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Everything You Need to Know About SEO: Becoming the “Go-To” Business (Part 3)

By Brendan B. Chard posted 06-30-2014 11:53

  

In part 1 of this series, I offered some insight for figuring out if you actually need SEO.  In part 2, I explained how to optimize SEO by becoming an authority in your chosen niche. In this installment, I review how becoming the “go-to” business factors into SEO.

To search engines, you're not just a website, you're also a local business. This means you are judged not only on your website authority, but on the longevity, reputation, and physical location of your firm.

You may have noticed that when you do a search for a business (i.e., Ann Arbor Bankruptcy Attorney), the search results display special local businesses in slots lettered A-G with business name, address, phone, website, and a map. 


This means that 7 (41%) of the 17 organic spots on page one are dedicated to local businesses that have a physical address in the area being searched.
 

For these special local results, search engines prefer businesses that are located at the "center of the industry" for the area being searched. If most of the law offices in your town are by the court house on the west side and you're on the east side, it's going to be harder for you to show up in those special local business spots for lawyers. This setup also means that even though you may do a lot of business in neighboring towns, it will be difficult to show up in those special local business slots in those towns unless you also have a physical address in those towns. GPS location for mobile users and IP geolocation of computer users also figure into the equation as well. Frustrating, right?

We do have control over two things which can help turn the tables in your favor. One is something called address citations, or NAPs. This is the publication of your firm’s Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) on other websites. A NAP for your business is like a link to your website; in general, the more you have from legitimate sources, the better. You can build some of these yourself with a LinkedIn company page, listings on Avvo, Yelp, professional association member pages, and other online directories. As with links, any time you're mentioned in the news or are part of a membership directory (like a bar association), make sure there's a citation.

The other thing you can do is ask clients to leave positive reviews on your Google+ Page, Yelp, and Avvo. This is scary territory for many lawyers, but this is how the search world works, so sticking your head in the sand won't help. Positive reviews will increase your chances of being in the local business slots and increase your visibility within those slots. If you get at least 5 positive reviews on Google+ those will display with bright orange stars alongside your business in Google search results. 

Conversely, if you get bad reviews, your rankings may go down. What you need to know is that whether you want reviews or not, clients can already review you right now on Google, Yelp, Avvo, and a dozen other places. You might as well pick out your 10-20 favorite clients, ask them to leave you nice reviews, and get ahead of the game.

You can manage your business listings with the major search engines for free. Google has just reworked its business listing center to streamline and simply the process of listing your firm with its Google My Business program. You can access that here. For Bing you can go here and, for Yahoo, go here.

TIPS: The most important thing you can do when managing your local business listings and citations is be consistent with how you type your address and phone number. Ideally you should use your official USPS Postal Address. USPS has a tool to obtain your official address. (The full 9 digit zip code is not necessary, first 5 digits are sufficient.)

Remember that moving your office, especially to another town, or changing your phone number can impact your local search rankings because your NAP format will change. This will require quite a bit of cleaning up to update various places that you are listed. Make sure you weigh the time and cost of doing that before moving.

Up next

Our next installment will explore the third method to getting a page one ranking: advertising with search engines.

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