Category Archives: Local SEO

This is a collection of all Local Splash Blog posts that cover Local SEO

If you’re a B2B company and you haven’t dipped a toe in the social media pool yet, one great place to start is blogging. Blogging not only shows your company’s personality and sets it apart from other businesses, but it can also provide keyword-rich content to the search engines in order to boost your website’s page rank. Want to create an awesome blog for your company? Follow these 5 tips for B2B blogging.

1. Blog from your website. Blogging from your own domain is more search engine friendly because it provides regularly updated content for your website. Search engines are more likely to come back and index your site when the content is fresh, which means higher rankings for you.

2. Use keywords in your blog titles. Figure out keywords that potential readers may use to find your blog post and use them in the title and sprinkled throughout the body of your blog. This will make your posts more searchable and will help your blog and website rank higher in the search engines.

3. Provide quality information that is interesting and educational. Making sure your readers will be interested and will benefit from your blog post ensures that they’re more likely to share it with others. They’re also more likely to come back and read more posts in the future. As they’re reading your blogs, they’ll build more trust and loyalty toward your company and will be more likely to do business with you in the future.

4. Break up the text in your posts. People don’t usually read online, they scan. People will scan through the different headlines of a blog post and read the parts that seem most interesting to them. When you’re writing your blogs, make sure to break up the text with headlines as you to separate and organize ideas, rather than typing one post in one long paragraph.

5. End each post with a Call to Action. Does your company offer a service similar to what you’re blogging about? Are you writing about a specific event, promotion or company announcement? Let your readers know what your company can do for them with a short Call to Action sentence at the end of your post.

Negative reviews on Google are a problem many local business owners face. Want to know how to remove your negative reviews? This tutorial will show you how to minimize bad reviews as well as how to gain positive reviews from your happy customers.

Key takeaways:

Customers are expecting a good experience when they’re paying for your product or service. You must go above and beyond to exceed their expectations – this will encourage them to leave a positive review.

You cannot get rid of a bad review. You can make the bad review obsolete and you can change the reviewer’s opinion.

Gaining more positive reviews on Google will push the bad reviews down and make them harder to find.

Offer your customers a discount or other promotion for leaving you an online review. Advertise this discount on the back of your business cards along with instructions of how to leave a review. Or collect your clients’ names and email addresses and send them an email including the coupon and instructions on how to leave a review.

Become familiar with review sites and the process of leaving a review in order to better instruct others how to do it.

Google is now officially allowing businesses, brands and other organizations to join the Google+ social network. Initially, Google+ was only open to people; Google deleted any accounts that tried to use a personal account for their company. Companies and brands are now welcome on Google+, which will open up a whole new world of social media marketing tactics to explore.

Create Your Page

Business owners can now use the Create a Page tool, found on their Google+ homepage to create a page for their company. Like Facebook, you must create a business page by using a personal account. The owner of that personal account then becomes the sole administrator of the page. Unlike Facebook, Google+ only allows one person to be the administrator of a page. However, this is expected to change in the coming weeks. If you have a social media manager for your company, be sure this is the person who creates the Google+ company page.

Once you click the Create a Page button, you will be prompted to choose between the following categories:

• Local Business or Place
• Product or Brand
• Company, Institution or Organization
• Arts, Entertainment or Sports
• Other

Determine which category your business best fits in and create your page.

Local Business Pages

Local Business Pages are different than the other pages on Google+. These pages are meant to allow followers to connect easily with the physical location of that business. Local business pages include a map to show people where to find the business location as well as the address, phone number and hours of operation. Even if you’ve already claimed your local business on Google Places, you still need to add your business to Google+. The two are completely separate applications: Google+ is a social network meant to engage and build relationships with fans whereas Google Places should be used to help potential customers find your business location when searching on Google.

Using Google+ as a Page

Once your page is created, you’ll have the ability to choose whether you want to act as yourself or your business page. When you’re acting as your page you’re able to do many of the same things you can do using a personal account, such as share photos, videos and links, conduct hangouts, etc. One restriction put on pages is that you cannot follow someone as a page until that person adds you to one of their circles. Here are some more things to pay attention to as a page on Google+

• Like Facebook, on Google+ it’s okay to create multiple pages on one personal account.
• Pages show the +1 count on their page. This shows all the people who have +1’d the entire site.
• Google will be launching a new badge for brands to share online (on their site, blog, etc.) to encourage people to add them to circles and +1 their business.
• If someone searches for your business using the Google search bar with a + symbol before the business name (i.e. +local splash) they can be taken directly to the Google+ page where they can follow the business.

Google+ for business is still very new and many of the kinks are still being worked out. Some features are expected to be added, enhanced or even possibly removed in the next coming weeks so be sure to pay attention to this growing social network.