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How to Crush the Local SEO Game with Optimized Location Pages

Posted on April 22, 2019January 28, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

For multi-location brands, location pages are a fundamental component of a comprehensive local SEO strategy. These pages serve as vehicles to help local consumers find the information they need to contact your business and make a purchase. To make sure your location pages are up to the task, you need to optimize both the on-page content and behind-the-scenes technical components to make each page easy for visitors to use and search engines to understand.

Why you need to optimize your location pages

When local consumers need to purchase products and services from nearby businesses, they turn to search. Almost 80 percent of holiday shoppers in the United States turned to online search prior to shopping at a physical store. And this isn’t just a seasonal trend, shoppers rely on search year-round to help them learn about products and services they want to buy and find the businesses they want to purchase from. In fact, almost half of all Google searches have local intent.

At Secrets of Local Search conference at GoogleHQ. Now 46% of searches have a local intent – quote from Google rep official presentation. That‘s increased since I last took note of that stat 📈

— Nick Wilsdon (@nickwilsdon) October 10, 2018

Optimizing your brand’s location pages helps increase your visibility in these searches by improving your rankings in both local map pack and organic results.

But, optimizing these pages isn’t easy. Google is constantly updating its algorithm, meaning the local SEO strategy you employed yesterday could be obsolete today.

Each day, Google usually releases one or more changes designed to improve our results. Some are focused around specific improvements. Some are broad changes. Last week, we released a broad core algorithm update. We do these routinely several times per year….

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 12, 2018

With that in mind, we’ve provided some updated local SEO best practices to help your brand create and optimize webpages for each of your locations. In this post, we’ll cover:

Best practices for the content on your location pages
Technical SEO best practices for your location pages
External SEO factors impacting your location pages

Note: we’re focusing on local SEO tips, but overall SEO best practices like mobile friendliness, site speed, etc. still apply to location pages.

Local SEO best practices for location pages – optimizing content for consumers

No. 1: Create in-depth content

To fully optimize your location pages, it’s important to populate them with in-depth content that’s unique, relevant to potential customers and easy to navigate. Keep reading for a few tips to help you build out that content.

No. 2: Include up-to-date NAP data on your location pages

Make sure consumers can find you by providing the location’s NAP data:

N – Business name
A – Location’s address
P – Location’s phone number

For extra credit, embedding a Google map with the location’s geo-positioning can help improve search engine rankings and help users find your store. According to a recent study, 17 percent of top-ranking local pages have embedded a Google map on their landing page.

No. 3: List your hours of operation

Driving to a business to find out it’s closed isn’t a great consumer experience. Make sure that doesn’t happen by letting consumers know when you’re open by adding business hours to your location pages and updating them for any seasonal changes.

No. 4: Add images and videos

Adding relevant photos and videos can do wonders for location pages. Photos and video help improve search engine rankings (especially if you include alt tags to describe the images to search engines), and they enhance the user experience by providing consumers visual inspiration to buy your products and services.

No. 5: Add product and service descriptions

You don’t necessarily need a specific product or service page for each location, but you definitely need to make sure consumers know what you sell. You can use your location pages to feature and describe specific items or product and service categories (ideally accompanied by images and/or videos).

No. 6: Guide consumers to conversion

Ideally, visitors to your location pages shouldn’t have any trouble figuring out how to convert. Include strong calls-to-action to encourage consumers to complete specific actions like calling your business, getting directions to your location, requesting a quote, etc.

Going beyond telling visitors how to convert, you should also make sure the content is easy to navigate. All other elements being equal, pages that have key information organized in a logical and intuitive fashion are more likely to earn conversions.

Technical SEO best practices – optimizing for search engines

No. 7: Make your location pages easy to understand

Crushing the local SEO game takes more than just creating in-depth content, you need to make sure search engines know what that content means. Don’t get me wrong, search engines love content. But if search engines can’t figure out what a page is about, they can’t determine if it will help a searcher answer a specific question.

Luckily, there are ways you can help search engines crawl, index and understand webpages. Before we dive into what those are, let’s first dissect what we mean by each of those actions:

Website crawls

To determine which sites go in their results, search engines start by crawling a list of web addresses from previous crawls and from sitemaps provided by webmasters.

According to Google, as “crawlers visit these websites, they use links on those sites to discover other pages. The software pays special attention to new sites, changes to existing sites and dead links.”

Website indexing

For webpages to end up in search results, search engines need to find them during one of their crawls. From there, they index each page based on its content. Again, let’s turn to Google for some additional detail:

We take note of key signals — from keywords to website freshness — and we keep track of it all in the Search index. The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. It’s like the index in the back of a book — with an entry for every word seen on every webpage we index. When we index a webpage, we add it to the entries for all of the words it contains.

Reading a webpage

Search engines are getting more intelligent by the day. But, they’re not sentient just yet. This means that even if they can read text and numbers on a webpage, they might not know what they’re reading. For example, look at the following sequence of numbers:

800 555 1234

Most of us humans would see these 10 digits with that grouping and intuitively understand it’s a phone number. A search engine, however, might not. To make sure search engines can understand important information like this on your location pages, make sure to include the following technical SEO elements.

No. 8: Optimize your title tags

Title tags act as just that for your page – a title. Use these tags to provide visitors and search engines a concise description of your location pages including the name of the business, the geo-location of the store and the main service and/or product.

No. 9: Don’t forget about meta descriptions

Meta descriptions haven’t directly impacted search rankings for some time. However, search engines often show descriptions in the preview snippets for organic search results, so it’s important that this copy entices users to click through to your site.

No. 10: Optimize your URL structure

The way you structure the URL of a webpage can have a significant impact on local search engine rankings. For location pages, the best practice is to use the parent domain (www.example.com) along with the location page (www.example.com/city-state).

No. 11: Add header tags

Header tags are like secondary titles that help organize a webpage’s content and help communicate the main topics of the page to search engines and users. H1 tags should be placed as close to the top of the page as possible and should include geo-modifiers and targeted keyword phrases.

No. 12: Leverage the power of Schema Markup

Schema Markup is a shared semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to the HTML of your location pages to help search engines read and understand web content. These tags allow search engine crawlers to identify text as essential local business information like:

Local business type
Address
Areas served
Reviews and aggregate ratings
Business hours
Product details

External local SEO factors

No. 13: Optimize your local SEO citations

Local citations are any mention of your business locations on the web. These mentions could be any combination of your company name, phone number, address, zip or postal code and website address. Citation Signals (consistency, volume, etc.) were the fifth most important ranking factor for both local map and localized organic results, according to Moz’s 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors.

There are two main forms of citations:

Structured Citations (i.e., local listings)

Your business information (NAP) on a business listing directory. Example sites for structured citations include:

Google
Facebook
Yelp
MapQuest
YP.com

Unstructured Citations

Your business information (NAP) on any other site that’s not specifically a business listing directory. Common examples where you’ll find unstructured citations are blogs, magazine/newspaper sites, wikis, etc.

No. 14: Monitor and manage your reviews

Having a stable of positive reviews can significantly impact your brand’s local SEO performance. Review signals (quantity, velocity, diversity, etc.) were the third most important factor for local map pack rankings and the seventh most important for organic local rankings, according to Moz.

Make sure your brand is monitoring and replying to reviews across locations. You should also encourage customers to leave positive reviews.

No. 15: Add high-quality backlinks

Backlinks are links coming into your website. Incoming links to a website are considered to be one of the most significant ranking factors in Google’s search algorithm (if not the most important) because they represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. And, the higher quality domains linking to you, the more valuable the link. According to Moz’s 2018 local SEO ranking factors, link signals were the top ranking factor in localized organic results and the second most important factor in local map pack results.

Download our free infographic for a helpful resource to reference when optimizing your location pages

This post was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated with new information and tips to help your brand connect with local consumers.

Want to crush the local SEO game for your brand? Contact Mindstream Media Group to learn how we can amplify your brand’s presence in local search results.

[APRIL 2019] What Multi-Location Brands Need to Know About Google’s March 2019 Core Update

Posted on April 16, 2019January 28, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

It’s been just over a month since Google released a core algorithm update that sent shockwaves through the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. Originally dubbed “Florida 2.0” by speculators, Google promptly renamed it the March 2019 Core Update (ostensibly to make it easier for everyone to grasp).

We understand it can be useful to some for updates to have names. Our name for this update is “March 2019 Core Update.” We think this helps avoid confusion; it tells you the type of update it was and when it happened.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 15, 2019

Um… Thanks, Google?

Let’s be honest, Google’s clarification on the update’s nomenclature didn’t really provide much in the way of actionable insights for brand marketers. So, to help clear things up, let’s look at how the March 2019 Core Update has impacted a specific type of business – multi-location brands.

Three takeaways for multi-location brands from the March 2019 Core Update

No. 1: Site engagement is a lot more important now

Every Google algorithm update has its share of winners and losers. To the victors go the spoils of increased search visibility, which inevitably leads to more site traffic. With the March 2019 Core Update, the winners appear to be websites with better engagement metrics like time on site, pages per visit and bounce rate.

What you can do

Multi-location brands should work to optimize webpages across their sites – especially location pages. Provide all the information potential customers could need about your brand’s products, services and locations. Make sure your location pages include up-to-date hours of operation, contact information and links to get directions.

No. 2: Understanding user intent just became a lot more crucial

Optimizing your site with all the information a consumer could need is important. But it’s also important to take it up a notch by optimizing your site for user intent, especially post-March 2019 Core Update. This means making sure that the content on your site addresses specific queries searchers use to find answers related to your brand.

What you can do

Start by analyzing the searches you want your site to rank well for and determining the intent and expectation behind each one. Then, make sure the content on your webpages matches those expectations.

Navigational searches: Queries where the searcher is trying to contact or visit nearby businesses. Increasing visibility in these searches is crucial for multi-location brands. To make sure your content matches searcher intent:

Optimize your location and other pages with all the information a potential consumer could need.
Add links so searchers can easily get directions to your locations.
Add click-to-call buttons and other calls-to-action to make it easy for searchers to contact you.

Informational searches: Queries where the searcher is looking for additional information about the products and services they’re interested in buying. Here are a couple of things you can do to make sure your site adequately answers these types of searches:

Create and optimize in-depth product and service pages.
Add images and video to provide searchers a visual representation of your products and services.

Transactional searches: These types of queries signal that a consumer is ready to make a purchase. To optimize for transactional searches, make sure your site provides a seamless path to purchase. (If your website doesn’t have a way for consumers to buy online, go back to the navigational optimization tips to make sure they can easily contact one of your locations.)

If you need help optimizing your website to improve your search visibility and attract more visitors, contact us to learn more about our SEO services.

The trustworthiness of your brand is still essential for search visibility

Another winner of the March 2019 Core Update appears to be sites with strong brand profiles that focus on broad topics. Which means the losers here are smaller, niche sites focused on sub-topics. Based on this trend, Google seems to be favoring sites that adhere to the Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) guidelines that were central to a previous core update.

What you can do

Building consumer trust in your brand involves a lot of different efforts, some of which we already touched on – like creating website content that matches searchers’ expectations. The goal of these efforts should be to position your brand as the go-to resource on topics related to your products and services.

One way to do this is to create a wealth of high-quality content around all the topics related to your brand. Don’t settle with just creating product and service pages for your website. Instead, own related topics by creating a library of content like blog posts, e-books, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc. for each of your products and services.

If you need help creating this content, contact us to learn more about our Content Marketing solution.

A closing thought on Google’s March 2019 Core Update

While the tips above will help your website’s visibility post-March 2019 Core Update, there’s so much more you can and should do. Given that Google relies on hundreds of ranking factors and has a variety of types of search results, improving your brand’s overall visibility requires a comprehensive search marketing strategy that encompasses a variety of paid and organic efforts. If you want to learn more about what it takes to crush the search game, contact Mindstream Media Group to talk to one of our local search, SEO or paid search experts.

How to Conduct a High-level SEO Audit (and Why You Need To)

Posted on March 15, 2019January 21, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

A holistic search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is one of the most effective ways to make sure consumers can find your brand online. As we explained in part one of our SEO series this week, optimizing a website for search results requires analyzing, adding and improving hundreds of factors that determine the site’s health, relevance and credibility.

Unfortunately, there’s no standard path for optimizing a site. Your brand’s SEO strategy should work to accomplish your specific goals, which makes it difficult to outline the perfect plan. But as we explained in part two of the series, SEO is far too important to ignore. So, knowing all that, where do we even begin?

Simple, by running an SEO audit.

An SEO audit will help you identify the most important issues facing your brand’s website and develop a customized strategy to improve your presence in organic search results. Here’s what you need to know to get started.

What is an SEO audit?

An audit is an essential first step in developing a successful SEO strategy that drives results that really matter for your brand (e.g., improved rankings, increased website traffic, more on-site conversions, etc.). When done right, an SEO audit accomplishes a variety of objectives:

Evaluates how easy it is for search engines to discover, crawl and index your site’s pages
Gives you an idea of your website’s health, quality and authority
Helps you determine and prioritize what you need to do to improve your pages’ rankings in search results

What will an SEO audit uncover?

The purpose of the audit is to identify as many issues affecting organic search performance as possible. Running a full SEO audit will reveal:

Technical issues impacting the health of your site
On-page SEO issues impacting the usability of your site
A profile of the off-site elements that determine the authority of your site

How often should I audit my site?

SEO audit frequency depends a lot on the size/purpose of the site and the scale of the audit. In my experience, I’ve found it’s best to conduct a comprehensive SEO audit every six months and run smaller, mini-audits each month.

There are several factors that make regular SEO audits mandatory:

The constant evolution of search engine best practices
How often you add new content to your site
How frequently search engines crawl your site
The possibility of new security issues

How do I run an SEO audit?

Full SEO audits can include a checklist of more than 100 individual items to review and analyze. SEO pros rely on a multitude of specialized tools and methods to crawl websites, scan for issues and evaluate their ability to rank in search results.

With SEO audits, it’s important to crawl before you run (pun intended). If you’re new to SEO, you probably won’t have the tools or resources to conduct a large-scale audit but you can run a high-level scan to get a general idea of how your site is doing.

High-level SEO audit checklist

Make sure there is only one version of your site

Here’s a simple step to ease into a high-level SEO audit: head to your browser of choice and try to access your site using different versions of your domain like:

http://[yoursite.com]
http://www.[yoursite.com]
https://[yoursite.com]
https://www.[yoursite.com]

If your site is operating correctly, you should only be able to access one of these URLs – your canonical version. The other versions should all redirect to that URL.

See if your site ranks for your brand name

Head to Google and search for your brand’s name. Then, go to Settings and select Hide private results to prevent Google from using your search and browsing history to dictate the results.

Does your website appear in the search results (ideally in the top position)? Perfect.

If you don’t see your site at the top of results, this could mean a few things including:

You’ve chosen a common word as your brand name. This isn’t the end of the world but it means you’ll have to put some extra work into your SEO program to find your way to the top of the results.
Your site hasn’t established enough authority or relevance to rank above third-party sites that feature your brand (e.g., social media sites, review sites, etc.). This means it’s time to up your site’s cred with a holistic SEO strategy that includes a link building program.
Your site isn’t indexed by Google, which is not good. But don’t worry, we’ll explain how to check for this in the next steps.

Set up Google Search Console

Search Console is a free tool from Google that helps you check the index status of your site and identify common SEO issues. If you haven’t verified your site in Search Console yet, follow this link to get started.

Make sure your pages are indexed

If Google can’t index a webpage, it can’t rank the page in its search results. To check if Google can index your pages properly, go into your Search Console account, click the Coverage tab and review the results.

Error: These are pages Google couldn’t index for some reason
Valid with warnings: These pages have been indexed by Google but there are issues on the page that may need some attention
Valid: These pages have been indexed by Google and don’t have any identified issues
Excluded: These are pages that you don’t want Google to index

Check for manual actions

While you’re still in Search Console, navigate to the Manual actions tab to see if your site violates any of guidelines that would prevent it from appearing in Google’s search results.

Make sure your site hasn’t been hacked

To make sure your site hasn’t been hacked, navigate to the Security issues tab under manual actions in Search Console. If Google suspects your site is in danger, or someone has already corrupted your site’s code, you’ll see a notification explaining the issue.

Run a mobile-friendly test

With more than half of all website traffic today coming from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, having a mobile-friendly site is crucial for SEO. To test if your site is mobile-friendly, head over to Google’s aptly-named Mobile-Friendly Test tool, enter your URL and click RUN TEST.

If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you can view a list of fixes to improve your site. And, even if your site is mobile-friendly, the tool will provide you a list of steps you can take to make it even better.

Next steps

While the steps above are more of a high-level scan than a full SEO audit, they should give you a good idea of how much SEO work your site needs and what you need to do to get started. If you’ve gone through the exercise and uncovered any technical SEO issues you can’t fix, or if you think you may need a more in-depth audit, Mindstream Media Group is here to help. Contact us to learn how we can get you started down the path to a healthier and more optimized website.

10 Reasons Why Your Brand Needs a More Competitive SEO Strategy

Posted on March 13, 2019January 21, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

Online search has become an essential part of our everyday lives. We use search to find driving directions to nearby locations, figure out the answers that are just beyond our reach (like remembering that one actor from that movie, you know, the one guy?) and research the products we want to buy.

For brands, that last task is significant. Consumers increasingly rely on search to find information about the products and services they want to buy. Which makes it more important than ever for brands to have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place to make it easy for consumers to find the information they need.

Yesterday, in part one of this series, we covered what SEO is and how it works. In part two, we’re going to cover why it’s so important for your brand to implement and maintain a holistic SEO strategy. Here are 10 trends playing out in search today that prove just how important SEO is for brands looking to connect with online consumers.

No. 1: Consumers turn to search often

As a media channel, search commands a massive audience. Each month, Google processes more than 10.3 billion searches in the United States alone. And, while there are several major search engines, no one comes close to Google. The search engine powerhouse is responsible for more than 90 percent of web search traffic.

No. 2: Consumers rely on search when researching purchases

Consumers aren’t just turning to search to look up trivia and find the latest viral videos. Search is often used as a starting point when consumers begin to research upcoming purchases. This is especially true on mobile devices.

No. 3: Consumers use search to evaluate options

Consumers often use search engines to conduct exhaustive research and find the products that work best for them based on an endless number of factors. For brands, this makes it essential to implement SEO strategies to make information about your products easy to find for consumers.

No. 4: Searchers buy from the brands that provide the info they need

When consumers turn to search to research buying decisions, they usually know what products they want but aren’t as concerned with finding a specific brand that sells it. This makes it crucial for brands to stand out with easy-to-find information.

No. 5: Consumers now expect to easily find information

Thanks to smartphones, consumers have 24/7 access to Google and are able to conduct exhaustive research on buying decisions at any time. This has given consumers more control over their buying journeys than ever before. Which means brands need to produce and optimize content that provides the information consumers expect.

No. 6: Consumers turn to search for immediate buying needs

Consumers don’t just use search for long-term buying journeys either. They often turn to search to make immediate purchases. And when consumers enter these types of searches, brands need to make their contact information, product descriptions and business hours easy to find.

No. 7: Consumers don’t like to scroll far in search results

Most people only focus on the results on the first page of Google. And, thanks to mobile and voice search, first-page real estate is shrinking. Implementing a holistic SEO strategy is essential to make sure your brand’s website can rise to the top of the search engine results pages.

No. 8: The way consumers search is changing

SEO used to focus on specific, short-tail keywords. This reflected the way consumers searched – they used short, choppy sentences to describe the things they were trying to find. Today’s consumers search in a much more conversational language, using natural terms as if they were talking to another person. If your brand is still using an outdated SEO strategy focused on short-tail keywords, it’s time for a change.

No. 9: The majority of website traffic comes from smartphones

This conversational search tone is in no small way due to the devices consumers use to conduct searches. Mobile and voice search are quickly taking over as consumers’ preferred search methods. So, while SEO strategies might have focused on desktop results for years, this strategy is no longer going to cut it. To succeed in today’s search landscape, your brand needs to update to a mobile-first SEO strategy.

No. 10: There’s a wider variety of search results to optimize for

Today’s SEO game isn’t just about ranking well in the standard organic results. Google has added several “Universal Search” results to their SERPs in recent years. Universal Search results include components like Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graph panels and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). To drive the maximum amount of traffic to your brand’s website, your SEO strategy needs to include plans to optimize for these Universal Search integrations.

To learn how you can get started implementing an SEO strategy for your site, check out the third post in this series on how to conduct a high-level SEO audit.

Need help implementing the most up-to-date SEO best practices for your brand’s website? Contact Mindstream Media Group to learn about our holistic SEO approach.

SEO Fundamentals: What is SEO and How Does It Work?

Posted on March 12, 2019January 28, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

If your brand operates online in any way, it’s important to have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to make sure consumers can find and navigate your website. But the truth is, while pretty much every brand has an online presence, many still haven’t implemented a holistic SEO strategy.

A big part of the problem stems from a lot of digital marketers not knowing exactly what is SEO and how it works. Marketers lack of SEO knowledge is understandable, though. As a discipline, SEO is fairly technical, incredibly nuanced and constantly evolving. Because SEO changes so often, your strategy needs to constantly evolve to keep up with the latest best practices.

If you’re not sure how to implement an SEO strategy for your brand’s website (or if you think your current strategy needs an overhaul), we’ve put together a three-part SEO series to teach you how. In part one, we’re going to help you get started by addressing two main questions:

What is SEO?
How does SEO work?

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing a brand’s online presence to improve its search engine rankings and drive organic traffic to its digital properties – namely, its website.

While there are a bunch of search engines, SEO pros typically focus on one – Google. Some estimates put Google’s market share somewhere around 65 percent, but there’s evidence that those numbers are low. SEO aficionado Rand Fishkin recently argued it was probably more like 90 percent. (If you ask me, here’s all the proof you need that Google is the dominant player: when’s the last time you heard some say they were going to Bing something or tell you to just Duck Duck Go it?)

Moral of the story: when it comes to search engines, Google is king and your SEO efforts are best dedicated to optimizing your site around its best practices (which are pretty similar to other search engines anyway).

Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs)

If you’re just getting started with SEO, it helps to have a basic understanding of the main types of organic search results (non-paid results) on Google.

Local search results

For local searches, Google displays a “Local Pack” that typically appears at the top of the SERP or below the paid ads. These results feature a map with markers of each location with links to the businesses’ local listings below.

Organic search results

In searches that include all three result types, Google displays organic results below paid ads and the local pack. The organic results link users directly to the webpage’s URL that’s described in the search snippet.

Knowledge Graph panel

For searches about specific businesses or entities, Google often serves up a panel toward the top of the SERP with contact information and basic details.

Featured Snippets

These search results are displayed at the top of the page for searches that ask basic questions. Featured snippets offer searchers quick answers to their questions and feature information from the page above the URL.

Voice search results

You won’t see these results on a typical SERP. In fact, you won’t see these results at all. These results are the one and only response searchers receive when they conduct a voice search with Google Home’s digital assistant.

How does SEO work?

Now that we have a better understanding of the search landscape, let’s take a look at the mechanics of SEO. There are hundreds of factors SEO pros can optimize to improve your website’s visibility in organic search results. Figuring out the best strategy for each site requires an in-depth understanding of Google’s search algorithms.

The bad news: Google doesn’t share much about those algorithms so SEO practitioners have to spend a lot of time studying, hypothesizing and testing various strategies to find out:

Which ranking factors does Google use in its algorithms
Which ranking factors are most important to Google
What are the best ways to optimize those factors to improve rankings

The good news: SEO pros have been at this for almost as long as Google has been around and we’re pretty good about sharing our observations with the community. Thanks to this collaborative atmosphere, we have a pretty good idea of what it takes to improve a site’s rankings the right way.

How Google ranks sites

Google uses bots to constantly crawl the web to discover webpages. Once the bots find a webpage, Google uses the page’s technical SEO elements and copy to determine what it’s about. Then, Google uses a process known as indexation to organize the page based on its main topics. Once indexed, Google evaluates the page’s relevance and authority for related search terms. Finally, Google uses the health, quality and authority of the page to determine its rank each time a user enters a related search.

How to impact Google’s rankings

SEO is both an art and a science, so there are various ways to approach it. At Mindstream Media Group, we take a holistic approach to SEO centered around three main areas:

Technical SEO

Ensures sites are compatible with Google’s guidelines so they can be indexed and ranked for related search terms.

On-Page SEO

Improves a website’s quality scores, makes the site more search engine friendly and provides searchers the information they need.

Off-Site SEO

Plays a major role in a site’s ranking by helping Google determine each page’s relevance, trustworthiness and authority.

This holistic approach to SEO allows us to accomplish a variety of objectives that deliver real results for our clients:

Improved search rankings: Making the site easy for search engines to crawl, index and understand > which improves the site’s rankings in relevant searches > which makes it easier for consumers to find the site
Increased organic traffic: Optimizing the technical components that display in search results (e.g., title tags and meta descriptions) > which encourages searchers to click > which drives organic traffic to the site
Lead nurturing: Improving the site’s user experience (UX) and content > which makes it easier for visitors to navigate the site and find the information they need > which leads to more conversions (e.g., calls, form submissions, etc.)

Why you need an SEO strategy for your site

Search isn’t just a niche market or a channel that’s nice to have in your overall digital marketing arsenal. Consumers rely on search to find the information they need to research and make purchases. If you’re still on the fence about SEO, make sure to read more at the links below.

Parts two and three of this series:

Part 2: 10 Reasons You Need an SEO Strategy

Part 3: How to Conduct an SEO Audit

3 Content Marketing Strategies You Need to Know to Drive Sales

Posted on February 26, 2019January 21, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

The big idea: Just because a consumer has decided on a product to buy, doesn’t mean they know where or how to make the purchase. In this blog post, we’ll cover three Content Marketing strategies to help brands deliver the right information at the right time.

For marketers, this is the moment we live for – we’ve developed our content marketing strategies, created messages to promote our brand’s products and implemented our plan. And now, because of all that work, a consumer is ready to make a purchase.

After weighing all of the options from other brands, this former-consumer, former-shopper is now a buyer who has made a purchase decision. This buyer now just needs to know how and where to complete the purchase.

Content Marketing strategies to help buyers complete purchases

Recently, we covered how much research shoppers conduct thanks to their smartphones and an abundance of digital media channels. That research doesn’t stop just because a buyer has made a decision. In the decision stage of the buying journey, buyers are still turning to their phones to conduct high-intent searches to help them complete a purchase.

When buyers conduct these types of searches – especially when they include your brand’s name in the search – it’s your game to lose. For you baseball fans out there, it’s like you’re up by three runs with two outs in the ninth. You’re set up for the win, you just need to close it out.

To avoid snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, this is where most teams would pull their starting pitcher and bring in the closer – for marketers, that’s typically paid media. However, there are plenty of ways you can use organic content to lock in a win. Here’s a three-pitch strategy for using content marketing to help buyers make a purchase.

Strike one – local listings

When marketers think about managing local listings, they don’t normally think Content Marketing. Typically, they think of optimizing and syndicating foundational elements of their listings like:

NAP – business name, address and phone number
Website URL
Hours of operation

These elements are key in making sure consumers can find you when they search for your locations. But there are ways to show off your content-creation chops when it comes to local listings.

Enhance your business description

Google gives you 750 characters to work with for your Google My Business (GMB) business description – use them. Don’t just deliver a boring description, write something that sets you apart from your competitors and provides buyers the information they need to know.

Answer common questions

When consumers have questions about your business, they can ask you right from your listing. Make sure to provide detailed and helpful answers to their most pressing questions.

Add photos and video

Create high-quality images and video to showcase both your location and the products that you offer. This helps buyers know that you sell the products they want to buy.

Strike two – location pages

Another effective way to deliver the information buyers need in the decision stage is to create optimized pages on your site for each of your locations. The key is to optimize each page for both human visitors and search engine bots.

To optimize the page for human visitors, add all of the information a buyer would need to purchase one of your products:

Location-specific image – a picture of the location to make it easy for the buyer to identify
In-depth copy – detailed descriptions of the products the location sells
Calls to action – messages to inspire the buyer to take the next step towards a purchase
Product images and video – visuals that allow the buyer to see the product in action
Location data – business information that makes it easy for buyers to contact and get to the location (this data should be an exact match to the information from your local listings)

For search engines, optimize the following technical SEO elements around a specific, locally-focused keyword for each page:

Meta description – a brief description that inspires buyers to click on the page from search results
Title tag – a headline for the page that includes the main topic of the page and a geo-modifier for that location
Headlines – sub-headers throughout the page to identify secondary topics
Schema Markup – structured data to help search engines understand essential information on the page
Alt tags – descriptions of each image on the page

Strike three – FAQ pages

FAQ pages help you connect with buyers in the decision stage by addressing common speedbumps in the buying process. They’re also effective at improving your brand’s presence in search results for high-intent, long-tail queries, especially for mobile and voice searches.

The main reason FAQ pages work so well for voice search is people tend to talk more naturally, almost as if they’re talking to another person. They ask specific questions and the brands that deliver direct answers are the ones most likely to end up in Position Zero (the one and only voice-search result).

Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your FAQ pages:

Identify your buyers’ most common questions
Provide answers to specific questions
Use categories to organize common questions
Link to pages dedicated to answering your most common questions
Provide the opportunity for buyers to ask new questions

Interested in learning more? Check out our next blog post in the series – How to Boost Customer Loyalty With Content Marketing – or contact Mindstream Media Group to learn how our Content Marketing solution can drive results for your brand.