Pod S9 EP 5 A Guide to Mastering Local SEO with Wordpress & Other Websites
===
[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm Pip from C more Digital Media. You're listening to Know How Marketing Lab podcast. This podcast brings together different experts in marketing from our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks Marketing Mixer. Each week we get on here and we talk about something, search marketing, like Google ads or SEO, social media marketing from Facebook to TikTok or website marketing.
If you're a marketer, aspiring marketer, a business owner or entrepreneur, this podcast for you, we're going to share the best SEO, search, social. And website strategies, we share tips and hacks, Google ad strategies, what's going on in the current markets. Each week we discuss something exciting and awesome in marketing.
[00:00:46] Pip: Cuz we're there now so good day We thought we'd try to get maybe an outtake or two and start a minute early Today we are talking about a guide. Oh, [00:01:00] we're talking Today we're talking about local SEO and WordPress and other websites, Greg.
[00:01:08] Greg: Yes. I always try to drive things towards WordPress just because WordPress is my bread and butter.
[00:01:16] Greg: So yeah, the topic is more on local SEO and we'll, I'll get a couple of things. In on WordPress and plugins that you can use and things that you could do within a WordPress site. But yeah, it's more local SEO for any site, just the things that you should be doing for local SEO.
[00:01:36] Pip: We're going to talk
[00:01:38] Greg: more.
[00:01:38] Greg: More your expertise than my expertise, so maybe I'll learn something.
[00:01:43] Pip: But I'm gonna I'm gonna convince Phelan, I have to show you something awesome. Phelan, can you do me a huge favor? Can you get that cup from Ian? Cause I haven't been here since January. And we, I got sent a little gift from a [00:02:00] graphic designer we love working with.
[00:02:02] Pip: Oh yeah? And yeah, she does. Yeah. She's cool. She's super cool. She's a young woman. And when I first met her, she messaged me and she said I think you'd be really nice to work with she was just so sweet anyway. So she redid the fish last year. It's more, I
[00:02:20] Greg: noticed it was different.
[00:02:21] Pip: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:02:23] Pip: But I wanted to heat it up. I wanted to drink my coffee in it. Ha! I don't know. I got Fail it.
[00:02:29] Greg: Is that failing?
[00:02:30] Pip: Yeah. That's Seymour Digital Media backwards.
[00:02:36] Greg: Your fish kind of looks a little crazy, actually.
[00:02:38] Pip: Yeah, I dig him! That's Bubbles! Or Frank. Maybe Frank. And Phelan, did you share in the Facebook group?
[00:02:45] Pip: Oh yeah, so we're here, Greg. We're in it to win it now.
[00:02:48] Greg: Alright. I want to show you something
[00:02:50] Pip: quickly though.
[00:02:51] Greg: We better get on topic,
[00:02:52] Pip: oh, wait. Oh, shoot. I didn't put you in there. Damn it. Nevermind. I have all these setups, [00:03:00] but I had to add you, before we started. So yeah, let's get into it.
[00:03:03] Pip: So we're going to talk about dominating search results to attract new customers in your area.
[00:03:09] Greg: Yeah. I do have a loose outline. No. Things that we can go over. I don't know if you want to drive since local SEO is your bread and butter, or if you want me to
[00:03:20] Pip: driving, do you know, I got told I was funny this week and I loved you are funny.
[00:03:26] Pip: Thank you. I do try. It's awkward, funny, but it's funny. So yeah, okay. We got, we have a stellar list of, I'm going to run through the top things we're going to talk about, and then we're going to go talk about them, which is, we're going to talk about how to optimize your website for local search rankings key plugins, that's you, Greg and then strategies for managing local listings and reviews, tips for creating location specific Pages and then Chrome extensions, which I love.
[00:03:54] Pip: I love my little Chrome extensions that help me do better.
[00:03:58] Greg: You are a huge Chrome [00:04:00] extension fan.
[00:04:00] Pip: I, they may, I found a new Chrome extension for research where you can actually add discussions. So all the. Forums come up, how you have like news and blah, blah, video and shopping.
[00:04:14] Pip: This one has discussion. And so it's got all the forums. So it's pretty neat. Oh, but that's just for keyword research and strategies,
[00:04:22] Greg: but what was your first item there?
[00:04:26] Pip: Okay. How to optimize your website for local search rankings.
[00:04:32] Pip: Yes. Yes. Okay. So there, there's a few things and you see them on a lot of websites. I think first is adding the Google maps onto your pages that really can help. Because that gives a signal to Google, Hey, you're in this location. So with local SEO, right? There's. There's one thing that you can't control at all, but everything else you can try to, win with, but you can't control [00:05:00] proximity to a location.
[00:05:02] Pip: But if you do use the Google maps and your websites more likely to show up. So there's cause in local search, there's the map pack and that's all local search, but that's really based on Google business profile more so than underneath the map pack the regular results. Yeah. they're all local businesses too, right?
[00:05:21] Pip: Do you mainly Greg, do you, when you go to find something local, do you just end up using the map pack or do you end up scrolling down and trying to pick a website?
[00:05:32] Greg: It really depends on what I'm searching for. And obviously if I'm searching and I know I'm searching for something local, I won't scroll down the organic results looking for for that result.
[00:05:46] Greg: I will go directly to the maps and if the first three that it shows me are not things that I'm, and I want to see more options, I will scroll through, click through into the map [00:06:00] pack and go through more businesses. In there. And I was under the assumption that everything on Google maps is driven from the, from your Google business profile
[00:06:15] Pip: in the maps.
[00:06:16] Pip: Yes. But, and that includes so that's Google business profile. And that's going to be the pages on your website, right? So it is an interesting challenge to try to low, try target local markets because you also want to target the whole market, in that. So if I target a website page for Vancouver islands.
[00:06:39] Pip: Like my homepage for Vancouver Island. I'm not targeting for Victoria. And Victoria is the biggest city on the island. Things like that. So you want to use what they are called geographical keywords or geo targeted keywords, right? That is a huge way to optimize on your website. So you got to plan out what you want.
[00:06:56] Pip: That's why people have locations pages on their [00:07:00] sites, but they can also have doorway pages, which are the exact same as location pages. And it's when your location page is just a doorway page and every location page is the exact same. And then that's bad, right? Cause each page needs to be specific to their area.
[00:07:18] Greg: Yeah. And for the fact that Google will think the content is the same on all those pages and either not rank you well anymore. Or. Negatively impact your organic results because you're basically spamming at that point, is putting on all the same content on different pages. Yeah. Just leading to contact, Vancouver or Burny or whatever location we.
[00:07:51] Greg: Yeah.
[00:07:51] Pip: Yeah.
[00:07:55] Greg: An interesting thing the other day, which I, because I don't do a lot of [00:08:00] location pages for clients. But I'm, I've been considering starting to do that a little bit more. And I did see feel like there's. A good opportunity there to use the use of AI chat GPT or whatever your preferred AI tool is to substantially change your location page enough that it will look different in Google's eyes.
[00:08:32] Greg: So if you create your one location page with whatever that location is. And with whatever write up, then you can use your AI tool to be like, okay, this is my location. Content. I want to cater this to X location. And it could probably spit out quite good information that is more geared or directed to that location while keeping [00:09:00] the theme of what you're talking about.
[00:09:02] Greg: For your business similar. And then those two pages are different enough in Google's eyes that they're not the same. You're talking about the same thing, but it's worded differently and it's using the different location. Do you use Yeah, and different photos. Yeah, do you use it for that? Will you use it for that as well?
[00:09:23] Pip: Yeah, I actually I just, I'm looking at some new AI tools, not that I want to spend money, but because you can do the assistant now. We can't do the locate what's it called? It's like your assistant, but I don't think we as Canadians get it yet with the chat GPT or you have to pay for the $200 one.
[00:09:43] Pip: So there's another one I'm checking out, what's it called? And it's called Convergence Do ai. . And I am checking it out 'cause it does research for you. So that's what I would use over chat GBT, but I might use both to check it out and [00:10:00] then. And then of course edit for the human element. You must edit for the human element.
[00:10:06] Pip: And yeah, that's how I would probably do location pages to when you're targeting location pages, you maybe want pictures of like things that people know for those areas. Like for instance, I work with a tree felling company. And so if they do Victoria, I might want to get a picture of Beacon Hill Park or some other city park that people would know, or have a picture of the parliament buildings, or, where in Langford, I might have a picture of a tree park somewhere that I don't know the name of.
[00:10:38] Pip: That's how I would do it. And then make sure I'd name my images properly and alt tags. To expand a little bit more on location pages on your site, how do you typically suggest you put those pages within the site? Do they all get listed like in the footer? How do you go about doing that?
[00:10:59] Greg: [00:11:00] Having putting giving access to those pages on a site, or do you not put them in the menus at all?
[00:11:06] Pip: Interesting. I do. So because you only want a one click, so we'll put them on the menu. But what I like to do is have a one locations page with all the different locations, and then they'll click through to the.
[00:11:21] Pip: other locations, right? So if I have a Vancouver Island locations, Vancouver Island, and I have Sukh and oh Carver and Victoria and all the different ones. And those will go to their pages. And then in the footer, I will have all the locations listed out because As a human, when I am looking for a business and I go onto their site, if I see all their locations at the bottom, I can be like, Oh, okay, what's my look for my location?
[00:11:45] Pip: And then you can do a custom lists and Google analytics, to grab all those people. And over time you'll be able to remarket to them. Which, how many of us buy on the first round of going to a website? Yeah,
[00:11:58] Greg: not [00:12:00] many of us. And the
[00:12:01] Pip: other thing, cool thing I would really do is I would take my locations pages and I would, if if I'm using, so in Google business profile, when you use a service area, you don't get products, but if you're not using a service area and you actually have have your business there then you get products, which is just an image.
[00:12:22] Pip: Under a category and some text, but you can make it look really great. And I would do locations and under locations, I would have a picture of each location, and then I would attach that to the page and I consider that like a backlinking strategy because Google's on not on page SEO, it's off page.
[00:12:39] Pip: Yeah. Ooh, that takes us into to one of our, one of our menu items, which was strategies for managing listings. But yeah, so yeah locations pages also It's probably a good idea to attach to each other's location pages. Say, oh, I didn't find what you're looking for Maybe you're looking for what's in Sooke and so [00:13:00] attach your like Oak Harbor page or Oak Bay page to the Sooke page or whatever I think I'm getting all the light. Hold on.
[00:13:12] Pip: Sunny when I came back after Christmas from visiting my family, so sunny in Toronto and it is so not sunny here. Most of the time it was like bleak for two weeks, but I love the bleak. So she's like, why is it sunny? Okay. For optimizing your WordPress site for local search, we have put the maps in and then we start talking about location pages.
[00:13:40] Pip: We also want to talk about what are people looking for if they're looking for a local business in their area. One of the most important things are your hours of operation, right? So the, so wherever you want to put those, they're usually on the contact page or on the bottom of a website. I think that's super important.
[00:13:57] Pip: And the floor. Just to [00:14:00] go over, I know this is website, but any listing for your business, the importance of having your business information accurate and accurate. The same on each of them, like the same name, the
[00:14:15] Pip: same format
[00:14:17] Greg: and everything, like the same email, the same, like it's important to have it consistent everywhere.
[00:14:26] Pip: It is. And I do struggle with that. I was probably messed my own business up by I was a little pissy about, not showing up for Victoria for SEO and stuff. So I, my, my business name is now Seymour Digital Media Marketing Agency. Vancouver Island, Victoria,
[00:14:45] Pip: well on Google business profile. Yeah.
[00:14:48] Greg: Okay.
[00:14:48] Pip: Why not try something? Cause you can jet right up. And I should be competing with those Victoria businesses were that awesome, but maybe I should just create a Victoria page first. [00:15:00] So yeah, I want to help the world.
[00:15:02] Pip: I'm going to have a lot of pages. I saw a website actually from these people in Markham that was an SEO that took some business from me. And so of course I was like, huh. And they did like mass locations across Canada pages. And I don't know if I guess they were trying to grow and expand.
[00:15:18] Pip: I haven't seen them around, so who knows if that worked. Is one marketing agency just like every other? No. So you definitely want to be particular. Okay. Like Greg, let's talk about the plugins and what plugins do you recommend for local? Yeah.
[00:15:35] Greg: I mean for SEO in general you're going to have your Yoast and you're going to have your RankMath the two most popular ones.
[00:15:43] Greg: But each of them do have local SEO specific items. So obviously you're going to want to make sure you fill that stuff out. And other than that, there's, I don't think there's any specific [00:16:00] local SEO plugins. I think it's more like techniques and what you're doing within that SEO plugin or what you're doing on your site.
[00:16:11] Greg: For all of the things that you need to hit to be best optimized for local SEO is really the, what you're looking for.
[00:16:20] Pip: Yeah. And there's a lot of things like you can, if you typed in local SEO plugins on Google, you'll get like local by Yoast, right? Simple schema. That's another thing you should do for your local business, but Yoast, yeah, Yoast has the Local element.
[00:16:34] Pip: If you pay for the Yoast plugin it looks like wordpress. org rank ranks of Savant is local SEO tool, but all these tools do is things that you will help you do things that you should be doing on your website. And so they'll, I think Yoast we've, I've used Yoast for local SEO and it's good.
[00:16:54] Pip: You want to do your local SEO schema. That would be huge for the website. And then the [00:17:00] local pages, right? And then there's, so if we move over into the, like listings, which you were saying, yes, they're supposed to be the same everywhere. And it's true. You should have your site on listing sites for the type of business you're in.
[00:17:17] Pip: So if you're a lawyer, you should be in on the lawyer sites, right? The listicle sites. So you look for listicles or citation sites, right? And you can just buy them outright at like bright local or word stream. Or you can manually go and do it. We were talking about this yesterday. And Yandex, is it Yandex?
[00:17:37] Pip: You can do there's aggregation sites that'll collect your info and spread it around. And that tells the machines like, Oh, this is a business and this is the same business and blah, blah, blah. And that helps. It's
[00:17:49] Greg: a, it's something that is hard to maintain. Like I have a business that just.
[00:17:56] Greg: Got rid of their location. They're only going remote [00:18:00] for for now. And but forever they've been at the same place. Their business has been listed all over the internet. This is their name and this is their location. And now it's that's out there everywhere, all over the place.
[00:18:16] Greg: And like, how do you maintain that? Often, a lot of these places grab the information and just put it on their site so you don't have control over it. So if you come across a site that has wrong information, it's not like you even listed it yourself and have a login to go in and change it.
[00:18:35] Greg: You have to look to see if there's someone you can contact and be like, Hey, I'm in business. I don't, I'm, my location's changed it. And if you have to, if you've been in business as long as these people have been in business, you're everywhere.
[00:18:49] Pip: Yeah we have our first location still on, on the interweb, which was in Vancouver, which is really interesting because I can, yes, exact problem.
[00:18:59] Pip: [00:19:00] When we used bright local, we would download the list and the login information and give it to our clients. So if they ever wanted to change it, so you just have to keep good records, which is near impossible. Yeah. But then, like I said, there's also sites that just find your location. Information and they're like, I want to start a, some type of website that tells it says where people are and they just put it on themselves.
[00:19:25] Greg: And you don't have access, like you didn't create it. So it's those ones that are more frustrating almost and be like, why are you listening to my business? I didn't ask for that. I have no ability to change it. You suck.
[00:19:41] Pip: Yeah. You've ruined my day. This took half a day to try to figure out.
[00:19:46] Pip: It is true. It is a definite challenge. And I would say if you're looking to see where you want to show up for local stuff, put your main keyword in Google and their geo targeted location keyword. So like I would do [00:20:00] digital marketing, Victoria, or I'd put my business name and then Victoria and see what comes up in the search results to know where you want to optimize, what you need to be having the funniest. Oh, go on.
[00:20:11] Greg: I wanted to ask you. If you like or do this with your clients using the keywords with near me or those types of phrases, that was a huge thing I feel for a period of time. I'm seeing it maybe a little bit less of people saying, you have to put the near me on there because.
[00:20:37] Greg: Typically if you want that on there, you've got to put that phrase on your site, right? And How do you put that on your website where it actually sounds normal and not just Where you don't put near me as your
[00:20:51] Pip: restaurant name? Did you ever see that? What
[00:20:53] Greg: do you feel with that whole near me or add, or adding some type of key phrase on there that does [00:21:00] imply local?
[00:21:01] Pip: Interesting. So there's a couple things with that is that, so if I'm in a location, Google is location targeting me. And so if I just put in I don't know, garbage collection, or let's say a tree pruning Google is going to assume I want something around me. So I don't have to geo target, but you could put near me or near me is the same as putting a city name, right?
[00:21:26] Pip: So does it matter? Will it change the results? Not necessarily. It's just an add on to let Google know a little bit more. So like for instance, when I was in Toronto I would search for businesses and it would give me Some businesses from my, from where I was searching, cause I'd say Victoria, and then some businesses from where I was.
[00:21:46] Pip: So it was a mishmash. It was really interesting. Rodney's asking a question about structured data. It says, do you understand, do you use structured data? Yep. I heard that can help you with your search. Search on [00:22:00] GPT. Oh GPT. Does it work for a local too? Yeah Structured data tells the greatest thing about structured data and doing the locate like low local structured data is that It's in the head tag of your website, and that means that the robots read it before they read the website.
[00:22:23] Pip: So they already know what it's about. So it would be one of the very first things I would do. Or somebody would do here, not me. Yeah, for
[00:22:33] Greg: sure. Structured data, you should be using it. Obviously using it Is going to help you to varying degrees whether it be normal search or local search. But yes, very important to actually use it.
[00:22:48] Pip: Yeah. That would, the location pages. Yeah, there's so there's a lot to do if you're a local business you want location pages you want the right plugins to help you update things for WordPress [00:23:00] You want to create local listings and get reviews even though Google sometimes just takes them away on the random I lost 11 reviews and I got 9 back I'm always a Greg.
[00:23:11] Pip: I can't get over 70. I can't get anyway the, one of the most important things for local SEO is your category in Google business profile, right? So your primary category. So you got to look at what your competitors are doing because you, do you want to show up for what they're showing up for? There's so many categories you can pick.
[00:23:34] Pip: And then I would put your custom services inside your primary category. in the service section of your Google business profile.
[00:23:43] Greg: And obviously using your relevant keywords in your business description on your profile as well. Yeah.
[00:23:52] Pip: Yeah. Any chance you get like in custom services or products, you could put you get 120 characters for the title.
[00:23:58] Pip: Wow. It is amazing. I can just pull that [00:24:00] up.
[00:24:01] Greg: I think the untapped opportunity with the Google business pages is. That people don't use the regular updates and adding images or video On a regular basis, which is really going to help you be more relevant in the local search stuff
[00:24:21] Pip: yeah, google business profile is like it is like a search and It's like social media in that you have local experts.
[00:24:30] Pip: So if you leave a review, you're a local expert. If you take a picture of something and put it up for the business, you're a local expert. And I think eventually local experts will have more pull, but I don't know if they do right now. There's no true, tried and true information about that. But the more you give to Google, the kind of more you want, you get back.
[00:24:52] Pip: So doing the posts, using video, using images, naming the images properly before you upload them [00:25:00] is nice. And the Categories in Google business profile. The way to find out all the categories, your other competition is using is with a Chrome extension,
[00:25:11] Greg: right? Yeah.
[00:25:12] Pip: Yeah. We
[00:25:13] Greg: extensions.
[00:25:14] Greg: We're going to run out of time. Otherwise, yeah so
[00:25:17] Pip: there's GMB spy, which I used to use, which is really good. And there's also GMB everywhere, which it has free options. But I actually use the paid option because it gives us more data. But if you just go look at a Google business profile for someone, you can see the primary category, but you can't see the secondary categories.
[00:25:37] Pip: And but if you use one of these Chrome extensions, GMB everywhere, I'll promote it for them, then you can see all their things right now. I'm looking at and next time, Greg, I'll make it so we can share a screen, but like dentist clinic nearby. And I can see dentist, hygienist, dental implants, dentist, cosmetic dentists, teeth whitening services.
[00:25:57] Pip: These are all part of their categories. [00:26:00] Like it's pretty amazing. And they're, they've listed them as categories. Like they're valid categories. You mean?
[00:26:07] Pip: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:09] Greg: There used to be a cap. I thought on The number of categories, like one primary and then three additional or something.
[00:26:17] Greg: Can you just keep going?
[00:26:20] Pip: Somebody made a mention, somebody made a mention yesterday about how many categories you get. And the thing is, so there's talk about not over categorizing, don't use more than you need.
[00:26:33] Greg: But if it's relevant, obviously you don't want to, put in categories that have nothing to do with your business, but, and there's only going to be a certain amount, but.
[00:26:43] Pip: And the other thing is the services section in Google business profile. I can't find where that shows up. I think it's just for the search engines. Yeah I've had those filled out and I think they're more [00:27:00] for no, I've seen them and they come across it more in shopping or or like product areas I have a client and she filled all that stuff out. We fill all it out. Yeah. And she, and but she has an e-commerce site and she's I don't know why. Google is showing these products. They're all wrong. And I'm like you just added them in your Google business profile. Like they're not, it's not seeing.
[00:27:28] Greg: So when you change it on your site, it's not changing the product on your Google business profile that you added. So she was seeing it somewhere.
[00:27:39] Pip: That's interesting. Yeah, there's a that might be in the merchant center. That's weird. Cause the merchant center and Google business profile do connect if you have store products.
[00:27:49] Pip: But they're asking us to connect and we don't actually have a store. We are service based, right? So
[00:27:56] Greg: yeah. Yeah.
[00:27:57] Pip: So yeah. GMB [00:28:00] spy. Yeah. And GMB everywhere. Those are my favorites. Favorites. But they
[00:28:08] Greg: basically do the same thing. They just let you get more information on competitor research and what other people are doing.
[00:28:15] Pip: Yeah. So when we do a, somebody's Google business profile, we do, we separate it, we do a build out, we call it, and then we do a, Activity management. So activity management is like image dripping hour updating for holidays and posting pictures and stuff posting posts, right? And then the build out is the building out of the services, the building out of the products and attaching those two different pages, right?
[00:28:44] Pip: So it's like a whole thing. So we will compare what other. So we'll do a competitive audit, like a manual one where we go and look at four different businesses. What are they doing? How often are they doing it? Are they posting? Do they have products? Do they have services? [00:29:00] Services is very hard to find, but we fill it out anyway.
[00:29:04] Pip: And I'm actually playing with the custom, like in the service section, you can do custom services under your primary. And that's what I want to utilize. So I think that might be a good one. Gooder, as we like to say in Canada.
[00:29:18] Greg: Yeah, I think that's one of those things also that's untapped in the Google business profile.
[00:29:24] Greg: I don't know a lot of businesses that are actually filling out that information, which they really should.
[00:29:31] Pip: They really should.
[00:29:33] Greg: Yeah.
[00:29:34] Pip: We're out of time, Greg. We are out
[00:29:36] Greg: of time.
[00:29:37] Pip: Not out of touch. Just out of time. Never out of touch. So Greg, do you know what's happening next week?
[00:29:45] Greg: I do know what's happening next week.
[00:29:47] Greg: It's you and Phelan, and you're talking about AI and Google ads and how you're changing what you do.
[00:29:55] Pip: Yeah, we're doing some fun things cause AI, but yeah, we'll talk more about that later. [00:30:00] If you enjoyed this today, please come back and join us next Thursday. We are here live every Thursday. This is our live video podcast.
[00:30:08] Pip: And this is my cohort. And Greg, he's amazeballs. I don't think we introduced our companies. I'm Pip Seymour, digital media.
[00:30:17] Greg: And I'm Greg with original 72
[00:30:20] Pip: creative. And we'll see you next week. Okay. Bye. Thanks everyone. Thanks, bye. Finish.
