Ranking local business website – am I doing it right?

[Smeak]

Hi all. I?m trying to rank few easy local keywords (50-100 searches, easy competition, domain 2 months old) and I?m not sure if I?m doing it good way. Here?s how Im doing it:
1. I bought 3 500 words articles and manually spinned them with TBS (oh god that was painful..) and got like 75% uniqueness.
2. I?m creating 1 web 2.0 page a day, I put welcome, about me and contact posts, then I wait one day and I post my seed article with link to money site. Then once a week some general relevant post. I?m going to make ~15 web 2.0s like that I think. I?m starting GSA Tier 2 project to them ? I tick articles, social bookmarks and networks, wiki and GSA Web 2.0s, around 15 links a day total for each web 2.0 miniblog
3. I?m posting 3-4 links a day directly to money site with GSA from Articles engine
4. I?m going to buy some facebook shares, google +?s and tweets from Fiverr
That would be it.. Well I know I might overthink the proccess a little bit because they are really easy keywords to rank.. But as I said it?s my first time in website SEO and I want to do it well.


I would really appreciate some tips which could point me in a good direction of this.. Thanks. : )

 

[HALKINHO]

Looking good but web2.0 not works for me in Local SEO... i tried in my country and my site deranked....

In google global i rank very good..

 

[john1444]

What do you mean by local business site? Is it local SEO?

What country are you trying to rank in?

John

 

[Techxan]

No, you are not doing it right.

 

[Rich77ard]

This will never work and furthermore what your doing will virtually guarantee that you'll never rank this site. This sounds like seo from 2009 - 2011 and it's utterly useless. I have sites ranked 1st for local terms with less than 10 links. It's very easy.

Step 1: Make sure it's the best site in your niche for that area. If you can see that your competitors have nicer sites in all aspects such as graphics & content etc, then fix the site. You'll always have an uphill battle if you don't do this first. I have many sites ranked in 1st with only 3 links because of this strategy. This is what's called long term real seo. Build your empire on rock, not sand. Tricks don't work anymore, if they do, it's temporary and the penalty will come sooner or later. Building the best site takes just as much time as all that stuff anyway so why bother.

Step 2: Find industry or locality relevant authoritative institutions or organisations such as the local chamber of commerce. Just get a single link from as many of these as you can, you'll probably only be able to find 1 such site, that's enough! Get a link from a licensing authority, for example, if it's a locksmith, get a link from the Master Locksmiths Association. And build a bunch of Quality citations too, even it there's no link in them.

Step 3: Here's an annoying answer for you... ready ... be patient. If you have the best site in the niche and you have links from the relevant organisations within your industry you will rank on the first page period.

Step 4: Ensure your onpage seo is absolutely flawless. I can rank sites for capital city keywords using this strategy with less than 15 links. This is the new seo. Potent onsite seo, amazing user experience, industry relevant authoritative links.

If one of my Plumbing sites that was ranking in 1st place had your strategy applied to it, I would say that you were doing negative seo on my site. If I did just 1 gsa blast as you described in the early stages of any of my sites I can guarantee you they wouldn't be ranking.

What does the above strategy accomplish. 1. Great user experience. 2. Long term maintenance free rankings. 3. Gives Google exactly what they want - perfect onsite seo - great UX - clean link profile. This may sound boring I know, but if you deviate from this strategy it'll be more work in the long run. Your strategy is only churn & burn and I'd never use that on a real business that needs to make money long term from their site. Hope this helps p.s. If you get the kind of links your talking about on a fresh domain then that domain is doomed. An old domain may be able to withstand such toxic links but fresh domains are very sensitive and those links will do massive damage.

 

[zombietechs]

i really have trouble believing in this last post. Can anyone else speak out on this topic? I have had a lot of success in the past and present using the methods that smeak has cited. What I've found to make the biggest difference, was facebook popularity and a backdoor indexing service for my gsa ser links. Most of my links are created for tier two sites and probably I should not have created most of my links for my main site (everybody says this is toxic) but for the longest time it's been ranking solid across 20 out of 100 terms. The concern is how to get the other 80 keywords pointing to me as #1.

 

[DannyZhang]

No, you are not doing it right.

Instead of saying that he's not doing right, why not tell him what he's not doing right. We all need a little help sometimes.

 

[Smeak]

Its business in UK. (not London)

This will never work and furthermore what your doing will virtually guarantee that you'll never rank this site. This sounds like seo from 2009 - 2011 and it's utterly useless. I have sites ranked 1st for local terms with less than 10 links. It's very easy.

Step 1: Make sure it's the best site in your niche for that area. If you can see that your competitors have nicer sites in all aspects such as graphics & content etc, then fix the site. You'll always have an uphill battle if you don't do this first. I have many sites ranked in 1st with only 3 links because of this strategy. This is what's called long term real seo. Build your empire on rock, not sand. Tricks don't work anymore, if they do, it's temporary and the penalty will come sooner or later. Building the best site takes just as much time as all that stuff anyway so why bother.

Step 2: Find industry or locality relevant authoritative institutions or organisations such as the local chamber of commerce. Just get a single link from as many of these as you can, you'll probably only be able to find 1 such site, that's enough! Get a link from a licensing authority, for example, if it's a locksmith, get a link from the Master Locksmiths Association. And build a bunch of Quality citations too, even it there's no link in them.

Step 3: Here's an annoying answer for you... ready ... be patient. If you have the best site in the niche and you have links from the relevant organisations within your industry you will rank on the first page period.

Step 4: Ensure your onpage seo is absolutely flawless. I can rank sites for capital city keywords using this strategy with less than 15 links. This is the new seo. Potent onsite seo, amazing user experience, industry relevant authoritative links.

If one of my Plumbing sites that was ranking in 1st place had your strategy applied to it, I would say that you were doing negative seo on my site. If I did just 1 gsa blast as you described in the early stages of any of my sites I can guarantee you they wouldn't be ranking.

What does the above strategy accomplish. 1. Great user experience. 2. Long term maintenance free rankings. 3. Gives Google exactly what they want - perfect onsite seo - great UX - clean link profile. This may sound boring I know, but if you deviate from this strategy it'll be more work in the long run. Your strategy is only churn & burn and I'd never use that on a real business that needs to make money long term from their site. Hope this helps p.s. If you get the kind of links your talking about on a fresh domain then that domain is doomed. An old domain may be able to withstand such toxic links but fresh domains are very sensitive and those links will do massive damage.

Thanks for you answer. I thought that if this strategy works for global seo it could work for local seo too. Hmm I try to make these links not as toxic.. I mean, I have readable and unique content and I'm posting it on relevant sites. I understand that I need strong site itself, but where do you suggest posting links besides authority sites in local niche?




Techxan

No, you are not doing it right.

 

[flipzseo]

i really have trouble believing in this last post. Can anyone else speak out on this topic? I have had a lot of success in the past and present using the methods that smeak has cited. What I've found to make the biggest difference, was facebook popularity and a backdoor indexing service for my gsa ser links. Most of my links are created for tier two sites and probably I should not have created most of my links for my main site (everybody says this is toxic) but for the longest time it's been ranking solid across 20 out of 100 terms. The concern is how to get the other 80 keywords pointing to me as #1.

Have you had a lot of success with ranking local sites? Because there's two different algos, one for global and one for local. With local, on-page, citations and reviews matter most.

 

[Laubster]

i really have trouble believing in this last post. Can anyone else speak out on this topic? I have had a lot of success in the past and present using the methods that smeak has cited. What I've found to make the biggest difference, was facebook popularity and a backdoor indexing service for my gsa ser links. Most of my links are created for tier two sites and probably I should not have created most of my links for my main site (everybody says this is toxic) but for the longest time it's been ranking solid across 20 out of 100 terms. The concern is how to get the other 80 keywords pointing to me as #1.

Spinning articles and GSA straight to the homepage? "Might" work if his niche has zero competition but it's just not a good strategy. Everything Rich...said + high quality PBN links is all you need.

 

[DannyZhang]

Spinning articles and GSA straight to the homepage? "Might" work if his niche has zero competition but it's just not a good strategy. Everything Rich...said + high quality PBN links is all you need.

Will GSA direct to site with contextual links with PR filters (>3) harm the site?

 

[BreaknBrix]

Hi all. I'm trying to rank few easy local keywords (50-100 searches, easy competition, domain 2 months old) and I'm not sure if I'm doing it good way. Here's how Im doing it:
1. I bought 3 500 words articles and manually spinned them with TBS (oh god that was painful..) and got like 75% uniqueness.
2. I'm creating 1 web 2.0 page a day, I put welcome, about me and contact posts, then I wait one day and I post my seed article with link to money site. Then once a week some general relevant post. I'm going to make ~15 web 2.0s like that I think. I'm starting GSA Tier 2 project to them - I tick articles, social bookmarks and networks, wiki and GSA Web 2.0s, around 15 links a day total for each web 2.0 miniblog
3. I'm posting 3-4 links a day directly to money site with GSA from Articles engine
4. I'm going to buy some facebook shares, google +'s and tweets from Fiverr
That would be it.. Well I know I might overthink the proccess a little bit because they are really easy keywords to rank.. But as I said it's my first time in website SEO and I want to do it well.


I would really appreciate some tips which could point me in a good direction of this.. Thanks. : )

Let me help you out since most of the money I've made has been from local lead gen sites. My income took a huge smash a few days ago but I can still give you some decent advice.

1) Spinning is OK. But not the way you are doing it. When I spin it takes me a full 40 hour week just to complete 1 spintax (no joke). I take 1 paragraph then rewrite it 5 times. Then I rewrite each sentence around 7-8 times. Then I go through manually spinning as many words and phrases as possible. And I repeat this 2 more times for 2 more paragraphs. I save each spintax for each paragraph in 3 separate .txt files. I make sure they are perfectly readable. And I will not post ANYTHING that does not register over 95% uniqueness. Finally, I write 30 HQ, manually written articles for all my primary keywords. Then I link my spun pages to those manually written pages. NOT to my home page. And I silo everything as neatly as possible.

People can debate this as much as they want. But if you just build *1* MASSIVE site, like 300+ pages big, you'll be AMAZED how much easier it is to crack the top 3. All my sites that were under 50 pages always got stuck on the top of page 2 or bottom of page 1. It was only my MASSIVE sites that cracked the top 3 and drove a lot of traffic.

2) Forget web 2.0s. I mean, this is somewhat relative to your competition. But I would never try to rank a local site with web2.0s. That's just me. And I definitely would stay away from GSA unless you're trying to rank some YT videos / facebook pages that drive traffic to your main $$$ site. But even when I do use GSA for that, I don't direct link my videos directly to my money site. Because most people call directly from the videos and I don't want to risk a penalty. So I force users to either call or copy and paste the link to find my site that way.

3) Again, you're relying wayyyy too much on GSA dude. You're slipping into the trap a lot of newbies slip into. GSA use to work much better a year ago. But these days it's becoming VERY difficult to crack page 1, nevermind the top 3 just with GSA. I'm not saying GSA doesn't have it's uses. What I'm saying is you are building web2.0 links that have NO trust, no rank, no RESPECT from Google. You can manually create 1000+ HQ web 2.0's, even for a not so competitive local keyword and still not crack page 1.

What DOES work is drip feeding PBN links. You don't need to invest a lot of money. Like $100-$200 worth of strong PBN links, drip fed over a couple months will get you farrr better results than what you're doing right now.

4) Socials are ok for increasing conversions on your money site. But your method overall .... I should say the FOUNDATION of your method is flawed. And if you continue the way you're going right now you're going to learn 1 way or another why people don't recommend it. Because it's extremely ineffective. In the next 2-3 months that you spend building these crappy GSA links and web 2.0, you'd be 10000xs better off just buying 10-15 HQ PBN links. TRUST ME ON THIS dude. I've been banking on local sites for a while now. Not so much recently because I was relying way too much on G local and this recent "Pigeon" update hurt me bad.

However, I still have sites ranking #1 on Yahoo and Bing. And in 2-3 months I expect to be where I was before making $6-$8k / month. And I'm going to reach that level because I know from experience what Google likes.

Google likes 3 things for ranking organically - Aged / expired domains + shit load of geotargeted content + strong, HQ PBN links.

The money you will spend on a good domain and good links will wind up SAVING YOU a lot of money and time in the long run. Same thing with making a big site. If I was you, I'd check your #1 competitor right now. Use "site:http://www.yourcompetitor.com" to check how many indexed pages they have.

Then make your site a minimum of >>> 60% the size of their site.
Also check the age of their domains. If you're trying to outrank an 8 year old, 200+ page site.... with a new domain, very few pages and shitty GSA links it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out this isn't going to work.

I've build over 20+ local sites. That may not seem like a lot but my smallest local site ever was 8 pages and my biggest was 424 pages.

I managed to blast that 8 page site with GSA to page 1 for 10 months before Google penalized it.
Another site that was 36 pages, I used much more restrictive campaigns, built a cleaner profile using nothing but GSA, it went up to page 2, danced for a few months and after this last update disappeared.

The ONLY sites that have stuck around long term and made me more than 90% of my $$$ was 4 sites. The smallest being around 75 pages the biggest being 424 pages.
The youngest site is 2 years old. They all used PBN links. NO GSA. They all are silo'd neatly. And early on I had a TON of top 3 rankings with these sites.

Then Google started plastering G local listings everywhere. That was when I stopped doing SEO and started hijacking Google maps. Which was a big mistake on my part cause even though I made a lot of $$$ this latest pigeon update took out most of my traffic.

These sites aren't "finished" or anything like that. None of them have any penalties. 1 site still ranks #1 on yahoo and bing and on the top of page 2 of G organically. Another site ranks in the top 3 of yahoo and bing. Then a lot of keywords dropped back to pages 2 & 3 because I stopped backlinking. So all I really have to do is get some good PBN links, and that should push them right back up into the top 3 of G.

My final point is. I've been doing this for 3 years and I still have >>A LOT<< left to learn. It's taken me this long just to realize how stupid it is to rely on any 1 avenue for traffic. Like first I relied 100% on organic rankings. After that I relied 100% on G local rankings. Now I'm realizing that a REAL, PROPER local site should ALWAYS be well diversified.

Meaning you do everything. Organic rankings. Ranking in maps. Rank tons of geotargeted YT videos. Rank tons of facebook pages using your geotargeted phrases. Rank in other local directories. Find other local authority sites and regularly post on them. Like I live in NJ so I do a lot of posting on nj.com. Try out bing and yahoo PPC (I hear they convert better than Google PPC). Never forget what reviews can do for your conversions. I never noticed a huge boost in conversions with facebook likes. But once I got up to 62 review in G local, 17 on yahoo, etc then put those reviews on my site, conversions literally doubled over night.

Don't go into this with the mindset "I'm just gonna target a few low competition keywords and do a few web 2.0's". Because I'll tell you what, even if you DID rank #1 the traffic you'd get would be a joke.

I use to do that back in the day. I'd rank for like 4-5 "easy" keywords and my sites would generate like 1 click / day per keyword.

So don't underestimate how much work it actually takes to succeed in local marketing. It is not easy. And it requires A LOT of work if you really wanna make a full time income.

-BB

 

[Laubster]

^ ^ ^ ^
Yeah, what he said. Seriously just close the thread down now.

 

[Techxan]

Instead of saying that he's not doing right, why not tell him what he's not doing right. We all need a little help sometimes.

Actually, I just answered his question, in full. He does not need a little help, he needs a LOT.

He is not doing ANYTHING right to SEO a local site.

If he had done ANY research into local SEO he would have run into things like "citations", "content marketing", "reviews", "schema". "on page optimization", "NAP, "press releases", "quality content", and so on.

Since explaining all this would take quite a long time, and I (among others) have posted on this subject in the "White Hat SEO" section, the "Offline Marketing" section, and the "Local SEO" sections of this fine forum and to be honest were kinda tired of repeating ourselves, I was feeling a little peevish that he did so little actual research before posting.

Even a cursory glance at this information would have indicated that you do not spin anything when it comes to local businesses, you don't use 500 word articles, you don't build web 2.0's (not like this anyway), you don't run links at a local business because for the most part local business sites get very few links. A steady stream of links to a local business site from crappy tier 1 sites is death, because it is obvious that an internet marketer is SEO ing the site. Real business don't do that shit.

And it sure is not gonna qualify you for the local algo.

I will and have always gone out of my way to help people, (and my responses are to say the least detailed, if not bloviated) when they actually ask a question.

He asked a question. I answered it.

 

[Flask]

4. I'm going to buy some facebook shares, google +'s and tweets from Fiverr

This won't boost your position, this will only make your site more "social" to site visitors.

 

[DannyZhang]

Actually, I just answered his question, in full. He does not need a little help, he needs a LOT.

He is not doing ANYTHING right to SEO a local site.

If he had done ANY research into local SEO he would have run into things like "citations", "content marketing", "reviews", "schema". "on page optimization", "NAP, "press releases", "quality content", and so on.

Since explaining all this would take quite a long time, and I (among others) have posted on this subject in the "White Hat SEO" section, the "Offline Marketing" section, and the "Local SEO" sections of this fine forum and to be honest were kinda tired of repeating ourselves, I was feeling a little peevish that he did so little actual research before posting.

Even a cursory glance at this information would have indicated that you do not spin anything when it comes to local businesses, you don't use 500 word articles, you don't build web 2.0's (not like this anyway), you don't run links at a local business because for the most part local business sites get very few links. A steady stream of links to a local business site from crappy tier 1 sites is death, because it is obvious that an internet marketer is SEO ing the site. Real business don't do that shit.

And it sure is not gonna qualify you for the local algo.

I will and have always gone out of my way to help people, (and my responses are to say the least detailed, if not bloviated) when they actually ask a question.

He asked a question. I answered it.

Thanks for clarifying and helping. Yea I get your point but just think back when you were starting out.

I think most of us just need someone to point us in the right direction. It's not that we do not want to do the research or take action, it's just we get caught up in doing the stuff everyone's doing. (which mostly end up being the wrong things)

And it really doesn't help to have someone more experienced say that we are doing something wrong without actually saying what's wrong. It's reasons like this why so many people tried and give up in this game.

Isn't this what the bhw community is about? Helping each other out?

 

[cgpa2.17]

This will never work and furthermore what your doing will virtually guarantee that you'll never rank this site. This sounds like seo from 2009 - 2011 and it's utterly useless. I have sites ranked 1st for local terms with less than 10 links. It's very easy.

Step 1: Make sure it's the best site in your niche for that area. If you can see that your competitors have nicer sites in all aspects such as graphics & content etc, then fix the site. You'll always have an uphill battle if you don't do this first. I have many sites ranked in 1st with only 3 links because of this strategy. This is what's called long term real seo. Build your empire on rock, not sand. Tricks don't work anymore, if they do, it's temporary and the penalty will come sooner or later. Building the best site takes just as much time as all that stuff anyway so why bother.

Step 2: Find industry or locality relevant authoritative institutions or organisations such as the local chamber of commerce. Just get a single link from as many of these as you can, you'll probably only be able to find 1 such site, that's enough! Get a link from a licensing authority, for example, if it's a locksmith, get a link from the Master Locksmiths Association. And build a bunch of Quality citations too, even it there's no link in them.

Step 3: Here's an annoying answer for you... ready ... be patient. If you have the best site in the niche and you have links from the relevant organisations within your industry you will rank on the first page period.

Step 4: Ensure your onpage seo is absolutely flawless. I can rank sites for capital city keywords using this strategy with less than 15 links. This is the new seo. Potent onsite seo, amazing user experience, industry relevant authoritative links.

If one of my Plumbing sites that was ranking in 1st place had your strategy applied to it, I would say that you were doing negative seo on my site. If I did just 1 gsa blast as you described in the early stages of any of my sites I can guarantee you they wouldn't be ranking.

What does the above strategy accomplish. 1. Great user experience. 2. Long term maintenance free rankings. 3. Gives Google exactly what they want - perfect onsite seo - great UX - clean link profile. This may sound boring I know, but if you deviate from this strategy it'll be more work in the long run. Your strategy is only churn & burn and I'd never use that on a real business that needs to make money long term from their site. Hope this helps p.s. If you get the kind of links your talking about on a fresh domain then that domain is doomed. An old domain may be able to withstand such toxic links but fresh domains are very sensitive and those links will do massive damage.

this is a very solid advice but I wonder how those seller in bhw marketplace will be replying this lol..

 

[anderson313]

1) Focus on giving the user a good experience. Nice, pretty site.

2) Unique, well written content. Not spun crap. If you spin stuff make sure it is REALLY spun. I have all my stuff like 95% unique...it is a pain to spin it that well but once done you can use it again and again.

3) Citations are important. Being listed in local directories that are niche relevant are good.

4) Quality links.

I used to be able to rank sites with GSA with pure spam in competitive niches quickly. Those days are now gone, and until they find another loophole (if ever). Your best bet is to take the long journey to where you have a solid foundation.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Both SEO and local SEO so if things change you don't drop into outer space.

Also BreaknBix has great advice above.

 

[BreaknBrix]

1 quick comment about spinning, since this tends to be a controversial topic.

If a client is paying you to rank their site, I would be more likely to advise against spinning. However, if you're building your own lead gen site, I think it's perfectly fine as long as you do it "properly".

The reason I say this is because I have a list of a little over 140, very old, local authority type sites that are LOADED with spun content.

Many of these sites I've been tracking since long before I even got into marketing (the 1 I'm gonna post I've been tracking since 2009).


I'm not gonna post the whole list but I'll post 1 example of what I consider "proper" spinning:


Reverse the following letters for this site - moc.dlomsseltopsyletulosba.www

Once on the home page. Scan down to one of their bottom pages (ie: "structural mold remediation"). Click that page and scan down to the bottom. You will see around 450 stuffed links, all spun pages.

Now I do NOT advise link stuffing like those idiots are doing. However, I've been tracking that site for 5 years now, and for as long as I've been checking they've been ranking in the top 3 of Google and dominating for their industry. I also know that roughly 9 months ago they got attacked by a pretty intense NEG SEO campaign and didn't drop 1 position since. Then I later read on the news that they were exposed on 2 different shows for scamming people.

There is another site I've been tracking that is very similar. Except they keep things much lower key (no link stuffing). I remember last year out of nowhere they started taking on thousands and thousands of links. When the previous few years before that they were only building like 2-4 links a / month. So I assume they were also NEG SEO'd.

The point is, I've been tracking enough of these types of sites for a long enough time to know that when they are done properly, they do not seem to ever get penalized. In fact, it seems that it makes them immune to NEG SEO attacks due to the mere size and age of their sites.

-BB

Disclaimer: I do not sell SEO in any shape or form and never have. All the sites I build I own 100%. But IF you are working for a client and use spun content, and they find out, that can obviously lead to some shit. And for that reason (not penalties) I recommend against it. However, I also want to add that for as long as I've been tracking these types of sites, I'm yet to see 1 suffer any penalties. It's only the sites that do poor spinning that seem to get penalized. The ones who do it "proper" it actually seems to shield their sites from updates and penalties. That may sound crazy but yes it's what I've noticed.

 

[srb888]

First just check the actual results in Google, for example. I think all those (local) keywords, if they are buyers KW at all, will be taken up for good... occupied by the yellowpages kind of internet advertising sites.

If you simply look at the (e.g.) Market Samurai suggestions and don't look into the actual results, you will miss the bigger story. Find out if your keywords, however strong or weak, are occupied by those big bullies of the internet. If they are weak, still see if those are marketing KWs and you feel you can rank them easily, see if they are really useful to you in the long run. Then look in the practical (doable) SEO (local) aspects of it.