Google Small Business for SEO – Are you making these mistakes?
Your Google business listing offers valuable SEO for your website but a quick survey shows some business owners have made mistakes in the set-up or don’t know it exists. If you have a Google Listing you probably set it up and then forgot about it, not realizing that Google has made many changes. When you set-up your listing 1 or 2 categories probably popped up and you chose them, not realizing you can have up to 10 for the best SEO. Your primary category is the most important SEO factor for ranking in Google Local Search but don’t make the mistake of stopping there. Google updates the categories monthly and may remove or add important ones for your service. Using a special program, I can find the hidden categories your competition is using for their Google Business listing and add it to yours.
Below is an example where I added 8 valuable categories to a local Family Fun Center.
– The 2 original categories were: Amusement Center and Amusement Park.
– 8 more categories were added to boost their SEO and helped more people find them with new including: indoor playground, children’s amusement center, children’s party services, laser tag center, batting cage center, video arcade, tourist attraction and miniature golf course.
What important categories are you missing on your Google Business Listing? Request Google Business Listing help from Morgan today.
Google Business Reviews – Why replying with “thank you” is hurting your SEO
Here are 2 suggestions that even the most savvy business owners don’t know about Google reviews: how quickly you reply and the keywords you use in your you reply can make a difference in your SEO and Google rankings.
If a Client Review reads: “Great customer service and very friendly staff! then your response should include important keywords. ” Typical Client response: “Thank you for your great review.” A better SEO response for a Google review would include your company name, location and some choice keywords, “Thank you for your 5 star review of Brown’s Market in Westminster, MD. Our goal is to have the best organic vegetables and customer experience. Come back and visit us soon”
If you want to play the Google ranking game then you need more reviews. Generate your FREE Custom Google Review Link and easily get 5 star reviews for your business. Use the link to share with clients through text, email or at your business location. Contact us today for your Google Review Link
Design Your Website for the Phone to outrank non-friendly mobile websites
More and more people are searching for your company from their phone, so why are you still making decisions about the content by viewing it on your computer desktop? Make sure your website provides an easy to view experience on all mobile devices. Images and content can even be different on a phone and desktop depending on the goal of the end-user. Mobile friendliness does matter for SEO. In fact, it’s a ranking signal in Googles algorithm when it detects a user is searching on a mobile device. IF your website is not very easy to view on a phone then it is not mobile friendly. Websites that are mobile friendly, in general, will outrank non-mobile friendly sites in mobile search results. Want to beat your competition by having the most mobile-friendly website? Contact Morgan to make your website more mobile friendly.
Website Security – a hacked website can destroy your SEO and rankings
When I first moved to Baltimore in my early twenties I not only parked on a street where cars were routinely broken into but I left a piece of luggage visible in my car… welcome to Baltimore! Your website is sort of like a car that but it is always parked on an unsafe street. If you don’t take certain precautions, like hiding your login page, then your website will absolutely will be hacked and you probably won’t even know it. Clients tell me that their website is so inconsequential that no one would bother hacking it. Well as it turns out many small business websites are easy to get into without absolutely no work. Once the hacker is in your website they redirect it therefore it doesn’t matter if you are a big or small company as long as you have a website, you’re their target.
All a small business really needs you to know about secure website hosting is:
- Make sure you are secured with an SSL certificate (check that your website has a little lock icon
- Hide your user names or XML-RPC data After your website is created you can see in the logs that hackers already know your user name. How is this possible? Hackers easily find your usernames you use to login in by scanning your site. Then all they have to do is start their program running different passwords and bingo… they’re in.
- Hide your Wordpress login page. Hackers use programs to run tens of thousands of passwords per day but there are ways to get that down to zero by hiding the login page.
- Make sure your website uses long and unique passwords that look like gibberish such as “XV{TG484834@@#$difh:”:swwf,” just copy and paste it to login to your website and change your password at least once a year. My small business clients have shared login passwords with me over the years and I can vouch that many of them are incredibly simple containing children and pet names. I have worked with multiple clients who have been hacked and they lose money, lose Google rankings and it can be avoided. I offer web hosting security services and can review your website security, create a custom security package for you or implement some of the above suggestions. Let’s make sure a back-up is available if you website is ever hacked, like my Managed Wordpress hosting package with an automatic 2 months of backups.
Everyone small business needs to set-up site analytics to track their traffic
One new client told me that every year his former web hosting company emailed him website analytics. He had no idea what to do with them and just filed them away. The problem was he needed someone who had the expertise to translate it for him. I recommend everyone sets up tracking because by the time you need it, there will actually be results to review. What can be done with this information? It can show which pages on your website are bringing in the most traffic and then you can add to those results. It might surprise you to know your home page isn’t always the most popular page for Google rankings. Your analytics show if your are using the same keywords that the public uses. For example the for a family fun center client, I found the word “inflatables” had 54 hits a year but the word “bounce house” had 500. The term inflatables was on every page of the website but it needed to be replaced with the word “bounce house” to get the most searches.
Google site analytics can also show you at a glance, if your website has been hacked. It shows you if pages are missing or have errors. It gives you great insight into how well your website is working or not working. Get Google Search Console set up today for your website contact Morgan today: 410-871-9227
