take the time to go and the money to pay to add additional videos and things of that nature. But that one is going to give you a little bit of a boost. And when it's free, why not? And then on top of that, reviews. We're going to go into reviews more in depth in a minute. But know that responding to reviews is key to success in the local SEO world. So let's talk about some of the negative factors. There are negative. I apologize. What is going on with my slides? I'm sorry. So there are some negative ranking factors when it comes to listings. I can't get the title to come up. So listings that are detected at a false location. So when you put in your address, if it's not identical to your website, as well as to every other listing out there, what you'll find is that Google or Yelp is going to come back and say, hey, we've detected that's not a real location. That's not OK. So you want to make sure, again, this kind of relates back that the name, address, and phone number are correct. The incorrect business categories. With business categories, you'll notice that when you're looking at, say, auto repair centers, there's also categories for tire repair shop. If you're a tire repair shop, you're not an auto repair center unless you do both. And then you have both categories. But make sure that your categories are exactly where they need to be, and that they're accurate. Because everything is connected online, know that those categories, if they're mismatched throughout the listings, it will hurt your actual Google search results. Number three, and actually, I'm going to tell you this. These are in order from most important to least important to show you the importance. So number three is that mismatched name, address, and phone. Number four is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing with the business name, when you type in to title your business on the listings, I've seen a lot of people who type in Uncle Joe's pizza shop, best pizza ever. Best pizza ever is keyword stuffing. Don't do it. We know from the reviews that you have the best pizza ever. So don't put it in the name. Make sure this ties right back into your name, address, and phone matching exactly. And then with the presence of multiple listings, I have had a lot of clients come to me, and they have actually had for Google my business listings. And I'm like, what happened? And they're like, well, I started to claim it. I didn't get the postcard, so I started over. And it becomes a problem. Because what happens is Google goes, what's connected to their website? Who's real? Who's not real? And so what you want to do is you want to make sure that you clean that up first. And there is my title. OK, so citation building. Citation listings are little sites out there that you can put your business information on that clients can use to contact you, but that aren't heavily used like a search engine's local listing. And a good example of this is yp.com, WeddingWire, and the Better Business Bureau is actually an example of this as well. And I'll provide a list in a minute of some of the most commonly used listings. But what these are used for is to actually build your domain strength. So these are directly related to how strong your website actually is when it comes to the local world. So make sure that if you have the money and they're not expensive, you can use a service that does all this work for you. And I'm actually going to give you the providers that I've used in the past here in a minute. If you don't have the money, claim them manually. It's going to cause a little bit of research on your part to find out where you can go to list your business, but it's definitely worth the time, the energy, and the money. Moz does provide a list by business category on their website. And my slides are already up on my blog, and you'll have the link at the end of the slideshow for that. But they do have citations listed by category as well. So top things to remember. Always keep your name address and phone number the same. I told you it's going to keep coming up. Slowly distribute these citations over time. Most of the time I average when I run a report for a new client, we'll see that we've got 6,200 available citations for a brick and mortar business who's never done any citation building before. And so what I will do is I will schedule 10 a month. So that means for six to 10 months, we're going to have this steady, slow addition of these citations. And I use a service that charges me $30 every time I do 10. So it's really not that heavy of a cost when you talk about just $30 for six months every month. It's not huge. For some small businesses, it can seem like a lot of money. But in the grand scheme of things, when we're going to almost double the number of people who walk through your door, totally worth it in the long run. Once again, you're not going to want to duplicate your listings. So you're going to want to pick one claiming service and stick to it. Because sometimes the results from the different searches can differ between claiming services. If you like one service and another service, sometimes there's certain industries that one is better for than the other. So that you could use. But just make sure that if you have a client or a business that you're only using that one service for them. So make sure there's nothing that gets convoluted and duplicates listings. The other thing is use logic. If you're a local business that only services the local area, only use local citations. If you're a local business, but you are a chain and you have a chain in another state, then you can use both locations. If you're a local business, but you can service nationally because you can ship product, use local and national citations. But use logic when it comes to that type of thing. So here's that list of citation examples that I was talking about. So Yellow Pages, Manta, those are some of the bigger names. Facebook is actually a citation listing when it comes to your domain strength. So once again, this ties right back into the need of having a social media campaign. Social media does account for 6% of your search results when it comes to local businesses. So that is a decent percentage when you're looking at the grand scheme of things. There's that local.yahoo.com again. Superpages, Yelp, Urban Spoon, if you're a restaurant, Wedding Wire, if you do business with brides. And then on the other side, you'll see GigSalad. That's for bands and for those in the music industry. And Angie's List for service-based companies. So once, like I said before, it's very gonna be, some of it's gonna be industry specific and then some of it's just gonna be broad spectrum. So who can do my local listings for me? Because I don't want to go and claim 100 citations all by myself. Bright Local is a good one. That's who I personally use. So for $30, I can do 10 listings. It's great, it's amazing. I've actually found that when I run my report the following month after submitting my 10 listings that I actually end up with traction on anywhere from 12 to 17 listings because they're all interconnected. So I don't have to worry so much about the nitty gritty when it comes to which listings am I putting it out on? One thing you'll find is the Yellow Pages is actually connected to like 10 other listing providers. So you might submit to Yellow Pages and end up on five or six others automatically just because they all communicate, which is really cool. Moz.com slash local has an option as well. It's a little bit more expensive. I haven't played around with it too much. I've used it once or twice. WhiteSpark and these other companies as well have some good and expensive options. But like I said, Bright Local is who I use. Their customer service is amazing. If they run into an actual discrepancy when they're claiming the listing, they contact me directly and say, hey, we found this problem. What do you want us to do? How do you want us to handle it? I have had others that have just kind of sent back an error message and say we couldn't submit to that one. So that's kind of that hands on is what I really like about them. So let's talk about reviews. This is kind of like, I don't know, the ugly stepchild for a lot of companies. They're like, I don't want my business on Yelp. I don't want bad reviews. And I have to remind people that there's no such thing as a bad review when it comes to your SEO. So 10% of your ranking comes from reviews. So it really is a necessary evil that you have reviews and that you actually not solicit reviews because Google says don't do that, but that when you have a really good exchange with the client, ask them to take it online. And any polite means necessary. I have seen a lot of clients where on their invoicing system, at the bottom, it says if you really loved our service and want to leave us feedback, please do so here. It's a link to their Google page. And so sometimes you'll find that that can be a two way street because they're not happy and they want to leave feedback. But at the same time, the people who are happy because you asked, they do as well. So definitely worth it. Reviews are gonna set you apart from your competitor. And I know that may sound a little iffy with that, especially if you might get a one star hero, one star there. But people are more likely to look at the aggregate anyway. So how many times do you look at a business and go, oh, well they average four stars, it can't be that bad. There's 500 reviews and they average four and a half stars. I'm okay, I'm not gonna die if I eat there. So it's one of those things where it will set you apart from your competitor, especially if you even have half a star rating above the next guy. There's no such thing as a bad review. And what I mean by that is when you have someone leaving a review, it shows that you have consumer interaction when it comes to the internet. So just like a social media campaign, does you know good if people aren't actually active on it? So you posting things is great, but if you don't have any clients or consumers that are replying to those posts, that means your engagement is zero. You have to have engagement to have traction. The same thing is true of reviews. You have to have engagement to have traction. So with that, when I say there's no bad reviews, if you get a one star, the logical thing that I have told my clients to do is to respond. Your response can be as simple as, I'm really sorry you had that experience at my restaurant. I really want to make it right. Can you email me at this email address so that I can make sure I make it up to you? All you're doing is taking the conversation offline. Because what can happen if you keep the conversation online is it can explode. So take it offline. Okay. I have seen numerous times where I myself have looked at reviews and gone, oh, okay, well they have one one star review and three five star reviews. But they replied and wanted to make it right. Everybody has a bad day, we're all human. So as long as you show that humanity and show that you're willing to take it to the next level, help them out, do that type of thing, you're going to see that it's actually going to increase consumer trust. And once again, you're not going to have that bad review and you have two way engagement. So it's really a win-win all around even if you have a lower star review. The flip side of that, it's five star reviews. Don't forget about the people who love you. Okay, your customers who are leaving you a five star review, make sure that you're responding to them too. I'm so glad you had a great experience at Uncle Joe's Pizza Place. We would love to have you come back. Come email me and let me do X, Y, Z. It doesn't have to be anything other than, you know, we have this already existing coupon that we give everybody in the mail. But to them it makes your customer feel good and it shows other consumers that you really care about people walking through the door, okay. So with that, that's where you come into that whole conversion thing. Because when you increase consumer trust, you're going to increase conversions. It's just the natural progression, okay. So here's some examples of some reviews from a little theater that has an interesting name. It's called the Mad Cal Theater. I've used the examples throughout this entire presentation just because their reviews are stellar and their service, well, I've been there a couple of times, is stellar. But these are the types of reviews that are accepted. They're lengthy, they're detailed, okay. A lot of times I see business owners say, hey, I'm going to have my cousin and my uncle and my brother and my sister go, go leave a review for me. I'm not saying that's not okay. That's okay. Make sure they make sense. You can fluff your reviews as long as they don't get kicked out, okay. They reviews use a bot to remove spam reviews. So that way, when you do have that angry customer or it was their fault and it's obviously their fault that they had a bad time, the bot is supposed to kind of sense that and pull those out, okay. That's the other thing is you may go back and read your reviews two months later and see that some of those one-stars have dropped off. You'll also see that some of your five-stars have too. So just constantly be paying attention to those reviews and make sure that you're diligently working through those listings and your citations. So my slides can be found at my blog. If you guys have any questions at all, we have time for questions, right, Nellie? Okay, we've got about 10 minutes for questions. I am gonna be in the happiness far if you want me to take a look at exact things you're working on. But if you have generalized questions, I can take questions and I'm gonna try and move from the front of the room back, so. So I have a brick and mortar location in Miami. Okay. And I'm moving to Fort Lauderdale. It's about a 50 mile difference. Okay, do you have your listings claim now? I don't have all of them. Do you have a few? I have a few. Can you come see me in the happiness bar? Okay. I saw two. Number one, can you see a little bit about what Yex does? Guys! I can't hear. Can you talk a little bit about Yex when it goes to that local market and then the second thing is Google reviews sometimes they fall off even the good ones. That's what I was just saying. Sometimes you'll see the five stars fall off. Yext. Yext has a weird place in my heart. Bright Local does what Yext does. The problem with Yext, I'm gonna try it very lightly because that is a big name for me to make mad and I'm on a live stream. The problem with Yext is that there's no way for you to go in and claim ownership of those after the fact. When you use one of these services, you can. So they're giving you in the report that they give you, they're giving you the username and password they used to set up that listing so that you can go in, make edits, change things going forward. With Yext, they own it. They're claiming it under them and if you leave them, you lose it. And then you end up with a duplicate listing and claiming it out from under them is virtually impossible. So just be careful with them. Not saying you know, not to, just be careful. Yes, that's through that Bright Local citation submission. One thing when you run that is it'll actually pop up in, Facebook will pop up, Google will pop up. But like I said, you want to claim the first three that I mentioned, Google, Yelp and being manually. And then through the citation submission, claim Yahoo. That's the only way to get around, not paying them. And they own Yext, so. They don't. Getting rid of the duplicates with Yahoo is a little bit more difficult. It took me upwards of 10 hours to get one person cleaned up one time. So if you're doing it for a client, that's when I would do hourly, just to be on the safe side. This may be out of scope, but one of the things that I do for my clients is try to encourage their customers to give reviews. And it's very easy on every site except Google. And I've tried all kinds of things. So I send an email and it clicks right to a open aid here at the review window. And it's like, okay, it works on some Android phones. It doesn't work on iPhones. And it's a real pain for me. I haven't found a solution to this. If you link to their Google My Business page, send them a link to that page and ask them to leave a review. It does require a few extra steps on the client's part, but it at least gets them to where they need to go. They don't want it to be that easy. I know. Which is painful for us who are trying to help our customers, and I get that. But unfortunately, it's kind of like that whole thing where I said Google doesn't want you soliciting reviews. They don't want to make it easy for you to solicit reviews. So the client's got to be like really dedicated. And when I say really dedicated, I mean like it's two additional clicks, but still, because you can't just pop them right into that review space. Yeah, unfortunately, it's just not there. Say you run reports regularly, what are you going to do? I use Bright Local. Bright Local is a full reporting service for local search engine optimization. You can actually run ranking reports for where the website falls in the main Google searches as well as in the local searches. And so I use that to gauge all my brick and mortar clients. Their monthly fee isn't necessarily tiny, but they do offer some pretty decent packages. So. They're really low, equal to 200 in cents. So other than, you know, doing something on the machine, is there any other way that you could suggest that we help them get those organic reviews? Google can't see what you have on your desk at the store. Like Google can't see that if you say leave a review, your next visit will give you a, oh, they can't. They can't see it. You can't do it anywhere that Google can see it, which would be anywhere online. But I have had, I've done some heavy, heavy work in the self storage industry. And I've had people with QR codes on their desk that have said use this QR code, leave a review, we'll give you $10 off your next month's rent. The caveat with that is they can't do it at the location because if they have a bunch of reviews coming in from that location, even though they're coming in from different IPs, you'll still see that most of those reviews will drop off. So what you'll wanna do is have some that says, scan this QR code and when you leave and get home to leave the review, it's really stupid the way that they do it, but they do it to keep from review spamming. So. In different cities, do you have one physical address? Is there any issue of using that one address to claim all these different titles of the suit? Yes and no. No, because that's your physical location. And I'm guessing that you have a magazine in that physical city as well. Yes. Okay, for the other cities with Google, there is an option for a brand page, a brand business page. Use that. The other option would be to claim that physical location and check there's a I deliver option and say I service these other areas and it'll pop you into those other areas as well. So that's two ways around it, but make sure you choose one or the other. If you wanna come see me in this happiness bar, I can look more specifically what your areas are and tell you which one's a better option. You're welcome. In the back. Using citation services, how are you able to get your clients instead of saying oh it's my unmarking efforts that's bringing them in? Analytics. Yeah, yeah. I use Google Analytics on the website so I'm able to track where they're coming from to the website and then once they're on the website, I use call tracking through call tracking metrics is the name of the company that actually tracks a number of calls and then with Google Analytics I can also track the number of driving directions that I get and with Yelp you can track the number of driving directions that you get. So when you're looking at those analytics you're able to actually track some of that data. It's not a hardcore number but it's definitely a good growth indicator because you're looking at it before you do those listings and you're looking at it after you do those listings. They were contacted by Yelp and they're paying $250 a month to be in their program. Can you talk about their program and your feelings on it? Yes, I can talk about the program and my feelings on it. Yelp has an advertising program. So that is pure ads. Their actual listings are free if you want to offer coupons to your customers. If you want to search in Yelp you'll see that it's like listing, listing, listing, gold listing. That is that paid piece. So yes, and it starts at like $200, $300 a month for their program and it's got all the bells and whistles. You have to be at a certain revenue point for it to make sense. National chains do it but for a mom-paw shop to really get in on it they have to be doing some serious bank for it to make sense, really. When I was in the self-storage industry I steered everybody away from it. They just don't make enough for the little self-storage places for it to make sense for them to do that. Does that make, answer your question? Okay. Is it on your website? Then no. Because this is going to compare everything back to your website. So if you have no address on your website this means nothing to you. Nope. It's got to be the physical address. It's got to be down to a pinpoint. Yep. Yep. Yep. Same thing with your email newsletter. It's got to all match. I got another one in the back. Hold on one second. What's up? No. You cannot use a P.O. box and you cannot use like a UPS store that has a physical address but it's actually a P.O. box. It has to be some place that you can get a phone call and a postcard and an email to all match up because that's how the different places verify your address. So I go to Google Maps. I go to Google Plus. I go to Google Pages. I go to Google Maps. I go to Google Maps. I don't know if I've covered everything. You probably have duplicate listings. Come see me in the Happiness Bar and let's see where you're at with that and I'll see if I can help rein that in a little bit for you. Yes. I'm going to be contrary to something you said. Uh-oh. I didn't want my own business. I didn't want people. I didn't want to use my house address. So and I had a U.S. in the United States Postal and I can't do that. So what I do, I got a U.P.S. store box and that is my legal address and of course, my email is whatever I am. And I'm able to register with all the local social sites and it has worked for me. You can, but Google knows that's a U.P.S. store and it will ultimately hurt your long-term SEO plan, long-term. What can I ask him about that? Are you afraid that if you put your address on there that all people will come to your house or something? No, I just want to separate my professional from my personal. Unfortunately, you can't do that. For years, I thought that I was going to be the same way and I've actually had stocking issues because of the social groups and everything that I've been a part of in the past. And the issue is you still have to do that because you actually have to give your real address for your domain registration as well. You can face with ICANN with your domain registration and find out that that's not your, if the field comes down, you can have your more domain. I didn't talk to you more about that. Yeah, I didn't think about that one. Yeah, that one's an important one. Do I have any more questions? I will be in the happiness bar for about an hour. I've got one more in the back. In my book, if you have a brick and mortar business, you need to be on social. You don't have a choice, especially Facebook. Facebook, like I said, is considered a citation listing, so you, it's a necessary evil. It doesn't have to be robust and you don't have to be posting every day. But you need to have some sort of activity but try and keep your activity level the same because if they see weird spikes in activity that isn't cyclical, like it makes sense if you have a lot of business the first part of the month, every month, right? That makes sense. But if it's not, the cycle isn't making sense then Google's gonna go spam alert. So just make sure that whatever you do it's all nice and even keel, okay? Well, I'll be in the happiness bar if you guys need anything else.