The Ultimate Local SEO Guide For Contractors

Contractor’s DIY Guide to Local SEO

49 SEO Tips to Generate More Traffic & Leads

This Local SEO Guide provides your home service business with tips to help you rise to the top of local searches and generate more clicks, calls, and customers.

In the age of the smartphone, online marketing has become one of the most important functions in your company.

Every contracting company must dedicate resources toward online marketing for lead generation, reputation management, branding, email marketing and referral reward programs.

Get in the game and dominate, or get crushed.

What is local SEO? Read our post about, “what local search engine optimization is and why it’s vital to your contracting company’s future.

49 Local SEO Tips for Contractors

Grow More Traffic & Generate More Leads

Tip #1 – Start using a Reputation Management system immediately.

Every future prospect of yours is going to check your reputation in Google, Yelp, and maybe elsewhere.

They will search Google for some variation of your “business name + reviews” and see what comes up.

“88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends”. – SearchEngineLand

Online reviews are one of the most important ranking factors for your website and Google Maps listing, according to the Moz Local SEO study done every two years.

Google and other search engines look for at least four things with regards to company reviews:

• quantity of reviews compared to competitors
• quality of reviews compared to competitors
• diversity of reviews across several major platforms
• the velocity of reviews (the frequency of getting reviews)

As you can see, earning quality reviews is incredibly important, so too is spreading them out on various platforms like your website, Google, Facebook, Yelp, and HomeAdvisor.

Keeping reviews coming in regularly is of top importance too.

Installing a reputation management system puts you in control of your company’s online reviews and makes the job easy.

Most reputation management systems include these features:

1. connect via API or upload your new customers (preferably regularly).
2. customize your campaign settings.
3. drips out automated email requests for customer feedback.
4. direct where you want reviews to go.
5. allows for first-party reviews to be written on your website.
6. includes schema markup on your site for first-party reviews and possible reviews stars in search results (rich snippets).
7. allows for responding to reviews from one platform.
8. scans review directories daily and alerts you to any new reviews written about your company.
9. display options for testimonials on home page, testimonial page, city pages, services pages, etc.
10. allows for sharing reviews with graphics on social media platforms.

Suggestion: assign someone to manage your online reviews. They will upload customers into the system regularly (if not connected by API), edit drip campaigns, respond to every review, etc.

Responding to Negative Reviews: be sure to always respond to negative reviews but never get into a pissing match no matter how wrong you think they are. Take it offline but let consumers see you’re trying to make things right.

Reply to negative reviews with something in the spirit of,  “Thank you for your feedback and we’re sorry to hear that you didn’t have an excellent experience. We strive to provide 5-star service to everyone. Please contact [name] in our office at [email or phone] to see what can be done. Thank you.”

Tools: here are a few very good cloud-based Reputation Management Software Systems available on the market:

• Plumber Dominance App
• GatherUp
• Broadly
• Birdeye

Tip #2 – Create a “Reviews” page on your website and main Menu

Display reviews, link out to review sites, and allow visitors to write reviews right onto your site.

If you use a reputation management system mentioned above it will provide with code to place on your testimonials page to do these tasks.

Your chosen software should also write aggregate reviews structured data code to this page to help with rankings and potential reviews stars (rich snippets) in search engine results pages.

Those review stars help increase click-thru rates, which creates more traffic, which creates more leads (if content and conversion are good).

You could also tag 1st-party reviews to segment them by city or service, which would enable you to display them on their applicable city and/or service pages, which may also add reviews schema to each city page.

This helps add city-specific social proof to the page and possible rich snippets in the SERPs for each of those city pages.

Videos: you should also use and insert video testimonials from your customers on your reviews, case study, and city pages of your website. Your home page could also include one or more of these.

Tools: Check out video testimonials software systems like Magnfi.com. 

Tip #3 – Create a Case Studies page on your website and main Menu

Highlight large jobs.

Ask homeowners if they’d be willing to provide their comments on video after the job is done.

Take before photos.

Document the homeowners goal.

Document the process. Take photos and video, narrate in front of the scenes if possible. Hire an intern to do your videography and photography for social media and your website.

Take after photos.

Interview the homeowners on video about the results, the process, the communications, and their level of satisfaction. If there was a financial incentive, for things like solar power, then what was the before and after financial result now and into the future?

Do this for several clients, give each their own webpages linked under the main Case Studies page.

In every case, include a video testimonial from the client.

If you have multiple location /city pages, include one for each location.

Tools: Magnfi is a simple tool to get video testimonials from your customers Magnfi.com. The camera on your crews’ phones is another useful tool.

Tip #4 – Get Your Keyword research right or you’re wasting time. What do consumers want?

Crazy Important Point #1: in-depth keyword and competitor research is the single most important part of creating content that will actually bring you qualified traffic and help generate leads.

Start with what you already rank for, what your customer’s top Q&As are, use competitor content gaps, and searched-for topics that match your services and whose competition difficulty aligns with your domain authority and good things will grow.

There’s a ton of local people already searching about topics in your industry.

They’re seeking information on your products and services but based on their questions, problems, needs, wants, and desires, etc.

Your mission is to find exactly what they’re searching for that’s related to your local business, then create great content for it, provide it in every format, design it for local SEO, syndicate it, and get it ranking organically in Google.

Go where the traffic is, to where the people are.

Crazy Important Keyword Point #2:  you don’t create traffic, nobody does… well maybe Salma Hayek does, but the rest of us don’t create traffic online. We use tools to search and find out where it is.

You search for and choose the traffic lanes whose volume is good, and where context and search intent relates perfectly to your products, services, and/or location, etc.

Create the content they’re asking for: solve problems, answer questions, provide how-to’s, instructions, show how you fix things, show off products, installations, video happy customers, etc.

Survey and ask your existing customers, “What’s their number one challenge when it comes to [your home service]?”

Tools: keyword research tools and online forums can help you identify the hot topics in your industry and what content your prospects and customers are looking for.

• Ubbersuggest (Free)
• KW Finder (Paid)
• Ahrefs (Paid)
• SEM Rush (Paid)
• Answer the Public (Free)
• Reddit (Free forum)
• Quora (Free forum)
• Alignable (Free and paid forum)

Tip #5 – Start with service+city keywords

Does your website and especially your home page use variations of your “service + city + state” keyword?

For example, most people when looking for a plumber will open Google and search “plumber (city + state).”

If that searcher was in Tampa Florida for example, they’d be searching for something like, “plumber tampa fl” or “tampa plumber.”

Other very common variations are:

• “service” + near me
• best “service” + city state
• city + “service”
• best “service” + near me
• “service” company + city + state
• best “service” company + city + state

You’ll want to be sure some of these variations are on your home page as Titles and/or H1 tags and in the body text, as well as on every single one of your service pages. Don’t overstuff them, but make room for a few.

Tip #6 – Are you missing out on over 90% of your prospects?

Most companies want to find prospects who are ready to buy. Who doesn’t?

But is everyone ready to buy right now? Nope, not even close. In fact, the majority of people are just starting out, learning, comparing, and still thinking about it.

So if you’re only looking for and engaging with people who are ready to buy right now, then you’ve already shut out the great majority of your prospects.

Are your competitors attracting quality prospects that you will never get?

If they’re producing helpful content for people in all stages of the buyer’s journey, and you’re not, then the answer is yes, you’re absolutely missing out on a ton of potential prospects.

What’s the buyer’s journey?

It’s the natural process all people go through when we’re looking for an answer, a solution, or on the path toward making a purchase.

Excluding emergencies, the buyer’s journey doesn’t start at “ready to buy.”

We all go through a natural learning and deciding process that has three identified stages:

1) Awareness stage – buyer realizes they have a desire, need, problem, or consequence of inaction.

2) Consideration stage – buyer seeks information and education on how best to solve the issue given their desires, circumstances, and/or budget.

3) Decision stage – buyer compares and analyzes various solutions and sources and then chooses one of each.

Buyers are more likely to buy from those companies that helped them learn all along the way.

People will trust the source that provided them with best and most useful information on their journey.

Buying from that company will be an easy decision. Is that your company?

For decades the marketing and advertising industry has used what’s called the AIDA marketing model to address each stage of buyer’s journey. AIDA is an acronym for:

1. Awareness – get the attention of the prospect, creating brand awareness,  (ads, email, content, multimedia, press, etc.).

2. Interest – deliver great user experiences and valuable, helpful content to keep and continue their attention.

3. Desire – use brand personality and story to connect emotionally and create desire.

4. Action – include calls-to-action; visit website, landing pages, join mailing lists, click to call, follow on social media, etc.

Absolutely every business should add a fifth stage of this marketing model, which is continued action or staying connected to your customers who’ve already come to know, like, and trust your brand.

So what content should you produce for your buyers’ journeys?

1. Start with the top 10 questions & answers your company gets from prospects.

2. The top 10 questions & answers your company gets from customers.

3. The top 10 service calls you go out on and how to prevent them.

Tip #7 – What high-margin jobs do you want to do the most?

To attract those clients and rank for those jobs you need to make superior cornerstone content for those services plus multiple supporting articles and location based articles to show prospects and Google your expertise and location relationship.

What jobs do you want to avoid that consumers can do themselves? Make how-to videos for homeowners to do it themselves.

Search Google [incognito] for services you want to dominate or a keyword research tool, analyze the top results, find all related keywords, then create far superior content.

Create multiple pieces of content for the entire buyer’s journey on that topic and include a location article (favorite restaurants in [city]).

Tip #8 – Use Google Search Console & Improve What You Already Rank For

*You can get your fastest wins with increased rankings and traffic growth by improving pages that are already ranking but not yet on page one.

1. Go into Google Search Console and click on “Performance.”
2. Then change the time frame to measure to 12 months.
3. Next, click on all four boxes to display clicks, click-thru-rate (CTR), impressions, and average position.
4. Next, click on the “Pages” column heading below the chart to sort by page URLs.

Next, click on “Impressions” to sort from highest to lowest.

Examine the URLs showing and all four metrics.

What URLs can be improved to move up from current rankings of 10-40?

Click on each URL that is ranking 10-40 to see exactly what keywords they are currently ranking for.

How can you improve the page to rank better for these keywords?

How can you improve the title and meta description to improve the click-thru-rate (CTR)?

Download each report of URLs and URL keywords that warrants being worked on and improved. Click on the download icon to the right of column titles.

See the SERP for each keyword to examine the top-ranking pages you have to beat.

Optimize the content on each target page to improve rankings for the keywords they already have some ranking power for.

This is a VERY powerful process if the site already has some history in GSC and page 2+ rankings for worthy keywords.

Tip #9 – Competitor Research & Gap Analysis

Identify and research your top online competitors and discover where they’re getting most of their traffic from.

What keywords are bringing them value?

What keywords are they getting traffic from that you are not?

Find what content brings them valuable traffic then create better content on that topic, publish, share, and promote.

What websites are they getting links and traffic from that could also benefit you?

Are they writing content for other blogs and getting guest post links? Find the most desirable sites they’re getting links from based on domain strength, see what content would appeal to their base, then create content and pitch it to them.

Are they in relevant business or local directories that you’re not? Find out and then create a listing in them. Most are free.

Are they in the news and getting valuable news agency links and traffic? Even if they’re not, you should be creating occasional news releases for their valuable links, traffic, and branding.

The tools to use to find you competitors’ traffic, keywords, and backlinks are the same as those in the keyword research list above, Ubbersuggest, Ahrefs, and SEM Rush provide access to this data. We use Ahrefs.

Tip #10 – You must have a mobile-first and responsive website

More than half of all Internet traffic now comes through mobile devices; mostly smartphones.

If you don’t have a website that looks great on mobile, then you’ve already lost about half of your potential prospects. That’s a piss-poor starting spot wouldn’t you say?

Google now crawls your website with mobile first-indexing. If your site isn’t ready for mobile, your rankings will start slipping or disappear altogether.

Websites today must be what’s called “responsive.”

A “responsive” themed website will automatically adjust the content to fit any size mobile phones, tablet, notebook, or desktop screen.

We use and recommend a WordPress website with the responsive Divi theme from Elegant Themes installed. We’re also fans of Thrive Themes.

There are many great responsive WordPress themes to choose from, both free and paid.

Important: just because a responsive website will automatically fit any size screen doesn’t mean it will look good on any device.

In fact, the web developer needs to create each page of the site and examine it in mobile, tablet, and desktop modes to make adjustments to things like image, title, and text sizes, margins, padding and other settings in order to make sure the page looks great on all devices.

Settings for many elements will likely be different for each device type.

Tip #11 – Install SSL/TLS Certificate

Google prefers and encourages an SSL certificate be installed on all websites today.

If you look up at the address bar of this website you’ll see the address begins with HTTPS instead of just HTTP.

The HTTPS means that the site is protected and secured using Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), which means it encrypts all information sent through website forms, payment gateways, etc. to ensure it’s not intercepted or mofified by another party without being detected.

Installing what’s known as an SSL Certificate will provide your site with that TLS security and then ask your hosting company to force all versions of your site to redirect to the HTTPS protected version.

If you do not have an SSL certificate installed on your website then any visitor that’s using Google’s Chrome browser will receive a warning page that your site is not secure before they get to your site.

You’re likely to lose most all of those visitors and you’re also risking your users data being intercepted and/or manipulated by other parties who most likely have bad intentions.

Contact your website hosting company to either use a free SSL certificate or to purchase a SSL certificate for your domain.

Install the free Really Simple SSL plugin as a backup to force all versions to https. This helps make sure that users of the Internet Explorer and Chrome browsers do not get a “site is NOT secure” warning message.

Tip #12 – Test all URL versions of your site

Type in all four variations of your website address and make sure they all point to the proper SSL version of your site.

http://your-site.com

https://your-site.com

http://www.your-site.com

https://www.your-site.com

If these are not all pointing to a secure version of your site, either with the www or without, then you need to contact your web hosting company, inform them, and ask them to correct it. Changes will usually take up to 24 hours to take effect.

You can edit your .htaccess file to place these redirects to your https secure version, but if you are not familiar with working on the .htaccess file you should avoid it since you can damage your website if you screw up the coding in the file.

Tip #13 – Connect Google Search Console (GSC)

If you’re not already using GSC then it needs to be at the top of your “get-it-done list.”

Google Search Console (GSC) is a FREE online tool and is like having a high-tech mechanic monitoring your site for problems while also showing valuable information about your site and the search traffic it gets.

GSC identifies the organic traffic on your website and shows which search queries you’re getting traffic from, and what pages are getting seen, clicked on, and attracting traffic.

GSC provides each page’s average ranking position and click-thru-rate (CTR).

See how much of your traffic is coming from mobile, tablets, and desktops.

You submit your sitemap through Google Search Console.

GSC will report if it finds any warnings or errors on any of your site’s sitemap or URLs for indexing, mobile usability, and more.

GSC is where you’ll submit new pages and posts for indexing or tell Google when you’ve edited content and ask them to examine it again.

GSC is where you’ll see if your site has been penalized with a manual action or if Google finds security issues with your site.

To install GSC go to https://search.google.com/search-console/about and setup a new GSC account, then add your website URL as a new property.

Use the “domain property” installation, this will monitor all versions, www, non-www, http, and https.

You will have to create a TXT file to the site’s root domain to prove you have ownership of the site (or admin access anyways).

Once the verification file is uploaded, you can go back to GSC, and click on the property to then verify it.

See previous step #8 on how to use GSC information to analyze and edit your content, keywords, and improve rankings, CTR, and traffic.

Tip #14 – Connect Google Analytics using Tag Manager

Google Analytics (GA) helps you see how users are interacting with your website.

Google Analytics tracks the traffic from all sources, including your Google ads (after connecting ads account with analytics account).

GA allows you to set goals and add values to those goals so you can track advertising funnels and conversion rates.

GA connected with Google Ads allows you to “retarget visitors of your website” with ads on various platforms. Retargeting usually provides the best ROI of any online ad.

GA tracks and displays where traffic is coming from, where it’s going, what the bounce rate of each page is, how long a visitor stays on a page and per session, are they converting into clicks, forms, opt-ins, or sales, and so much more.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) makes it easier to create and deploy most of what you would want tracked in GA.

Goals such as calls, form submissions, URL views, and so much more can be easily setup in GTM and then tracked in Google Analytics under Events.

You can even deploy your GA code using GTM and an all pages trigger.

Go to Google Tag Manager, setup an account, connect it to your Google Analytics Unique Account ID, and create an all pages trigger for your first tag. Install that tag on your site, test, and now you’re ready to create additional tags.

Common Tracking Tags to Create in Google Tag Manager (GTM):

Google Analytics – All pages
Form submissions
Clicks to call
Scroll down percentage of URL

Important: Google does NOT recommend using GTM to deploy Schema markup using Structured Data. That code should be placed directly on the website.

Tip #15 – Perform Mobile-friendly and Page Speed Tests

Your website needs to be mobile-friendly. You can test it using Google’s mobile friendly test.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, you’re losing more than half of your potential prospects, so you need a new website like yesterday.

Your website also needs to be fast.

People are impatient, if the web page they clicked on takes more than a couple of seconds to start loading, they’ll hit the back button and go somewhere else.

If you’re running Google or Facebook ads and have slow landing page loading times then it’s hurting your Quality Scores, ad location, effectiveness, and return on investment.

It’s costing you money.

Google has also made it crystal clear that page loading speed is critical to ranking well.

All sorts of factors can effect page speed.

The most common culprits are large image files.

Images should first be sized to how big you need it, then compressed to reduce file size.

After images there’s all kinds of other common issues such as

• Slow hosting servers
• Caching issues
• CSS and Javascript codes
• Plugins
• and much more

Test each page of your website using GT Metrix and/or Pingdom

There’s several measurements of page speed, two of the most important are “time to first byte,” which is how long it takes to start loading, and “page load time,” which is the total time to load the whole page.

Time-to-first-byte is when the user sees the page begin to load, statistics show this needs to be less than two seconds.

Some of the issues discovered in these tests are created by the theme and plugins being used. You may be able to replace some plugins, but unless you custom code your site, you won’t be able to get rid of all issues.

Note that Google also has a speed testing tool but it does NOT test the actual loading speed of the site but rather it audits the page performance using Lighthouse technology and Chrome UX data.

Google’s tool uses and displays data from two sources; lab data, which is a simulated load of the page in a fixed environment, and field data, which is the real-world actual page test and its historical data. You can read more about it here.

The metric that matters most in Google’s Page Speed Testing Tool is the First Contentful Paint (FCP), which measures the time it takes for the user to see the start of the page loading.

Tips on how to speed up a web page:

• re-size and optimize images
• reduce image file sizes (plugins)
• simplify your design (less images, sliders, animation, etc.)
• improve server response time (better hosting)
• use a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare
• reduce or remove redirects
• install browser caching plugin (WP Rocket)
• minify CSS, Javascript, and HTML (WP Rocket)
• enable Gzip file compression for CSS, Javascript, and HTML (WP Rocket)
• remove render-blocking JavaScript (WP Rocket)
• install a lazy loading plugin that loads content as the user scrolls.

Our Favorite WordPress Plugins that help speed up your website:

Best Paid Combo
WP Rocket [paid]
Short Pixel Adaptive Images [free and paid versions]

Free alternatives to WP Rocket are:

A3 Lazy Load [free]
WP Fastest Cache (cache, minify, etc.)
W3 Total Cache (cache, minify, etc.)
WP Smush (images)
WP Optimize (database)

Tip #16 – Create or claim & optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP) listing.

Your business listing in Google Maps is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate you can have, and it’s FREE!

Google Maps contains all of the business listings from the FREE Google Business Profile (GBP) directory.

It’s at the top of every local services search in Google, just below the ads.

If you show up in those top 3 map listings, your phone rings.

Is your business listed in Google Maps? If so, do you have ownership control of it?

Is the GBP listing highly optimized to help it rank high in local searches relevant to your services?

Go to Google Maps and search for your exact business name and city. Does your business come up? 

If you see your business but aren’t sure if you have control of it, go to https://www.google.com/business/ and sign in with your main business Google account (or whichever one you think might be the manager/owner of the account).

If you’re taken to your GBP account management panel then you’re all good.

If you’re not taken there, then either that’s not the right Google account or you don’t have control of it. Do you have another Google account to try?

If you still can’t figure out if you have access and control of your GBP account, then contact GBP for support.

https://support.google.com/business/

They stopped phone support in late 2019, early 2020.

Once you have ownership control over your verified listing you’ll need to optimize it and post to it regularly in order to try and get it ranking in the top three “local pack” listings for every local business search.

For details on powering up your Google Business Profile listing, see our Free Guide: How to optimize your Google Maps, Yelp, and Bing Places listings.

Tip #17 – Get Google Guaranteed Verified – Local Service Ads (LSA)

The Google Guaranteed program can help you generate leads quickly plus it seems to be required to compete in voice searches.

Google’s Local service Ads (LSA) are pay-per-lead ads (PPL). These are different than regular Google ads where you’re used to paying-per-click (PPC).

The program is only for some home services, and is slowly rolling out in selected cities at first.

For the consumer, the service work done by Google Guaranteed contractors is insured by Google for up to $2,000.

Google pre-screens your home services business for biz license, insurance, claims against you, contractor’s license, employees, etc.

Once approved, you’re eligible to run Local Service Ads (LSA), which are at the very top of local services searches, and get about 14% of all clicks.

The consumer searches for a home service in their city, the top three boxes (pictured above) are Google Guaranteed Local Service Ads (LSA).

The consumer can click on them and get the ability to contact you plus see a short snapshot of your business and its customer reviews. The short bio page also includes a Google statement that your business has been screened and approved for the GG program.

A bonus by-product of getting Google Guaranteed, is that your company will stand a better chance of appearing in voice search results, according to current voice research data.

More than 20 percent of searches are done by voice today.

Typing is being replaced by speaking commands into your smartphone or smart home device.

So how do you help give your company a chance to be the one that comes back when they say “Hey Google, who’s the best [home service] company in [their city]?”

To date, when people do a voice search on Google Assistant for a local home services company, the search results appear to include only the pre-screened service companies that go through the verification process with Google Guaranteed, HomeAdvisor, or Porch.

So whether or not you’re going to run LSA or Google Ads, go get your home services company Google Guaranteed to be eligible to show up in the results for an ever-growing voice searches.

Source: voicebot.ai

Where do VOICE platforms get local business data?

Tip #18 – Optimize Your Yelp Listing Regularly

Yelp is a go-to site for many consumers to check out customer reviews on local businesses they’re considering doing business with.

In addition to that, Yelp has teamed up with Yext to provide local business data to Amazon Alexa for voice activated searches.

It’s also common for listings in Yelp or other business directories to be a top organic search result in Google.

So it’s important to have an optimized Yelp listing.

The same goes for the dozens of other important online business directory listings (a.k.a. citations).

Optimize your Yelp listing:

• be sure your business name, address, phone (NAP) matches exactly what’s on your website, Google My Business, Bing Places and other directories! As stated already, it will hurt your ranking ability if it’s not.
• do NOT use a call-tracking number (it creates a NAP conflict which will hurt your rankings – see Tip#10).
• write keyword optimized business specialties, company history, and owner biography descriptions.
• upload optimized and geo-tagged photos and continue to drip these each and every month.
• ask customers to upload photos on Yelp and “check-in” to Yelp when visiting your office location.
• be sure to include all categories and services that you offer.
• be sure to complete all information that pertains to your business; payment methods, operating days and hours, holiday dates you’re closed, parking, if WiFi is offered, handicap access, etc.
• suggest other businesses that you truly recommend and ask them to do the same for you within Yelp.

Important: DO NOT ask for Yelp reviews! Yelp does not allow you to ask customers for reviews, it’s against their Terms of Service. But by asking your customers to upload photos and check-in on Yelp when at your location, you’ll get some natural reviews.

Tip #19 – Create, Claim, and Optimize A Bing Places Listing

Bing is Microsoft’s search engine and they too display a map of nearby businesses for local searches in their app.

Bing Places for Business is their directory of free business listings.

You can sync your Bing Places listing to your Google My Business listing so that once your Bing listing is setup and synced, you only have to update the GMB listing and it autofills to your Bing Places listing (for images, descriptions, etc.).

Tip #20 – Create or Claim & Your Apple Maps Listing

If your contracting business has a physical commercial location or showroom (not your home) then you should make sure it’s listed in Apple Maps.

There’s a ton of people with iPhones and when they search in the Apple Maps app on their phone for your kind of business, you want to make sure you’ll show up.

Here’s a link to add or edit your business listing in Apple Maps.

Tip #21 – Make sure your business name, address, and phone (NAP) match exactly!

It’s incredibly important that your business name, address, and phone number match exactly on your website, Google My Business, Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, and all other business directories.

Incomplete, inaccurate, and inconsistent NAP data is the #1 reason why websites and directory listings DO NOT RANK well in search results pages.

If there are conflicts in your NAP data on your website and these business directories then you’ve confused Google and others and they just drop your listing from appearing high in searches, if at all.

If your company has moved, changed its name or telephone number then the odds are very high that you have NAP conflicts and these are hurting your ability to rank well and generate more traffic and leads.

Every business should run a “Citation Audit” before investing any time, money, and energy into your website or optimizing business directories because the efforts will have a hard time bearing fruit as long as those NAP conflicts remain.

NAP conflicts must be cleaned up, and it needs to be done manually one-by-one in each directory. It’s a labor-intensive and time-consuming process but worth it’s weight in gold to help enable your business and website rank better in local searches.

Beware the automated “citation cleanup” services because every directory has different methods for suggesting edits and listing formats.

We are not fans of companies like Yext, that hold your listings hostage and if you stop paying they withdraw them.

Tip #27 – Use A WEBSITE URL Structure That Makes Sense

If you’re setting up a new website or about to have a new website built, then use good structure that will help in search engines.

Setup your website URL structure by topic and sub-topics to help users and search engines better understand your website.

*Use short URL’s. Studies show short URLs rank better.

For example:

your-domain.com
your-domain.com/about-us
your-domain.com/contact-us
your-domain.com/testimonials
your-domain.com/work-gallery
your-domain.com/blog
your-domain.com/services/
your-domain.com/services/service-1/
your-domain.com/services/service-2/
your-domain.com/services/service-3/
your-domain.com/area-served/
your-domain.com/area-served/city-1/
your-domain.com/area-served/city-2/
your-domain.com/area-served/city-3/
Etc.

Display relevant blog posts on each service page using a post carousel.

Display city relevant testimonials on each service and city page.

WARNING: changing site structure without using 301 redirects for every affected URL will harm your search appearance, traffic, conversions, leads, and sales.

If you change the structure without a 301 redirect then the old page and post URLs won’t exist and will produce a 404 Not Found error from search engines, links, and direct searches. BEFORE you do anything you have to map all existing URLs to new planned URLs then apply a 301 redirect to every existing URL that will be affected when you make the structural transition.

Tip #28 – Create A City Page for Every Service Area City

If you want your website to rank in Google for cities outside of your location city, then you have to create a location or city page for each one of those locations.

Each city page should have it’s own unique content on it.

Creating one page and then duplicating it but just replacing the city names is old school and when Google finds it they will choose one of the duplicates as the primary and ignore the rest (by applying a canonical URL), resulting in perhaps one city page having the ability to rank in search but none of the others.

So each location page should be unique, state your services with the city name in the heading tag, like “Solar Installations in [city name]” and “Solar repairs in [city name].

If you’re a plumber, it’s “water heater repair in [city name],” etc.

Create unique versions for each location page.

Include:

Heading tags with your services + city name

Paragraph or two about the city, it’s history, population, colleges, trade schools, annual events, and points of interest.

Survey your employees for each person’s favorite spots in each city in your service area.

What’s their favorite:

2 Restaurants:
City park:
Fun place:
Family spot:
Other:

Create a list on each city page of all your favorite places for that city and make each one link to the Google Maps URL of that business or location. This provides the user more info and a map to each place and it also provides “location signals” to Google that your page and it’s content is related to that area.

Create a Google Map using your business Google account, and create map directions to each of those same favorite places from your business address in Google.

You can only apply five direction locations per map so make two maps of five each and then embed them onto your city page.

The embedded maps help send “location signals” to Google.

Tip #29 – Setup Topical Silos / Clusters for SEO Power

For new websites of those about to be built, if you want added SEO ranking power you can setup a content silo structure to keep everything about one topic or service in the same silo and interlink them together.

Some people call them topical content clusters, silos, etc.

This can be a very powerful ranking structure but only if you have a lot of services that you will continue to add future content about.

There are many ways you can setup a content silo but a simple setup would be to use the WordPress permalink structure of:

/%category%/%postname%/

And keep all related topical content and future blog posts using the proper category.

You can go one step further by placing a 301 redirect on the category URL to its main topical content page.

You can add a sidebar menu to this main content silo page to show all related posts (child silo pages).

WARNING: changing site structure without using 301 redirects for every affected URL will harm your search appearance, traffic, conversions, leads, and sales.

If you change the structure without a 301 redirect then the old page and post URLs won’t exist and will produce a 404 Not Found error from search engines, links, and direct searches. BEFORE you do anything you have to map all existing URLs to new planned URLs then apply a 301 redirect to every existing URL that will be affected when you make the structural transition.

Tip #30 – Set A Good Permalink Structure

The first step toward good technical SEO website URL structure to to setup your WordPress Permalink structure to one of two choices:

/%postname%/

/%category%/%postname%/

Many SEO studies have proven that short URLs rank better than long ones.

The simplest method is to have the postname show up immediately after your domain name.

If you’re creating topical silos / clusters (as in tip #26) then using /%category%/%postname%/ will keep topical content together for added SEO strength.

Be sure to interlink all related topical pages to each other.

It hurts your rankings to use any number or date permalink structure because you don’t want users or Google seeing aging dates applied to your content over time.

WARNING: changing site structure without using 301 redirects for every affected URL will harm your search appearance, traffic, conversions, leads, and sales.

If you change the structure without a 301 redirect then the old page and post URLs won’t exist and will produce a 404 Not Found error from search engines, links, and direct searches. BEFORE you do anything you have to map all existing URLs to new planned URLs then apply a 301 redirect to every existing URL that will be affected when you make the structural transition.