Local search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of improving online search results for a business at a specific location. It is particularly important for small and mid-sized companies that operate in and serve the residents of a particular city or region.

Widely embraced by a broad spectrum of companies, local SEO has become an essential component of most modern digital marketing campaigns. Think of it as helping Google to help customers who want to find your services online.

6 Factors to Help Boost SEO Ranking

Landing at or near the top of relevant Google searches isn’t easy. Digital marketers have developed a wide range of complex strategies and processes to boost search rankings. But as Google and other search engines continually adjust their operations to improve user results, best local SEO practices must evolve in response.

With this in mind, here are six SEO ranking factors that business owners and marketers should prioritize in 2023.

1. Optimized Google Business Profile

In light of the extraordinary popularity of Google’s search engine, a good Google Business Profile is a great way to let people know about your business, what it does, where it is located, and how customers can reach it. While providing relevant information to customers, your Google Business Profile can aid in local SEO by boosting your Google search results. Although it is free of charge, you should invest a significant amount of time into setting up and maintaining your Google Business Profile. To better serve customers and enhance local SEO, consider customizing your profile with captivating photos, special consumer offers, and regularly posted updates.

2. Good Online Reviews

Although Google keeps many of its ranking factors and processes a secret, the company has publicly acknowledged that the prominence and quality of a local business’ online reviews can have a significant impact on its overall SEO results.  “Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking,” says the Google Business Profile Help Center. “More reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business’s local ranking.” In short, the reviews of your business that appear online exert a powerful influence on your website traffic and financial bottom line. The number, rate, and diversity of these reviews send powerful signals to the algorithms that ultimately determine your final search result ranking.

3. Consistent Citations

Citations for your company can appear on any number of online business listings or community/industry directories. In fact, any online reference to your company’s NAP (name, address, and phone number) data will function as a citation that not only informs consumers but guides Google and other search engines in their ranking operations. With a power that is similar to that of online reviews, the quantity and quality of these citations help search engines determine just how legitimate and trustworthy your company and its website really are. In addition to reaching out to a large number of reputable business listings and directories, wise business owners and SEO marketers will ensure that NAP data remains strictly consistent across all platforms.

4. On-page Signals

All aspects of your website design and on-page content should serve your local SEO efforts. This means including relevant keywords on your home page, landing page, and other key places. It also means prominently featuring your business’ home city and general region of activity. You will also want to include keywords and geographical information in the website page and section titles as well as readable URL addresses. All of these actions will help boost your company’s search result rankings with leading online search engines such as Google. Be aware, however, that keywords and location information must be incorporated naturally and organically into the titles and text of website content. If Google detects that you are overstuffing your website with on-page signals, it can actually result in worse search result rankings.

5. High-Quality Local Content

Google penalizes websites for inorganic keyword stuffing because it identifies companies that are trying to take SEO shortcuts at the expense of the average web user and consumer. Ideally, your company’s relevant keywords and location information should be integrated into high-quality local content that informs, entertains, and otherwise engages a specific target audience. Make no mistake: it can be quite a chore to create and continually optimize website content with SEO firmly in mind. However, high-quality local website content will not only improve your search engine results but better serve existing and potential customers alike.

6. Superior Backlink Quality

Every embedded link to your website that appears on another website is a “backlink.” All of the backlinks to every page of your website constitute your “backlink profile.” Google and other search engines take a very close look at your backlink profile when determining your placement among relevant user search results. When it comes to backlinks, quality is far more important than quality. Wise business owners and digital marketers will do all that they can to establish backlink connections to reputable and authoritative websites and organizations. Links to untrustworthy or unpopular sites may significantly damage your SEO efforts.

Ask the Experts

Covering a wide variety of highly technical areas and processes, the launch of a local SEO campaign can be daunting to say the very least. Not all strategies work equally well for all businesses in all geographic locations across all market sectors and industries.

A specialized marketing agency based in Cleveland, Ohio, Marketing Done Right provides expert SEO services, that can help you identify your needs and create a customized campaign that is right for you. In addition to offering considerable SEO expertise, we can help you with everything from website creation and development to social media advertising, all with a specific focus on local businesses.

In Conclusion

Various factors, including those above, will continue to impact local SEO throughout 2023 and well into the future. Stay up to date with these changes and address other digital marketing issues by contacting us today.

In today’s internet-driven consumer marketplace, digital marketing with a focus on search engine optimization is an absolute must. If you aren’t leveraging the power of today’s top online marketing tools to increase traffic to your website and boost your bottom line, you can be sure that your competitors are!

While these tools are best used by skilled digital marketing professionals as part of a larger, multifaceted yet unified branding and consumer outreach campaign, start-ups and small businesses can now mount their own digital marketing efforts with the help of some user-friendly technology.

Like all tools, digital marketing tools are only as useful as the people who wield them. But any craftsperson can tell you that the right tool for the job can make all the difference in the world!

With this in mind, you owe it to yourself and your business to take a look at the best digital marketing tools for 2023.

Best Digital Marketing Tools for Market Research

The art and science of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the best way to lead only the most motivated consumers directly to your company website. It does this by ensuring that your website appears at the top of results for relevant consumer searches on Google and other online search engines.

To reach the right potential customers at just the right time, today’s business leaders and SEO professionals can benefit from key market research tools such as…

1. Ahrefs– Billing itself as an “all-in-one SEO toolset,” Ahrefs allows users to adjust their website for SEO, analyze the SEO efforts of their competitors, identify the keywords their target consumers are using in online searchers, track their search engine ranking progress, and learn from the top SEO performers in their industry.

2. Semrush – Another market research tool with comprehensive SEO capabilities, Semrush determines best keyword practices while tracking the keyword strategies of your competition. Designed for businesses of all sizes, it can also perform SEO audits of your company blog, build a valuable backlink portfolio, and provide real-time website performance analytics.

3. KWFinder – While tools like Ahrefs and Semrush attempt to do it all in terms of SEO market research, KWFinder focuses on keywords and keywords alone. Marketed as “the only keyword tool in the universe you will ever need,” KWFinder helps users identify their company’s optimal “long-tail” keywords – “those that hit the sweet spot of high search volume and low competition.”

4. Ubersuggest – Like KWFinder, this tool focuses on doing just one thing and doing it well. Other tools may look at the SEO of your competitors, but Ubersuggest gives you the opportunity to completely reverse engineer every detail of a competitor’s SEO campaign, learning from its successes as well as its failures. Ubersuggest also performs competitor research to compare and shape social media and general content marketing strategy.

5. AnswerThePublic – Drawing upon autocomplete data from Google and other leading search engines, AnswerThePublic identifies each question and phrase that people enter when making searches relevant to your company using specific primary keywords. In short, it allows you to get the very most out of your keywords by responding to consumers with the exact keyword-related content they seek.

Best Digital Marketing Tools for Content Advertising

Even the most intricately designed SEO campaign is bound to fail without careful attention to content. From website development to social media advertising, all elements of an effective online marketing campaign must stress quality content creation and placement above and beyond everything else.

Fortunately, today’s business owners and digital marketers don’t need to face the never-ending challenge of quality content creation alone. Here are just five of the best digital marketing tools for 2023 to help you get the very most out of your advertising content:

1. Canva – From brainstorming and design to publishing and review, this tool comes complete with thousands of ready-made templates, user-friendly drag-and-drop editing capabilities, and a premium content library with more than a million photos, graphics, and video/audio components.

2. Illustrator or Photoshop– Adobe has two visual design programs that are great for different reasons. Although it is a bit of an oversimplification, Illustrator is geared toward experienced graphic designers, while Photoshop is great for anyone who wants to edit a photograph or another image. Both tools operate on a wide range of digital devices and are available to try free of charge.

3. Facebook – When it comes to reaching out to a broad spectrum of consumers, it’s tough to beat Facebook in terms of both sheer outreach and targeted messaging. As Facebook puts it, the platform’s “ad formats and Pages are designed to capture attention and prompt action.”

4. Instagram – If your marketing outreach particularly lends itself to vibrant or detailed imagery, Instagram is an exceptional place to purchase advertising or engage in organic social media marketing processes. After catching their attention with a well-placed photo, you can lead prospective customers directly to your eCommerce site.

5. Google Business Profile – Extremely valuable and free of charge, a sufficiently detailed Business Profile on Google can bring countless consumers to your company website. It’s a great way to let Google users know what you do, where you are, and how people can reach out to you. Make your Google Business Profile stand out by personalizing it with compelling photos, updated posts, special offers, and other remarkable features.

Best Digital Marketing Tools for Performance Monitoring

Perfect digital marketing campaigns don’t happen overnight and generally require constant refinement. This makes performance monitoring essential to online marketing success. The two following platforms are great ways to determine just how well your digital marketing campaign is doing.

1. Google Analytics – Digital marketing and sales authority Neal Schaffer praised this tool for offering an unvarnished, “real world” look at online content performance, focusing on everything from keyword use to paid ad placement. Even better, Google Analytics is free to use.

2. Google Search Console – Beyond Google Analytics, Neal Schaffer called Google Search Console “one of the best free SEO tools out there.” This platform not only allows you to monitor and address website performance problems but shows you just how visitors (and the Google algorithm) see your site.

Consult with Digital Marketing Experts

Due to its complex and technical nature, SEO-driven digital marketing demands an expert touch. For more information, contact the leading digital marketing experts at Cleveland, Ohio’s Marketing Done Right today.

Every good backlink profile begins with a single backlink. Simply defined, a backlink is an embedded link to your website that appears somewhere on another website. Conversely, if a link to another website appears on yours, you have provided a backlink for someone else.

Backlinking does far more than just offer easy access to offsite information for website visitors. Ahrefs have identified referral traffic, greater search engine discovery, and higher search engine rankings as the three biggest benefits of backlinks.

Driving traffic to your website is an essential component of online marketing outreach. When people click a link to your website to get more information, you immediately gain a new website visitor who shares a common interest!

The other two major benefits of building a portfolio of backlinks have to do with search engine optimization (SEO). SEO efforts are centered around improving connections with motivated consumers through popular online search engines such as Google. A significant number of key backlinks can both help search engines discover a new website and cause them to place a familiar website higher in results rankings.

Although it may seem quite simple to boost SEO through backlinking, there is an intricate art and science to the process. It may be easy to randomly place large numbers of anchor texts on arbitrary websites in an attempt to increase the number of backlinks to your own website. However, quality is far more important than quantity when it comes to building your backlink profile.

What Is a Backlink Profile?

Your backlink profile is more than just an internet-wide list of all the anchor links to your website. It also involves an assessment of your backlinks’ ability to drive referral traffic and improve search engine results. Because a backlink from an irrefutable, untrustworthy, or unknown website can actually hurt your referral and SEO efforts, it is crucial to approach the entire backlinking process with careful thought and strategic planning.

Building a Strong Backlink Profile

Due to its innate complexity, the link building process is best conducted by an experienced digital marketing professional. However, all quality backlink profiles share a few essential qualities in common.

Backlinks

As previously mentioned, all effective backlink profiles begin with a single high-quality backlink. You have to start somewhere, and even the longest of journeys starts with a single step!

Link Attributes

Digital marketing experts divide website anchor links into two general categories (Dofollow and Nofollow) that are determined by how the ranking algorithms of Google and other leading search engines treat each link.

In short, a Dofollow link passes page ranking signals to search engines, while a Nofollow link doesn’t. As we will discuss in the “Find Balance” section below, search engines keep tabs on both types of links, making them equally essential for good SEO.

Referring Domains

Referring domains are the various websites that contain backlinks to your website. As we discussed before, the quality of your referring domains reflects directly upon the quality of your website in the estimation of search engines and consumers alike.

Anchor Text Distribution

Each anchor text that backlinks to your website sends identifying information about that link to search engines. This means that search engines can keep track of anchor text categories to see if a particular backlink profile is designed to artificially boost rankings through “spammy” practices.

For example, search engines look for relatively even anchor text distribution across a broad range of categories. If the vast majority of a website’s links have a precisely matching anchor text, it will raise a red flag that may negatively impact SEO.

H3: Relevancy

We have already discussed the benefits of backlinking to websites that are respected authorities in their respective fields of influence. But all the respect and authority in the world make little difference if their fields of influence differ from yours.

This is the underlying idea behind relevancy. Backlinks to your website must fall within its primary area of focus. For example, a real estate website would gain little from a backlink on a blog that is dedicated to reviewing new soft drinks.

Spam Score and Trust Flow

A lack of relevancy is just one of many issues that can turn a healthy backlink into a toxic one. Although neither spam score nor trust flow is an official backlink metric of top search engines such as Google, they are proven criteria when it comes to assessing the overall quality of a specific website.

Determined by calculating the percentage of websites with features that are similar to the website under scrutiny, the spam score estimates the likelihood that a particular backlink comes from a low-value spam website. Low spam scores come in at  30 percent or less, while high spam scores are generally over 60 percent.

Trust flow measured the overall credibility of a website based on the credibility of its backlinks. This key SEO and referral metric is determined by tabulating the number of clicks that a specific page receives from an established set of trusted and relevant sites.

Find Balance

We have discussed the fact that search engines look for an even divide among relevant categories when it comes to anchor text distribution. This principle of balance also applies to many of the issues that govern effective backlink profile building.

“For example,” says the industry authority Backlinked, “if all your backlinks come from one site, you have also convinced only one webmaster of your site. Therefore, regardless of their absolute number, these backlinks are not worth much.”

A similar balance should exist between Dofollow and Nofollow links. If Dofollow links dramatically outnumber Nofollow links for a given site, this serves as a signal of unnatural and inorganic backlink practices and will negatively affect search engine rankings.

Let Marketing Done Right Help You!

Marketing Done Right offers multidisciplinary digital outreach services that include all aspects of backlinking and general SEO. Our team of experts is adept at using the latest in industry advancements to achieve goals that are specific to your company.

In Conclusion

A leading digital marketing agency can assist you with all facets of backlink profile building. To learn more about the power of the backlink and link building best practices, contact a skilled and knowledgeable representative of Cleveland, Ohio’s Marketing Done Right today.