How was the talk "Get your business found through local SEO"

The numbers

  • Registered for the talk: 59 people.
  • Attendants: 28 people.
  • It was held on January 27, 2020 in the space provided by ULab, the co-working center of Alicante.

Important: We remind you that in the tool Slack have a channel registered to organize and to share the management of the meetup, specifically the channel we use is #wpalicante of Slack WordPress Spain. If you want to lend a hand, contribute ideas and become more active part of this community follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/

Make them find your business thanks to local SEO: The Talk

Once the food and powder hangover is over, what better than to start the year promoting our local business thanks to this new proposal that we make from WPAlicante: to make it easier for visitors and network users to find us thanks to Google My Business. To this end, this month we propose you in the space of ULab learn all the ins and outs of this useful tool to position our business locally. In order to find out everything, we have on this occasion Noelia RegaladoShe is a local SEO expert and the Agency's CEO SEO Force. He has also been a speaker at numerous WordCamps (soon to be held in Zaragoza!), meetingups and SEO events nationwide. It is also part of the group of Women in SEOThe Women's Group, a group of women to give more visibility and strength to the female sector that is dedicated to SEO.

Of course, you can't miss the classic round of questions at the end of the talk, typical of all meetingups, as well as the traditional networking accompanied by refreshments in one of the surrounding pubs, which the weather doesn't allow to be outdoors, always to our sponsors: WeglotThe WordPress Plugin to translate your website into the language of your choice. You can try it out without any obligation as it is free to use for translating up to 2000 words into one language, and it takes up very little space on the server. We also have as a sponsor WP HerculesThe company offers both hosting and maintenance services for WordPress.

We leave you the link to the shared presentation during the talk and here are some points that we found interesting. although we include at the end of this entry The full video of the presentation.

Fundamentals: What is Local SEO

Local SEO are actions of SEO focused on showing the business in a specific location, since normally the user's search will be focused on a specific site.

When you do a Google search for a local business, it displays the Local Pack, which consists of a map where you locate the first three organic results (those that you don't pay for) that match the search. More and more, two or three businesses are beginning to appear in front of us that are paying, but are clearly identified with the word ADVERTISEMENT.

Another important concept is that of Google My Business and the generation of a file in this service for our company. It is a tool, for the moment free, that Google offers to work the local SEO. Almost every company is worth having a listing on Google My Business (GMB). There are few exceptions where it may not look interesting, such as an affiliate business in online stores that do not have local businesses as customers or offer them the affiliate service. But overall it will be interesting to have it. It is not discarded that in a time this service will cease to be free given the importance that Google is giving to this service. It's so important to have this file as complete as possible to keep it up to date.

What to look out for in Local SEO:

  • NAPName, Address, Phone: This is the acronym for Name, Address, Phone. It is vital that these three pieces of information are exactly the same both on the GMB file and on the web or in any directory where we register. For example, differences in the direction of the style to "run" instead of "street" or to "Y/N" to identify that our address has no number instead of not putting anything, are what will generate problems because Google will understand that it is not the same business, when in fact it is. Another important issue is to have a landline phoneThis helps Google to better locate the company by the prefix of that phone number. If you only have a mobile phone, you can buy a virtual number, it is a minimum investment and it will be very useful. Today the direction we point GMB in is not necessarily going to be shown. He asks you for it to send you the verification letter but also asks you if you offer services at that address because if not, he does not show it on your file. He uses only your zip code to paint on the map a circle with the area where you are located to position you in the Local Pack.
  • Business DescriptionThe description of the business: We have 750 characters to describe the business. It is important to go to the point and detail as much as possible, where they are, what the business is about, what services we offer...
  • ScheduleThe daily schedule must be indicated, but also the holidays we do not open and any other exception we consider interesting. This is used by GMB to display the businesses open at a given time (when the user makes a query, for example). It can be very disappointing for a customer to see at GMB that the business is open and when they arrive at the door it is closed. That can cause us to lose a customer.
  • ReviewsReviews: We must manage all the reviews that users make us, both good and bad. In addition, Google uses algorithms to track both the reviews we receive and our responses to generate a summary of our business. This summary is not automatic but a set of editors are in charge of shaping the information collected by the algorithms. The better we have managed the reviews and the better we have answered them, the better the editorial summary text will make our business. In case they make us negative reviewsIf you are not panicky, you answer them politely, because they have the right to reply and we can generate a greater conflict, you can give them the option to pass us more detail as private to try to manage it. In any case, it is important to answer all of them because our file will lose its position if we lower the percentage of answered reviews compared to the totals.
  • ProductsThe ideal is to upload to GMB all the products we have on sale. If our business is an online store and we work with hundreds of them, it can be important to upload at least those that distinguish us from the competition. Those products will appear directly on the tab that Google shows and from there you can even buy it without having to access our website from the outside. In order for GMB to show them, it is important to be aware that it is necessary to have a minimum of three products per category.
  • PublicationsThe following are important because they are also shown on the tab. There are different types of posts, from events to blog entries. In the case of eventsThe publication will be shown from the day of publication until the date on which the event takes place. Other types of publications can be tips or useful information about one of our services, with a photo that draws attention and a link to the website. Please note that these publications have a duration of 7 days. There are tools that allow you to automate these entries, for example, from our blog. In case we have a blog on our website, tools such as IFTTT allow you to publish the header image, title and short description in GMB automatically when we publish the entry. GMB only shows three publications so it is ideal to release three per week (unless we have included a long term event) to make our file look perfect. Another tool to have publications in GMB is MetricoolThe project is a project that works with autolists to generate programmed content. You have to work an excel with everything you want to publish during the week but once the work is done, metricool can publish it as you indicate.
  • Marking of structured dataIt is important that we have worked on our website in this data marking (Rich Snippets) so that Google has as much information as possible categorized, from having specific fields filled in the NAP to many others. At schema.org is all the information on the ready-to-be-marked data that exists, grouped by type for ease of use. We pass the link to the guy LocalBusiness.
  • Geolocation of imagesIt is important that all the images that we publish have the information of their geolocation included, so that Google is able to locate them on a map.
  • Archive KML and geolocalized SitemapTo locate the business and the web in order to improve the local SEO. To do this we uploaded a KML file.


How to Implement Structured Data Marking in WordPress

The most complete but also most expensive option will be to hire a programmer to implement on the web all the structured data we want Google to know.

For those who can't shuffle this option, there are specific plugins that help us do it ourselves.

This plugin shows us directly the necessary fields so that we only have to worry about including the necessary information in each one.

How to implement image geolocation

We also have an interesting tool for this task. These are GeoImgrwhich has a free and paid version. In the free version you can geolocate 5 images a day manually and you can only edit one image at a time even if they are all geolocated in the same place. The way to proceed is to upload an image on the right side and on the map on the left side, place the pin in the position where the photo was taken, enlarging the map as much as necessary to find the point manually. If there are few images that we have to work on, it can be enough like that, but if there are many photos, it can be worth the $9.90 that it costs per month to avoid this craft.

What the tool finally does is to include the location's meta tag in the image, so we download it and can use it on the web. When we take photos with the mobile phone, this information is already incorporated, but when we have an online shop with catalogue products, for example, this is not given. If we manage to get all the photos in our catalogue geolocated we will have a positioning bonus.

How to implement the geolocalized sitemap and obtain the KML file

As with data marking, we can have a programmer do it for us, or we can use a web tool called GeoSiteMapGenerator which generates the KML file from information you provide in a form, where you include your business data, all the geolocations of the same (if we have companies spread over the national territory, for example), our domain by adding a name for the KML file. With all this, the web generates both the KML file and the geolocalized sitemap, which we can download to upload to the web, and include it in the robot.


Final networking questions and issues

QUESTIONName of the company: Apart from the main name of the company, can you put another name that informs about the service you offer?

RESPONSEThe main service of your company can be included. But not the main service you think is your business but the one the customer is really going to look for.

QUESTIONIs there a way to upload all the products massively to GMB?

RESPONSENo. When you have a franchise, yes there is an option to create all the chips in a massive way directly with a GMB manager, and up to that point you have to have at least 10 locations but I don't know how much information uploads because I haven't used it so far, I have always uploaded it by hand. For now, there is nothing to link the product with the file. I think it will come out and they will charge it because for an online store it can be so useful that they usually end up charging it.

QUESTIONWhat do you recommend to upload, products on offer or new products?

RESPONSEWhat I recommend you to climb above all is that which makes the difference with your competitors. It is also interesting to upload the product that your client is looking for

QUESTIONHow is the synchronization between publications and the web blog done?

RESPONSEFor what you indicate is used https://app.dlvrit.com/share/automate. This is a tool that you give permission for GMB to access your WordPress and publish. As we mentioned at the beginning of the entry, you can also use Metricool to program these automatisms.

QUESTIONHow many languages can you have the GMB file in?

RESPONSEGMB: The GMB file can only be in one language. What is usually done is translation. When the web is in several languages, you have to try to see which language is the most rewarding to work in, where the searches are coming from and in which language.

Glossary

  • SEOSearch Engine Optimization: This is the Spanish acronym for Search Engine Optimization. They are a series of actions whose objective is to improve the positioning in search engines, so that when the user makes a search, in Google, for example, our website appears in the first positions. This improves the visibility of our business.
  • KMLGeographical Data Language: It is a mark-up language based on XML to represent geographic data in three dimensions. It is used to view and share Google Earth data.

Make them find your business thanks to Local SEO: The video

Some photos


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