#holiday optimization

Holiday 2014 Tips

Some of these are quick-hitters, so even if everything isn’t perfect in your company’s Local SEO game, you can still get more juice out of this season if you can push a few more levers.

1. Listings Audit

Do a quick audit of your listings in online directories and correct any information that’s off. Business listings in online directories are one major source of Citations for Local SEO — Citations are mentions of a business’s name, location and contact information which Google uses as a measure of prominence.

2. Directory Listings

Obtain more directory listings. Pump up your local ranking potential more by insuring your listing is in more directories — this gets you more Citations which will augment your ability to rank well.

3. Category Check

Add/change categories. Check the existing categories your business is listed under in online directories — many businesses neglect to check this, and may be incorrectly categorized or may have neglected to be included in all the categories they could be.

4. Advertising

Consider advertising in online yellow pages. According to some statistics, online business directories of many types have seen an upswing in their traffic this year, perhaps due to the Pigeon Update to Google’s algorithms which seemed to raise directories in search results for many keyword combinations.

5. Product/Service Listings

List products/services on your website. So many small business websites I examine are little more than a few pages with the business name, logo, photo, basic description and “Contact Us” information.

6. Customer Reviews

Add customer reviews and endorsements onto your own site! This could provide a quick “stealth optimization” tactic to put you ahead of the competition over the holidays, because most local sites have not adopted this advantage. There are three ways that this can work, if it’s done right.

7. Meta Description Tags