Local SEO Practice

I am practicing some local SEO, and so I am trying some things on business websites that I do not own. Since I have no access to the onPage SEO of these websites, I was wondering if I should bother trying to rank for keywords that do not appear on the page I am trying to rank locally? Is it even worth it? For example, say I am practicing on a business called "Mario's Pizza". I see that the keyword "Pizza Place New York" is a big keyword, but the keywords "Pizza Place" or "Pizza Place New York", or anything similar do not appear on Mario's Pizza website.

My other question is about citations. I hear some people saying that citations need to be consistent. The more consistent they are the better. My question, does a phone number, for example, in a citation really have to be formatted the exact same in every single citation? I mean, Google is smart enough to tell that (xxx) xxx-xxxx and (xxx)xxx.xxxx are both the same phone numbers. Would it be a waste of time to make sure that all of the citations are formatted in exactly the same way? I can see that in some instances it would be better to be consistent, but phone numbers should be simple enough for Google to figure out.

Having the keyword mentioned in the page gives more relevancy and weightage for the website. But, you can target the relevant keywords with quality links. Also, citation formatting is not that much important in my idea. But, when you are using for real business, having them consistent will help you in long run.

This is something I am really interested in.

OP, what is your strategy with the local SEO? ( considering that the site is not in English )


About citation formatting, what I know is that is not that much important. Just my 2 cents.

here is method and practice. your NAP should match on all citations and google listing. 2nd niche related citations. kml map submission, real reviews

So if I am correct you are experimenting with other peoples websites to see if your methods work? If I was you I would
experiment on your own test websites that way you are not affecting others and can get full data including on page SEO.

MadStacks, the only problem is I do not own a business, so I don't think it will be easy for me to listed in Google places without a physical address.

freelanceronline, are reviews actually an important part of SEO or is that still speculation?

sirmattheww, I am still a newb with this stuff so I don't really have a strategy. I simply plan on finding businesses ranked on the second page of a Google maps search around my area, and then analyzing the pages that appear on the first page and try to get some of their backlinks to see if that will be enough to bump up to the first page.

I would love to be able to control the onpage SEO but I might not be able to do that until I get permission from webmasters, But I don't want to sell my services to people if I don't really know what I am doing yet. Maybe I can offer them for free just for practice though.

Every Page that gets indexed with content to your site - or links to your site - whether follow or no follow has some value.

It's like a reputation score sort of thing that the more you have the better --- the problem is that if you have too many of one thing - then that starts to raise red flags and can lead to penalties etc..... if you build links too quickly that tends to be bad as well - newer sites need more care.

On-Page work is important no doubt - as it gives Google clues plus your site gets rated for user experience as well.

I think you just need to keep the big picture in mind - and what I mean by that is you want a website to rank well for years - and not just force it to the top for a few weeks.

You are making a few mistakes right off the bat here.

The two most important things for local SEO is consistent citations, and on page SEO.

Just building links to the business will get it a penalty. You are potentially destroying someone's livelihood, so stop.

Find a small business and build them a website, and do SEO on it. Find someone with a hobby, and do the same. Build a church website, or a ball team, or something but quit screwing with the food on the table of people who have done nothing to you.

The onpage seo is critical because if the search engines don't know what you webpage is exactly about, they cannot possibly send you exactly the customer you want. They will send you the perfect customer for whatever they think the website is about. If you screw that up, as a local business, you just shot yourself in the foot.

Citations are next in importance because it is the one thing you do that tells Goofle you are trying for the local algorithm.

The local algorithm evens the playing board for local businesses who target local keywords against nationals. This means someone in Houston who does payday loans can outrank the number one site in the nation, if the search come from Houston. The algo slants the board in the local businesses' favor.

Because citations are many times hand approved and verified, and because they are tied to an address and phone number, most internet marketers can't use them.

The more of these verified citations that a website has, the more confidence Google has that it is in fact a local business, rather than an IM lead generation website.

For the record, to a computer (xxx) xxx-xxxx, (xxx) xxx xxxx, and xxx-xxx-xxxx, are all three different sets of datapoints.

To a human, they are all phone number formats, to a computer they are mismarches.

This is why it matters. The citation is going to be crawled by a computer. This computer will look for certain information, we will call datapoints. The goal is for the datapoints to match as much as possible.

So the crawler hits your citation, and it records the information. The next citation it finds, it will match what it already has and decide on how much confidence it has that this is the same business, or a different one.

Now in one case the crawler finds the rest of the citations, and all of the information it finds is the same, same phone, same address, same hours, same pictures uploaded to the cation sources, same everything.

In this case, google has high confidence that this is in fact only one business.

BUt in another set of ctations, Google sees different information depending on where it looks for the business info. On one one site, the description says commercial floor services, on another it says carpet cleaning, on another it says tile and grout cleaning. The phone number is 281 - br549 in one place, and 281br549 in another, and (281) BR-549 in others.

Google looks at all this different information, and does not have the same confidence as it does when everything is a match. This probably is a local business, but there are some mismatches in the datapoints, so confidence is lowered.

And that is just three things that you did not know about.

The biggest lie out there is that anybody can do seo. You are not ready, and you won't be until you rank a few sites.