Video: Beginners Guide to Local SEO

Hi, my name is Andy Williams, and I’m one of the search specialists here at Koozai. Today I’m going to be talking to you about local SEO and the link building that goes with it. Now, obviously, link building is a very important part of any SEO campaign, and it’s even more important for local SEO. But before we look into that, I think it’s important that we look into some of the basics and make sure that they’re in place first.

So hopefully on your website you will already have the address. This is very important and it sounds like an obvious one, but you’d be surprised how many people leave that off. Some people like to put it in the footer; that way it can be on every single page and it’s not a problem. The next one is the phone number. Again, it sounds obvious, but a lot of people miss it off. It’s very important to have the address and the phone number on the site because then it links up with all of these links that we’re going to be building later on.

The next part that I would expect to be in place is your Google Places profile. Hopefully that’s also been verified and you’ve filled in all the relevant fields. If not, make sure you’ve done that before you move on to this part.

Link building. Now the first area that I’d like to look at is the Yellow Pages section. These are pretty much what they say, Yellow Pages. So you’ve got the likes of Yell, 118, and Thompson. Now what you might have found was that your Google Places profile has already been made up. That’s because the likes of Yell and 118 have already supplied Google with this information. So you might have come along and all you needed to do was verify your account. This highlights how important it is to be linked from these places. Others that I recommend are Yahoo Local, Smile Local, and Scoot. Now a lot of this information is fed by these sites onto Google, so it’s very, very important that you make sure this is your first stop.

The next area that I would look into is local directories. This is very much the same as if you were building links from any other directory, but this time you need to look locally. For example, I would search for business directories and then the area that you’re in. From there, there are other directories that you can look at, including Free Index and Hotfrog which has been hit by the Panda update but I would still suggest that you place yourself there. There’s no harm in doing it. People are still using the site. People are still looking for information there, so use it. Applegate is also an important one and Biz Wiki, which is kind of like a directory, kind of like a wiki. Again, all the information that’s fed in here ends up being put into your Google Places account or at least has some sort of a knock on effect to it.

Next up is social media which you’re probably more familiar with than any other. The likes of Yelp, which I’m sure everyone’s heard of. Now Yelp and Google have had their ups and downs recently, but it’s still very, very important that you’re listed on here if only because the community uses it and therefore you might get some custom that way. Other sites that are very familiar are Welovelocal, Brownbook, Bview, Qype, BView, and Tipped. Now if you verify these accounts and you verify your listing, it also gives you the option to add more information. So you could add some images. You could add more descriptions, opening hours, the products you supply. It’s very much the same sort of information that you’re able to put in your Google Places account. Again, make sure that that’s verified. There’s Trip Advisor as well. They’ve had a bit of bad press recently, but we’re still seeing some sort of information going through to Google there. So it’s very important that you’re listed there.

I hope that gives you some kind of an overview of the sort of places you should start. Start building links from these areas and you’ll start seeing improvement within Google Places and your local SEO placing. I hope that’s helped. I’ve been Andy Williams. Make sure you check us out on Koozai.com, like us on our Facebook page, and look on YouTube for some of our videos. Thanks a lot.