A THREE-PART GUIDE TO INCREASING YOUR ORGANIC LOCAL VISIBILITY WITH THE AIM OF DRIVING FOOTFALL TO YOUR STORE, SHOP OR BUSINESS.

TO

PART 2: Duplication issues • Citations • Schema

Andy Robson Senior Search Marketing Consultant

CLICKS BRICKS

So, in part 1, I’ve spoken a lot about the ‘main’ things you can do on and off your website,

but this is where I get down to the real nitty gritty.

Think of this section as your main course, full

of actionable insight you can use to start making a big

impact on your Local Search campaigns.

Unlike some of previous elements discussed, this lot may take a little longer before you begin to see any impact, however it certainly doesn’t make them any less important and as a general rule, will give you greater longevity once you achieve success.

So let’s get right into it, shall we?

The elements featured in Section 2 are the influencing factors behind your local SEO strategy and will go a long way to increasing your potential organic local visibility.

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DUPLICATION ISSUES

WHAT IS A DUPLICATE LISTING?Okay so let’s keep this super easy, a duplicate listing isn’t anything complicated, it simply means that one of your physical locations has more than one listing in an online directory, for example Google My Business, and as such would be considered a duplicate.

And… duplicate listings aren’t necessarily your fault.

Although there are occasions where we’ve seen business owners creating more than one listing thinking that this will give them an advantage over competitors when in fact, it does more to hinder their search visibility. The majority of duplicates are the result of automated activity of search engines or directories but nevertheless, they need to be removed.

WHY DOES DUPLICATION MATTER?There are a number of reasons why they’re bad, but most importantly of all, they’re going to affect your ability to rank well and as a result, win users to your website or footfall to your store.

Google is very clear on the number of listings each business location can have, either in single or multiple accounts. There are however a few exceptions to this such as multi-partner legal firms but in most cases it’s a definitive no-no by Google.

HOW TO CLEAN UP DUPLICATE LISTINGS

There are a number of tools available which allow you to see any duplicate listings you may have, the best we’ve found so far is MOZ Local.

In addition to this tool, I also recommend performing a search on Google for your business name, and/or your specific location, along with things like your phone number. Wherever you see more than one listing on the same directory/website then this will be classed as a duplicate, and especially worse if this is on a Google My Business listing.

In order to remove your duplicate listing on Google My Business (if you don’t have access to the duplicate listing via Google account) is to ‘suggest an edit’, from there you’ll be able to let Google know that this listing is a duplicate.

CITATIONS

WHAT ARE CITATIONS?Okay, so what the heck is a citation? Well, those of you familiar with SEO willknow the importance of ‘back-links’ from(relevant) external websites to your ownwebsite, and with these links, comesauthority. With that in mind, a citationis very much the same from a localperspective.

Citations are mentions of your NAP on other websites which increase your business’s relevance to and prominence to a specific city or region

CITATIONS

SO WHAT IS A NAP?Citations are primarily made up of NAP’s or Name, Address & Phone number and is best thought of as being your digital fingerprint. The main priority when it comes to citations, are the consistency – you’re far better to have 10 very accurate and consistent citations than 100 inconsistent ones. Silverbean recently helped a client gain an increase in local visibility across all 97 of their stores, and one of the main issues I saw across all of their citations was the lack of consistency across their citations.

There are many tools available which can already help you identify the citations that are out there in the big wide world, but one I think really hits the nail on the head is the MOZ Local Search

Will it be your full legal name?

Will it include any legal entities?

Does your trading name differ from your legal name?

Will you include a building name?

Does the street name or building name come first?

What format will your phone number take? Will it include a local code?

AGREEING CONSISTENCY FOR CITATIONSBefore you go out and look to amend and rectify your listings/citations I recommend agreeing what format your business name, address and phone number will take;

TITLE

H1

AKA

If you have a large number of stores or locations, another potential weakness is citation consistency. One of our clients had had their main customer services phone number listed for every local store number and this certainly weakened their local rankings, as many search engines struggled to distinguish the difference between a store in Newcastle to a store in Norfolk.

There a few different templates out there but I find this one from Moz to be the best, it gives you a great head start on consistently building citations.

And whilst we’re on the subject, ensure your name and address meet Google’s guidelines for compliance, and do this before you being to build your citations. Otherwise, you’ll have to start all over again.

HOW DO THEY DIFFER FROM LINK BUILDING?

Okay, so Citations are similar to link building, and whilst every SEO strategy will have an element of link building, Local Citations are incredibly important and often something

that is overlooked by many.

Citations don’t need to be linked, although some local directories do offer this for a small fee, but for the purpose of building citations, you don’t need a link. Just a mention of your NAP will suffice. As long as they’re referencing your

business in a consistent way then this will help build your citation profile.

HOW TO FIND CITATIONS?

There a lots of tools that can help you identify existing citations, such as the Moz Local Search and also BrightLocal, and with both you can also update any citations to ensure their consistency – not to mention tracking your competitors.

Question and answer sites

Forum Signatures

Profile Pages

Image and Video Descriptions

Article and guest post by-lines

Press Releases

WHERE TO GET CITATIONS?

Don’t get us wrong, building citations is by far the hardest part of building organic local visibility, but without citations you’ll struggle to achieve great local search visibility, and there are a number

of different ways you can go about building citations.

I know we also get caught up in the whole ‘Google is King’ mentality, and trust us, it’s a hard one to break, but there’s also merit in ensuring you have listings with Apple Maps, Bing Places and Yahoo Local, too.

Although it’s also a common misconception that you can only build citations through directories, but actually you can build citations from a whole host of other sources, but don’t get us wrong, directories are a great place to start and build a firm foundation.

You might want to consider, depending on time and budget

Before we begin, whatever you do don’t think it’s a wise decision to turn to someone via Fiverr, or Upwork to build your citations on your behalf. Any slip ups, inconsistencies or simply lack of understanding will certainly have a knock-on effect for your local campaign.

MANUAL CITATION BUILDING

The first is manually visiting online directories and updating the records one at a time, and if you’re a UK based business then I recommend starting with these directories;

So, depending upon your business type and where you’re based, you’ll be able to list your business in approx. 75% and all of them offer a FREE listing option.

Trust us, we’ve got a lot of experience in doing this, so here’s a few pointers;

• Create a new email address purely just for listing purposes, you will no doubt be inundated with marketing emails later.

• Always provide as much information as possible, including opening hours, photos etc.

• Claim ownership or verify listings on all sites that allow you to do so

www.yell.com

www.yelp.co.uk

www.192.com

www.scoot.co.uk

www.118.com

www.hotfrog.co.uk

www.brownbook.net

www.thomsonlocal.com

www.cylex-uk.co.uk

www.freeindex.co.uk

www.directory.independent.co.uk

www.directory.thesun.co.uk

www.touchlocal.co.uk

www.uksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk

AUTOMATED CITATION BUILDING

The second, which is favoured by most as it saves time and increases efficiency, is using a service such as WhiteSpark who will find your current citations and correct any that are wrong, but also show you opportunities to build further citations from relevant sources.

WhiteSpark currently charge around $4 per citation – but these citations are permanent, where as there are some other services where the charges are annual.

SCHEMAWhere to begin? Well schema is certainly something that has been on the radar at Silverbean for some time now, but more recently Schema has definitely caught our attention, primarily because we’re seeing a greater impact of Schema with every passing month.

WHAT IS SCHEMA?So, what is it? Well in a nutshell, Schema is structured data using specific vocabulary of tags (microdata) that you add to your HTML to improve your sites visibility. Now when it comes to Schema, the possibilities are almost endless, and there is quite simply tons you can do with it across your entire website, but in this context we’ll be focusing on the tip of the iceberg from local standpoint.

As I said in Part 1, if you are able to have an individual page for each of your stores locations, then this is certainly where Schema.org will able to flourish. As you can see in the data on the following page, this is an example of a private hospital offering laser eye surgery in Birmingham, UK, which features its name, location, (including co-ordinates), website, opening hours which vary by day.

HTML

SCHEMAM I C R O D ATA

LOCAL SCHEMA EXAMPLE

<script type=’application/ld+json’> { “@context”: “http://www.schema.org”, “@type”: “MedicalClinic”, “name”: “Optegra Eye Hospital Birmingham”, “url”: “https://www.optegra.com/hospitals-and-clinics/optegra-eye-hospital-birmingham”, “telephone”: “08081598126”, “logo”: “https://www.optegra.com/CMSPages/GetResource.ashx?image=/App_Themes/Optegra/images/Optegra-logo.png”, “image”: “https://www.optegra.com/getmedia/4c124e3d-30f0-4852-956d-6de86ae2233c/A-Optegra-Birmingham-building?width=600”, “address”: { “@type”: “PostalAddress”, “streetAddress”: “Aston University Campus, Coleshill Street”, “addressLocality”: “Birmingham”, “postalCode”: “B4 7ET”, “addressCountry”: “United Kingdom” }, “description”: “Optegra Birmingham Laser Eye Hospital is conveniently located in Birmingham within Aston University campus approximately 3 miles off jun 6/M6. Free parking is available on the hospital forecourt.”, “geo”: { “@type”: “GeoCoordinates”, “latitude”: “52.485305”, “longitude”: “-1.887663” }, “openingHours”: [ “Mo, Tu, We, Th, Fr 08:00-18:00” ], “availableService”: { “@type”: “MedicalProcedure”, “procedureType”: “Surgical” }} </script>

WHY USE SCHEMA FOR LOCAL OPTIMISATION?

The best way to think of this, for us anyway, is taking a highlighter to the data contained on your website’s location page and saying to Google,

“Hey! Here’s the important stuff you need to know!”

Otherwise, without structured data like Schema, everything is left to interpretation by Google. In the same respect that now an e-commerce website can mark-up various info for Google to say, here’s the price, stock status, size, imagery – the info is available and always has been but, you’re essentially passing it over to a robot to understand and hope for the best.

So, in the same way for local, you are able to mark-up those numbers as your opening hours, and mark up that bulk of text as being your address. It provides consistency and accuracy.

But why is that important to building my organic local visibility, well as I said earlier it’s your website we’re hoping to drive traffic to, and ultimately footfall to your store, but if you want your website to be the authority on all things ‘you’, then providing accurate consistency at the primary source, is the key to all this.

If you have 20 brilliant and consistent citations along with a fully optimised Google My Business listing, but the NAP and extra info on your unique local landing page is hard to find (or difficult to crawl) by Google, then you’re putting up barriers to your potential success.

SCHEMA

HOW TO USE IT?

Probably one of the best things about Schema is that it can be implemented in so many ways. You can have your website template code altered so that the data such as address, phone number etc are all

marked up through the HTML framework and are picked up by Google accordingly. This method, however, can be time consuming and potentially expensive if not already offered with your website platform, which would need

to be implemented by web developers.

USING GOOGLE TAG MANAGER Here at Silverbean, this is by far our most popular method, primarily for clients who already have the GTM snippet included within their websites source code, it means you are able to add Schema mark-up to a website with no input from a website developer.

The code example shown two pages previous, has been written in JSON-LD format, and implemented through GTM. Within the GTM dashboard you are able to set up a trigger. This trigger means that a ‘tag’ will only fire on a page which is ‘triggered’. So in this example, our client Optegra, only wanted the schema for ‘location 1’ to trigger only on /hospital-location-1 page. Silverbean setup a trigger for URLs that end with /hospital-location-1 and a tag with the above code which only fired on that trigger.

There are many more ways to implement Schema and they’re all quite flexible. And speaking of Google Tag Manager, as a bonus piece of information, check out my colleague Scott’s post on successful implementation of Google Tag Manager campaign tagging. A great read full of actionable tips you can make headway on right away!

That’s a big part of Local Search criticals dealt with and when you think of the potential impact this activity could have on your customers going from Clicks to Bricks, you must be surely dying to check out the third part of this series…

COMING SOON:

CONTACT US FOR TAILORED ADVICE ON BUILDING A BUSINESS CASE FOR DIGITAL INVESTMENT, OR ANY OF THE OTHER TOPICS COVERED.

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