- [Neil] Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel
and welcome to another day of Local SEO Unlock.
Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel
and if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
Today we're going to be breaking down on an off page SEO.
If you miss any of the previous lessons
we've already had four other videos,
you can check them out at Neilpatel.com/training
and click on Local SEO Unlocked,
where you will not only find the lessons
but you'll find the worksheets, the templates, the PDFs,
the cheat sheets that all go along with each lesson
so that way you can get results faster
and with less work.
So why wouldn't you download these templates?
In this lesson, we'll discuss the art
of optimizing your local SEO.
And when we're discussing local SEO,
I want you to first start off by thinking
about New York versus New Jersey, just for a moment.
Think about New York versus New Jersey.
All right, you got that in your head.
Well, I'm going to go over that in a little bit
and you have a few extra seconds to think about it
but the overall reason why I brought that up
is when you're doing keyword research,
you have to do it for every single county, region
that you focus on.
You need to also adapt your website to that local audience.
Now, when you think about New York versus New Jersey,
they're quite a bit different,
one is more urban, one has suburbs,
one is busy, one is calmer,
one has a much more wealthier population,
one has maybe more average income,
one has no sales tax,
one may have a really high cost of living
and city income tax.
All these things need to be kept in mind
when you're doing your local research
because your customer is quite a bit different
and their needs are quite a bit different.
So how do you rank well in local search?
Well, it comes down to a three things,
proximity, relevance and prominence.
How close is your business's searcher?
How relevant is a search query to the products
and service you have to sell?
And what other customers say about your product
and services and what do they genuinely think?
A lot that you can do to really rank locally
is to have tons of location-based pages.
Tiffany & Co does a great example of this or more
so a great job of this,
they sell jewelry, they have local pages
for all their retailers and or all their locations
and by doing this they're ranking really,
really well locally and that caused them
to get more business over time.
With localization is also important
to localize your content.
Take the time to understand
the culture of the city, the state
and that's why I mentioned New York versus New Jersey.
Feature any local pages if you can
especially your most popular locations
and go really in depth on each page
and don't just play, hey, here's your location?
Here's your name and address.
Show pictures, videos, talk about what you offer,
your products, your inventory, the more detailed
you get the better off you're going to be
with your local rankings.
I also want you to create content based on local news,
stories and events that's relevant to your industry,
there's always something local that's happening
and by creating content around this
is going to also help you rank higher locally.
Now when I say this, the caveat is
don't create content for the sake of creating content,
it needs to be related to your business
and help your ideal customer,
if it doesn't then you're wasting your time.
I want you to break your main category down
into different topics.
For example if it's cats, it would be cat education,
cats in New York City, cat cocktails, cat food,
old cats, young cats, gray-haired cats,
cat food, cats having babies, all this kind of stuff.
So the more detailed you get the better
you're going to rank because it shows Google
that you're expert and you have the thought in the space
because you're breaking down each of the topics
that are really important to people.
Now some of the cat topics I just came up with
may not make sense cause I don't have a cat
and I don't know much about them
but you get the point.
Once you have your content and you've broken it all down
and you're trying to optimize your site,
one easy way to get better rankings
and more business locally is to submit
to all the local directories out there
from Yahoo Local to local.com,
the list goes on and on and I'm not going to bore you
with the list because I have the list for you
in a nice PDF that you can just download it
at neilpatel.com/training and head to Local SEO Unlocked
and you'll find it under week two and it's the second video
under week two where you'll find
all the list of directories just download the PDF
and you'll be good to go and submit your site.
I also want you to make your URLs very readable.
Don't put numbers in your URLs.
Try to have your URLs with words.
People don't really search for numbers,
they search for words
that's why key words are very important
and that's why we discussed that in the previous lesson.
When you put your URLs in,
what are the keywords in your URLs,
you'll find that you'll get more clicks
and you'll rank higher.
One thing to do is once you have your keywords in your URLs,
add internal links so if you have a page on cat food
and you have another page on dog feed and be like, hey,
if you also have a county looking for cat food,
food go here, you can link you to go here, word or phrase
or the cat food phrase to that page on cat food.
And that helps your internal pages rank better
because it passes juice between your pages,
Google can see that, hey, you think all these pages
are important and high quality
because you're linking to them.
So we're going to rank them higher.
And when you use internal links, make sure it's natural,
don't just focus on the keyword like when I said,
if you're looking for cat food go here
the link text could say cat food or it could say,
go here or it could say, if you're looking for cat food,
go here and you can make the whole thing a link
but just do whatever's natural,
you don't always need the keyword to be the link.
Typically, when you're writing content
and you're linking out internally,
you should have a handful of internal links on each page.
As long as your paid does are long and detailed
if they're not, maybe you have one or two,
if they're really long you may have three or four.
Another type of links is external links.
And this is what builds trust.
External links is other websites linking to your website.
And the more links you have, the better it is.
External links are like votes in an election
or political debate.
The more votes someone has, the more likely they're to win.
On the internet, Google looks at SEO on rankings
based on links, the more links someone has,
the higher they're going to rank
because all those links is a another website vouching
for your website.
So when you're trying to go out there,
how do you build these links?
Well, you build these things by just outreaching.
I go to networking events in your community,
look to see who links your competition,
you can do that by going to Ubersays.com,
putting your competitor URL in there
and once that loads up,
click on the back links report on the left-hand navigation,
it's at the very bottom
that'll show you who's linked to your competition
and you can reach out to all those sites
and see if they're willing to link to you as well.
In addition to that, make sure your website
is encrypted and secure,
there's a lot of security issues going around these days
by having HTPs security, you're much more likely
to rank better in the long run.
And even if your site is secure,
another thing you need to do
is make sure your site loads fast.
In the Ubersuggest report,
you can also click on the site audit report
in the left-hand navigation,
it'll tell you how fast your website loads
and if it loads slow, it'll tell you what you need
to do to fix it.
So then you're going to be often to the races,
have a blazing fast website
because that will help with your rankings as well.
Then there's schema markup,
there's a lot to do with structured data
which helps you rank higher
and I won't bore you to the details with schema markup
because we have worksheets and there's a lot of tools
which is even better than the worksheets
that help you add schema markup to your website.
If you use Google Structured Data Markup Helper,
you can just Google for it, put in your URL
and you can select where you want the skill markup.
Like are you event-based business,
movie-based business, articles,
what are the pages you want to add schema to?
It shows you your website.
You just select the element it's on there
that you want to mark up like this.
And you just select what you want to do like for name
or address or anything like that.
It gives you code, you copy and paste it,
pop out on your website, you can use a W3C market validation
to make sure you're not doing anything wrong there.
Check all of that to make sure it's clean
and then of course, the other thing
that you'll want to do is go to Google search console,
submit your site map
so that way Google can index your website correctly
and that'll help you with your rankings as well.
If you don't want certain pages index,
you can use a robot.TXT file.
You probably don't need this
but I just want to mention this just in case
you want to block Google
and people from seeing certain pages on your website.
And with your website, you want to just make sure
you have a good structure,
you're doing the internal linkings,
you're having multiple layers deep,
you're going really end up on categories
because that'll help you rank higher in the long run
and if you're not noticing that your rankings
are going up over time, if you give it three to six months,
just of course go to search console,
make sure you don't have any penalties,
look for any manual actions
if there's no issues detected, you're fine,
build some links, give us some more time
and you should do better over time.
Then there's also voice search,
there's tools out there like Jetson AI
that help make your website compatible
for voice search.
If you also use schema markup
and that's what I brought that up
because that can also help with voice search as well.
And it's all about micro moments,
you want to answer specific questions that people will have.
And according to OCNC over the next few years
over $40 billion roughly it could be a little bit off
but I know it's well into the billions like that.
It's roughly 40 billion from the last summer,
I looked at the number either 20 something billion
or 40 something billion, either way it's a large number
of purchases that are going to happen per year
through voice search.
And if you're trying to find more keywords
to go after through voice search,
you can type in keywords within two Uber Suggest
and it'll help you find those micro moments.
It'll give you ideas of what's working and what's not.
So last step for you go to Neilpatel.com/training,
click on Local SEO Unlocked, I want you to go to week two.
This is the second video lesson
and download all the worksheets including all the resources,
the tool list that we have for you.
If you enjoyed this video, you liked it,
share it, subscribe to the channel,
tell your friends about it.
Of course like the video
and if you just want us to do all your Local SEO for you,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
Thank you for your time.