LIVE Local Website SEO Search Audit : How We Rank Customers on Google [How-To]

Hi, my name is Phil Risher with Flash Consulting, and in this video we're going to do an SEO overview and a local search audit for your business. So after this video, you're going to be able to look at your website and make tweaks or updates to rank for local SEO. So let's take a look at what exactly is SEO. SEO is searching for keywords on Google, search engine optimization on Google and having you rank for specific keywords. So what SEO is good for is when someone search for a product or service that you offer showing up on those results. All right, so there's two different types of SEO. There's on site SEO and off site SEO. Off site SEO is typically what you see right here, which is called a local service pack. And on Google you've probably seen this before. If you search for a local business, you're going to show up on this off site SEO. The reason it's called off site SEO is because it's specifically for like a Google business profile or Yelp profile or Facebook profile. It's off of your website, but it's still a search engine optimization tactic. And then we also have an on site SEO. On site SEO is the part down here that you see on Google which is like URL structures and that type of stuff. So there's two different types of SEO. In this example, we're going to be looking at local SEO for your on site SEO and how to optimize your website for on site SEO. How can it help your business? It's very obviously important because people search for a product or service, they click on your website and then they turn into a lead. So it's very important. Everyone searches on their phone or on on Google for stuff. How long does it take to see results? It typically takes about three to six months. Most people say give it a good 12 months to start ranking on things. What we've seen with clients is if you're just starting out like bare bones, it's going to take at least six months. Because just even indexing your content, it takes Google about a month or two to get things rolling. And then slowly you're building content up at least three to six months. But imagine if you rank on these top keywords, for example, for your target areas, it can prove to be worth the cost immensely down the line as the snowball keeps rolling. All right, and what is our philosophy here at Flash? It's first, create the visibility. Second, get the clicks through which getting reviews is really important for that. And then finally when they go onto your website, converting them into leads. So having like web chat, online scheduling, any way for them to convert into a lead is going to be really important. But it all starts with getting the visibility so that people searching for a product or service can find you. All right, so in case you haven't seen the last video, last couple of videos, this is the 2022 local marketing success. These are the rank factors from 2021 that going into 2022 are very important. So the first thing to notice here is that 70% of your ranking is reviews which is so important to get reviews. Specifically for this we're going to focus on this on page SEO. 16% of your ranking on page for your Google my business profile. This is that off site SEO. And I've made videos about this before. But specifically for this, we're going to look at this on page SEO. How do we know what is good on page SEO? Google Search Central actually gives you an entire guide for beginner SEO Advanced SEO. We have people on our team that it is their job to know this inside and out about how to structure your, your links, what to do for search engines, what is the advanced stuff or meta descriptions, title tags, all of that. And it's always changing. But Google actually gives you the playbook. It's just a lot of information and you know, it's who, not how. Who can you hire to do this instead of how trying to figure this out and become an SEO expert. If for example your carpet cleaning company or something like that. So that's how we know how to do this because Google tells us. All right, so the first thing we're going to look at, Let me make me a little bit smaller here. Alright, first thing we're going to look at is a URL structure. No wasted links such as services. This is a very popular one in your URL structure. So good is flashconsulting.com digitalmarketing bad is flashconsulting.com services digital marketing. Why Google does not want us to push down our main services and when we push them down in our URL structure, Google ranks us lower because it has to go through each step in order to get to what we're actually doing here. So inside of your website, let's look at this website for example. We want to take a look and see, okay, what is their URL structure and how are they ranking? So wm-cpa.com services accountingservices so theoretically you could take out services, which is a filler word and just push this to accounting services and what that's going to do, it's going to push you up inside of this category section and you're not wasting any fillers. So that's a quick fix that you could easily change. The second thing is your site structure. Again, this is another quick fix for you is you want to make sure that your services are going to be pushed towards the front of your ranking. So if you look here, homepage, you have category, category, brand articles blog, everything is getting pushed down. Brand articles blog is on the back end. Most people want to leave with their about section or lead with their contact or whatever, but traditionally you see the contact is pushed down, the blog is pushed down and the brand should be pushed down too. And you should really feature your services that you offer. So in this situation, our process, which is duct cleaning process or whatever they do residential air duct cleaning, commercial air duct cleaning, which is their service link structure, and then it's pushed down the brand stuff and everything else. So again, this is a quick thing that you can manipulate inside of your menu. All right, we're going to get a little bit more technical with your local SEO and this is going to be more about your title tags and your meta description. And don't get scared because it's not that crazy. It sounds a little scary when you hear these words, but it's pretty straightforward and I'm going to explain it to you. So what exactly is website URL description and indexed sitemap? So let's take this keyword again. Dryer van Cleaning, Manassas, Virginia. And you see here, these are called title tags when it says dryer van Cleaning, Manassas, Virginia. And meta descriptions are underneath the descriptions of what exactly is on this page. So if you notice here, these title tags, what do they all have in common? They all have GEO targets inside of them, whether it's Northern Virginia or Manassas, Virginia. And what do they all have as far as meta descriptions? They all have the word Manassas, Virginia inside of them at some capacity. So this is the lowest hanging fruit for any company that we've ever come across and is to put these GEO targets inside of your title tags and meta descriptions. And how does this look? Let's go and take a look here. We're going to look at this website again. Where did they go? All right, perfect. So the first way that you can see how this works is if you just hover over this. Accounting Services Whoosh Maloney and company.com, lLP. This is the title tag notice. There's no geo Targets in here. If you want to see what the meta description is, you can highlight this, you can go here and do site and you can paste this in here and it's going to show you what the title tag is, what the meta description is. So in looking at how this is structured. Right. Dryer Van Cleaning Manassas, Virginia do you think that if someone searches for accounting services in whatever their target area is, they haven't listed it here, someone's going to click on this? In my opinion, no. I would have it say expert accounting services for small businesses inside of whatever their target area is. Right. Same within here. It should have the same thing with maybe a phone number. And so going through the entire website, whether you're building out a new website or optimizing the current website, these are all the small little minor changes you can make that in the end are going to lead to better results. And after the fifth, the fifth step, which we're going to get to in a sec, I'm going to actually show you real results of how this works. So keep, keep hanging on because it's going to be pretty amazing. You're going to see the results. All right, next on site, local SEO step 4, header 1. So on this page we want to highlight a GEO target. And if you notice in their H1, their header 1 it just says accounting and audit. No good. We needed to say, we needed to say, you know, residential driver and cleaning in Northern Virginia or providing dryer van cleaning in Manassas, Centerville. Right, Your target geographical. We don't need any fluff stuff in here. We need the H1 to tell Google exactly what we do. And this in that example, it doesn't show it that. All right, next up we got our fifth and final step is internal linking. This is very straightforward. If you go to the website, we need three links to other spots on our website. So we need to link to accounting and if we're on accounting and audit, we need to link to tax services and we need to also link to resources like a video or something. So inside of here, as we're just not, you know, talking about these things, we can just link out. We have long term working relationships with bankers and bonding agents, so maybe long term relationships, we hyperlink that out to an industry, for example, or something like that. So we need three of those. All right, next up, let's look at actual results of how this is going to work. All right, so here's a company that we just started working with. Let me pull this out here. And we're going to look at how they are ranking and we've been working with them for about two months now. And Google Search Console, which Google Search Central, which I showed you before, Google Search Console and Google Search Central, they all work together and they want you to rank on keywords because at the end of the day they want to give the user the best information available. All right, so let's look. October, this was the first month that they had started tracking it on their own. And we can see what the average positions are. So if we look here, the top eight positions are the first page on Google. So over the entire month they had 1, 2, 3, 4 keywords on the top of Google and their target location area is Gaithersburg, Maryland. And they had zero keywords ranking for Gaithersburg, Maryland. Alright, so let's pull this out and all of these strategies, right? Building out content and keywords and there's other strategies, but this is just the basic stuff from a website structure perspective. We're gonna go to February and let's just look at their average position. All right, so they have 34 keywords on the first page of Google, which is good. But more importantly, because this is a local SEO audit that we're doing, we want to look at this Gaithersburg because that's their target area. All these keywords over at 1000 Impressions, which is awesome. So if you notice, they're not ranking on the first page of Google yet, but we just have only worked with them for two months. But if you see they now have 72 keywords that have to do with Gaithersburg. So they went from 0 to 72. Even if we look back at December, which is the first month that we started working with them, they had two in Gaithersburg. So to give you an idea of how this really does work, and it's a snowball that compounds on top of each other. If you have any questions, drop a comment below. If you're interested in setting up a demo with us or setting up a meeting with us to see if we might be able to help your business, I'll put a link down below to schedule a meeting and be sure to hit that subscribe and like, we post videos about how to grow your business using technology and digital marketing and we look forward to helping you grow your business.