Great Tips For Optimising Your Google+ Business Page

 

The local listings that Google shows in its search results has made considerable changes

Google has replaced the leading seven results with simply the 3 top results This makes getting your business displayed on the 1st page of Google more difficult and reinforces the fact that you need to work hard on completing your profile and regularly update it.

Here we have some tips to keep in mind when completing your Google+ business page

Create a Google+ profile and then add a business page. Google My Business handles your page through it's dashboard

Verify your business by having a card sent through the post. Through having your business verified you can add further information to your page. Failing to verify your business can result in it not to appear in Google results.

Make sure your business has not have numerous listings. These will harm your profile and rank in Google. Edit all duplicates.

Your Business Info

Ensure sure your NAP(Name Address Phone) is exactly the same across all your social media accounts and your website. Google looks on any errors as a harmful ranking problem. You are unable to use Post Box numbers for your business location on Google and you also are unable to use free phone phone numbers.

Google allows you to register your home address as your main business address and do this with several businesses.

Always Finish Your Information

Failure to completely fill out your business information will normally reduce your effectiveness in Google Adding lots of info to your profile is a positive step you should always complete, also add links to your website.

Geo-Tag every image you upload to google, this give positive signals about your location. Also remember to add alt descriptions to your images.

Hopefully this advice will start you off on the right foot. If you require more help and advice contact us a The advice given here will hopefully help you improve your Google+ profile and ranking. Contact Local SEO Edinburgh for more information.

How To Optimise Your Website With Animations

Does you website have all the bells-and-whistles? That was the question a couple of moons back...
And do you remember how tired and frustrated you would get waiting for them to load in?
Every website was about the dancing. Full with annoying graphics and sounds moving from all directions.

Ohh, those were the days…
Did it make for a better user experience? We thought it did… at the time.

Would we do it today?  Most definitely not!

Since businesses realized the importance of their online presence, so have designers and developers. Gone are the days where designers would force their wacky ideas onto the developers, who very happily ‘translate’ them into code.

In all honestly, most of them were really impressive and in line with the trends of the day although it wouldn’t work due to browsers restrictions.

A virtual marriage made in heaven since the ideas bounced from one to the other with the user and client out of the equation.

On those days everything was game.

Then the industry grew and realized it needed to create and standardize some rules and bring the user to the limelight.
And UX became the question to answer. With user’s expectations to take into consideration and businesses embracing the vast possibilities of the benefits of their online presence pushed designers and developers to work together to help those businesses to achieve their goals. Common sense really...

1. you are on business only if you have a client
2. you have a client if you do what they want you to do
3. but…you need to listen to the client and observe the end-user

Nowadays, there are still many websites that don’t follow the rules. Design wise they are outstanding, but from the user’s point of…use…they don’t really work.

See it closer

So, how do you incorporate animation to UX functionality?

When developing a new project there are some points to consider to implement animation without going OTT:

1. Think of engaging users, keep them on the page by explaining any changes, use new technology to transmit up-to-date brand.
2. Plan where, what and why.  Your animations should be in the right place to make sure the users see them at the right time. Let users see the content, bring attention to their actions to guide them to your goals.
3. Don’t let users get lost. Focus on your navigation, keep it simple and always show the users where they are and/or how did they get there.
4. Predict their interactions to make them feel you’re listening. It’s important to provide the user with the appropriate immediate feedback (show & tell) to reassure them their action was right (reducing uncertainty and increasing happiness), like colour-button changes or progress indicators.

Once you've analysed your audience you'll be ready to implement some animation.

Our Key Points

Whether you are developing a project or getting to know your website, there are two points to keep in mind to help you optimise your website to the full:

– Functionality – achievable by giving your users the right tools to use your website.  This will help them to identify your website’ features, release your website’s potential and enhance the user’s experience. Pay attention when designing shopping carts, forms and email links.

– Optimise– by adding options to the users experience you will increase their time on your website, giving them a positive impression and time to accomplish their tasks. All these will be reflected on your analytics’ numbers. 

Here's a short example of why should you consider paying attention to your UX to help your website optimisation and subsequently, climb up on the search engine ranks.

We love videos, animation, calls-to-action, maps, forms, visual design, social media…everything helps, and adding functionality to a website will improve its position on search engines…if done right of course.


As web designers and developers we will love to help and advise on technical factors that can affect your rankings.

Let Local SEO Edinburgh build an effective online marketing campaigns that effectively target the right customers.

Top of Google without backlinks???

Does you website still need a high number of backlinks to appear on the first page of google?
Judging by the success we've had in ranking our website in various search engines leads us to believe that backlinks are becoming less of a ranking factor.

For the last 8 months Local SEO Edinburgh have been focusing on trying to rank our website for the term "seo edinburgh". Within this time we have made little attempt to acquire backlinks from other websites apart from listing ourselves in business directories such as yell.com and Thomson.

Our main activity over this period has been the creation of quality content for syndication to our social media profiles. The search term 'seo edinburgh' gets approximately 280 searches per month, sites that are currently listed on page 1 of google have up to 400,000 back-links and aged domains of nearly 13 years.

Our website has around 5 backlinks and was created in march 2015.

What does this mean?

The world of online marketing and SEO are changing. Forget about buying your way to the top of google or employing techniques that are seen as 'black hat'. Success is now obtained through producing quality content that keeps your visitors on your site for longer. You also have to replicate what your main competitors are doing and more.

Google’s Matt Cutts: Over Time Backlinks Will Become Less Important

How can you achieve this?

Having a well built social media presence is the place to start.
At the very minimum you need accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and of course Google+.
You need to continually create content that your site visitors will find interesting. Quality content is becoming the number one ranking factor with search engines.

Googles algorithm identify quality content by the amount of sharing your content receives and by amongst other things the amount of time spent on your site.

As a business owner you know doubt have little time to produce such content. You concentrate on running your business and let others run your online marketing.
Having to update your content on a daily rate is a difficult task for many businesses. It's easy to begin a social media campaign but not so easy to continually update your profile with fresh content over the days and months ahead.

To have any sort of success you need to employ the help of an online marketer.

Let Local SEO Edinburgh build online marketing campaigns that effectively target the right customers.
As web developers we can also assist with help and advise on technical factors that can affect your rankings.

7 Tips for SEO

To develop a friendly SEO site doesn’t always have to be a painful job.
By planning a clear strategy and following some easy and quick tips you can improve your search marketing success.

Here are 7 useful tips:

1- Review Your Robots.txt File
2- Revise the Worst Page’s Title Element and Meta Description (through the Keyword dimension Google Analytics)
3- Check for duplicate content and link value dilution. If your site exist at www.mysite.com and mysite.com create a permanent 301 redirect
4- Review Your Site for Duplicate Title Elements
5- Assess your anchor text by linking site authority with tools such as Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO
6- Review Your Link Targets in Your Site Navigation
7- Verify Your Google Local Listing

Do-It-Yourself

You could create a robots.txt file, if you are not afraid of coding or you could use a generator site to do it for you.

Look in your GA for the pages with the less effective title keywords and change them.

We know is time consuming to keep your content fresh and unique, but if Google finds the same information, with the same structure and syntax in more than one place the chances are that your website ranking will go down. Duplicate content is a sin, don't do it.

There was a time when anchor text was important key factor on your page ranking, and easy to optimize too. All you had to do was to use your keywords for each anchor text and you were laughing. Google changed their ways and anchor text linking got a makeover too. If you don't want be penalized we suggest you to use safe anchor text like long sentences (less than 65 characters with no stop words), or direct links (www.xyz.com).

Think carefully when designing your site navigation. Think about your customers (and potential ones especially), how will they find your services, prices, business directions? Are your navigation links pointing to the right pages with the right information? Time is an essence and the beauty of the World Wide Web is speed. If users have to keep clicking through your links until they find what they're looking for, they'll simply stop clicking and move to another business.

And the most important one, verify your business with Google and claimed your place on the map.

Keep Improving

As you know by now, content is king for Search Engine Optimization. Having mastered link building is not enough to be seeing as an authority by Google or your customers. 

Remember to write your content with humans in mind (search engines should come second), if the user finds your content engaging and shareable new links will follow. 

Take care of your images. Search engines don't see them, they read them. Don't forget to fill in the title, caption, geo-tags, description and alternate text. 

Utilize your header tags. H1 comes first...

Place your keywords in the content and make sure it is well written (between 300-700 words). 

Oh, and don't forget your URLs. Place important keywords when possible. 

In order to get all the pages of your site indexed you'll need a sitemap. Use a sitemap generator to create one and submit it to Google Webmaster account.

Lesson To Be Learned: Having set up a website to represent your business online it's not enough to make your business grow. It doesn't take long to set up a routine and go over your website performance as often as possible.

SEO Promotion

Hi, we are Local SEO Edinburgh and we would LOVE to help your business generate more business. Having a website to promote your business online is not enough in iteself. To make your business grow online you need to create a targeted marketing campaign that includes various ways to promote your website.

Do you know that less than 10% of potential customers go to the second page to search for local businesses?

                                    

SEO is a big-scary-word for some. But we are not scared of it, quite the opposite, we thrive with the challenge of working on a website and making your business 'visible' to the right people Your  aim is not to be seen by everybody but to be seen by the people who need your product or service. 

Things To Do For SEO Promotion

The first step for any business, nowadays, is to develop an online presence via a website. The second step is to make that website accessible. In order to get clients through your door, or your business through their door, you need to optimise your website. Make it easy to reach for search engines so internet users will find you quick. 

Some of the things you need to consider when optimising your website are clean HTML code, image tags, redirects, content, sitemaps, titles, social media...

But the most important thing is not to panic!!

If you feel like running for the hills when you hear SEO, then why don't you give us a call and we'll take care of everything.

We provide a wide range of SEO promotion services to suit any size of business and organisation.

Call localseoedinburgh.co.uk for free advise on how to improve your online presence.