Master Local SEO: How to Get Found in Google with a 67-Point Checklist

Hey everyone, Sandy Waggett here from MSW Interactive Designs and it's been a bit since I've made a video. I had a little accident on my way to the seven figure agency conference. I fell at the airport in Fort Lauderdale with a 40 pound backpack on my back, broke my arm and my shoulder. Ended up having a complete shoulder replacement surgery last Wednesday. So that's been my absence. So for that I apologize. But let's get to it because today I want to do a training on search engine optimization and specifically local SEO. Local search engine optimization, how to get found in Google. I want to give a quick caveat though, because I have been doing this since 1999 and when I started my company in 1999, my marketing agency, Google was not the primary search engine, if you can even imagine. We were asking Jeeves. We were looking Yahoo. We were looking on man. What were some of the other ones? I can't even remember. Aol. I mean, I'm going way back. Google rose to dominance, okay? And the search engine algorithms change all the time. So one thing that you need to know is that you could be ranking page one number one today, which is amazing, and you will get website traffic from that. But tomorrow, in the blink of an eye, that could be gone based on Google's algorithm changes. And then some things that you may or may not have willingly done to have your website penalized. Let me give you an example. So I had a website called where bridesgo.com and it was ranking nationally, which is very hard to do for wedding favors, wedding accessories and things like this. That website was doing about $30,000 a month in revenue and we were just raking it in. It was fantastic. Now this was running alongside of my MSW Interactive Designs marketing agency. Thank goodness. Because with my wedding website we had what we called local wedding portals. So we had a website in Colorado Springs called SpringSweddings.com. we had a website in Las Vegas called Vegas WeddingGuide.com. we had a website In Fort Lauderdale called Fort Lauderdale Weddings.com. so you get the idea. And all of these websites had articles that we had written. AI didn't exist back then. We wrote the articles and the articles were the same on every single one of these websites. Stay with me here because this is going to tie back to AI today. Things change, but they don't. And I'm going to make a point here. So we had articles on all these websites. So I'm going to say duplicate content because how many ways can you tell someone how to shop for A wedding photographer or how to choose and test and taste and all the stuff, a wedding cake and whatnot. And then the other thing we did is on all those wedding portals, we sold ads, banner ads to local wedding professionals. So that was unique content on every site. Oops, sorry. Well, that's a little embarrassing, but you can see my bandage. Let me get that fixed. Anyway, all was well in the world. So then people, we would feed people back to where bridesgo.com to buy wedding accessories and things, right? So we're selling to wedding vendors and to brides. Literally overnight, our website went from multiple years of dominating page one of Google for most wedding related terms, for favors, accessories, cake tops, things like that, to nowhere to be found in the top 100 pages of Google. Like literally it felt like we'd been banned from the search engine completely overnight. So if you can imagine if you own a business and you're doing $30,000 a month in revenue and literally overnight that traffic disappears because you have no other advertising going, that's catastrophic. So I've got a couple points here. The first one is I'm going to talk about local SEO and what I don't want you to do is get complacent. If you work hard and get ranked on page one of Google, that's amazing. And we're going to do things and I'm going to teach you things that should help you maintain rankings. But at any time because you don't own or control the search engine, your rankings could fluctuate. So do not make that your only source of traffic to your website. You need to spread your marketing and visibility across multiple channels to protect your business. The second thing is duplicate content. So back then, the penalty for Google because the Panda and Penguin algorithms hit it was right around 2000, 2008, 2009 time frame, they were saying people were trying to manipulate search results by having duplicate content across multiple sites. Well, we had had that for years and it was not with the intent of manipulating an algorithm. It was sincere content written for local brides. But it didn't matter. We got swept up in the algorithm and there was just really no getting out of it. Now that said, a lot of people are talking about AI. So this is where I want to tie back to today because a lot of people now are generating content in large quantities using things like chat, GPT and people are all a flutter out there saying that the search engines are penalizing for AI written content, which is not true. So the search engines and so let's just talk Google, right. They are very well aware that people are utilizing AI to write content. And so the direction from Google in this area right now is that it's not that AI written content is a problem, it's that you can utilize AI to help write your content, but then there should be some human input and some personalization around the content. In other words, take your personal experience and build on it. Yes, low quality content comes from AI as far as the search engines are concerned. But if you beef it up from a human standpoint and with your own business perspective, and this is Google's direction now, and I'm going to caveat that because that can change at any time. But now, as of this recording in 2005, that's what they're saying. So they're looking for quality content. Doesn't matter if AI has helped you write it, but put your own twist on it. All right, so there's my intro. So now we're going to talk about local SEO. And there are some things that are just frankly tried and true. So search is shifting the way that search results come back. Now, it's a lot of Google Maps, which is different. Ranking in Google Maps is different than ranking organically on page one of Google in the like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 position not associated with the maps. One of the things that I want you to pay special attention to is that Google now does not want people to leave Google. In other words, traffic to websites has decreased from Google because Google has now positioned results in a way that they try to answer people's questions right when they get to Google. So what you really need to do is optimize for everything, including AI, including maps, all the stuff. So the things I'm going to talk about today are just foundational things that are, in my opinion, very unlikely to change. And when you're looking at your rankings across multiple platforms, search engines, AI, voice search, mobile search, all this stuff, these are just tried and true methods that work. All right, so let's just dive right in and there is going to be a link to my 67 point SEO checklist. And this is what I'm going to walk you through on this video. And as we walk through this document, I'm going to show you examples of various things like the YouTube channel websites and so that you can actually see what I'm talking about. Now, I'm not going to go into the step by step by step of how to do each of these things because you can get the checklist and then you could just go to Google and ask how do I do this? Or you can go to ChatGPT and say how do I do this from my checklist? And it'll tell you step by step how to do it. So I don't need to go into that level of detail. So watch the video, download the checklist and then go to work on your website. Now, the first page of my 67 point checklist I feel is the most important. I want you to prioritize because 67 things sounds like a lot. Prioritize those things first and then focus on the other stuff. All right, so I'm going to share my screen and Here is the 67 point SEO checklist. Again, I will have a link here or you can go download it. But let's just get started. The first thing is to create a list of primary keyword phrases to focus on. So obviously you want to know what people are searching for. And as a business owner, sometimes it's hard to step back and think about what the customer's words are actually going to be. So I could say SEO in Missouri or SEO Agency in Missouri. SEO standing for Search engine optimization is jargon. Small business owners may or may not know what SEO means. A better thing to optimize for instead of SEO services in Missouri would be how to get my business found on Google. That's what a small business owner really wants to know. So when I say create a list of primary keyword phrases to focus on, that's what I want you to do. I want you to go to Google, search for your business, think about what your customers might be searching for when looking for your services, and then you can look at based on the search results that come up. Google always returns a section that says people also asked and then you can see what else they're searching for and use that information to help get your keyword list to optimize for or keyword phrase list to optimize for. There's also some tools like Answer the Public which we use. So if we're doing SEO work for you, I will use Answer the Public to do research to see what people are searching for. And I also use a tool called SEM Rush. SEM Rush. Now we have an agency plan. If you need help, feel free to reach out to me. You do not have to pay for SEMrush. If you want to go to that level and utilize a tool like that, let us do it for you. And save yourself the subscription for that. First of all, get your primary keyword list. The second thing here is add unique Title tags to each page of your website. Title tags are things that are behind the scenes. It's a title tag in the code for your website. So I'm just going to flip over here to this tab. This is the MSW website. So you can see up here at the top in the tab it says Best Web Design and Social Media Marketing Agency, Lake of the Ozarks. This is the title tag. There are companies out there who in their title tag, it actually just says home as in homepage. Like if you're using a website builder website template, a lot of those just say homepage and then your company name. That title tag does nothing to help you get found in Google. So you want to make sure that every single page on your website has a unique title tag. So I'm going to come over here to the web design page on my website. And you can see now here it says Web Design Services, MSW Interactive Designs. And I could also say Web Design services at Lake of the Ozarks. But I did not localize it in my case because we actually optimize for a larger area than where we are locally. So it's the title tag, it's in the code of the website. So that's what I mean by that. And then this one is write unique description tags for each page of your website. Again, description tags are in the code. It's a meta tag, a meta description tag. And every single page on your site should have a unique description. And that description should be focused on the keyword phrase that that particular page is optimized for. So when you come to my website design page, this page is all about website design, website design only. In reality, you should have one topic per page. You might do eight different services in your business. Do not put all your services on one services page and expect to rank for those services. You will not. You want to have a services page for every single service in your business. And you want to go in depth on the content on the page on your website for that service. The next one is to use H1, H2 and H3 tags on each page of your website. Now look, I know this is super technical stuff and that's why a lot of people struggle ranking in Google because they just focus on keyword stuffing. They don't do any of this technical stuff the right way and they don't work with people doing their websites who are trained on this technical side of SEO. But this is important stuff. You need to do it or you will not rank. Okay, so H1, H2 and H3, they're heading tags. Heading one, heading two, heading three. Think about heading one like the title of a book. Heading two like the chapters. Heading three like the sub sections of those chapters. And what you need to do is section out your website so that these right here, heading one, heading two, heading one, heading two, heading three. So these are all behind the scenes, how these headlines are coded on the page. So what Google does, right, it's an algorithm, right, it's crawling your pages and it's looking for that heading 1, heading 2, heading 3. So it can see how the page is structured and what the content is of the page. Now if you think about it, Google is in the business of returning the best possible search results to the users given what they perceive the intent of the user is. When people are searching, they're searching because they have a question. Just think of it that way. They have a question, they're looking for something specific. So it really doesn't matter that you are way better than the guy down the street. Google doesn't know that without the kind of content that we're talking about here and the structure on your page. So it's got to be finely tuned and optimized website, great online reviews and all this other stuff we're going to talk about, this is what's going to separate you from the rest in search, not only in Google, but in AI and voice and all the other things that you're trying to rank for. Then you want to write content on your pages that includes keyword rich copy around what you're trying to rank for. Again, keep in mind that you really, for best results should have one primary keyword phrase per page on your website. So we don't want to have a page like a services page that you're trying to rank for eight different things. If you do eight different services or you service seven different towns around your local area, there really should be pages dedicated to those things for best search engine optimization locally. The other thing is you want to make sure that you're adding keyword, phrase, anchor text linked to other internal pages of your website. So if we come back here to MSW Interactive Designs, I don't think I actually have it on my homepage, I have it on my secondary pages. But if I wanted to here, I could say your website should be findable, make you lots of money. How's your website doing? So I could take this either website or I could do website and marketing and then link it to this web design page on my website. So outside of just the Main menu. You want to link words from within your internal pages on your website to other internal pages on your website. It helps Google crawl and find things on your website. So it's just a. It's a very technical tactic, but it matters. You also want to ensure you use alt tags on all of your images. So these images here on the website, you want to make sure in the code, like even these little icons here, you want to have alt tags behind the scenes that describe what the image is. You want to have it very specific and accurate on what the image is. So like this one would say clear messaging for website design, awareness for small business marketing. Retargeting for small business marketing. So you see what I'm doing? I'm saying, yes, so it's retargeting, but then I'm adding in some keyword phrases that are going to go in the alt tags. And again, a skilled web designer would know how to do this. Then you want to ensure you've got Google Analytics code installed on all your website pages and you want to make sure that you connect a Google search console. Most small business websites do not leverage this. If you leverage this, you all get a big jump over your competition. So take the time to do that when you download this document. I've got links here on how to do that. I'm just going to come over here and show you Google Analytics. Google Analytics is so powerful because it gives you so much information, but only if you go look at it. When I talk to people when they hire me for SEO, like so can I get access to your Google Analytics. You would be amazed at the number of people who, number one, don't have it at all, or number two, who, like, they don't even know how to get to it. They have it because someone set it up for them, but they've never even gone and looked at it. You need to be looking at your analytics at least monthly. I recommend doing it weekly because that's how you know what you're doing and what your messaging is and the ads that you're running and all the stuff is actually working the way you want it to. This is how you get the best return on investment for everything that you're doing from the marketing for your business. So this is a snapshot for a little under a month for MSW Interactive Design. So the last 28 days, so you can see we had 1.3 active users on our website and they came from direct organic social referral. Referral means from other sites, organic search. And then I can See the actual numbers. And then I can see here what pages they're looking at. So they're looking at ADA compliance, they're looking at our homepage, obviously they're downloading our how to define your ideal customer. They're looking at about us. They're looking at request a quote. And I'll give you a little insight here. So I had 27 people go to my request a quote page in 28 days on the website that I had 27 people go to the request a quote page. And I did not get 27 quote requests. Then I have the information that says, what can I do on this page to make a change, to make it convert better? I actually worked to get people to it and I didn't fill it out. So what happened? So you want to look at stuff like that. That's why Google Analytics is so important. The other thing here is, and this is really technical, but it matters. So there's a 404 not found error here, and we've got 55 of them. The reason we have this 404 error is because we recently redesigned our website. This is not uncommon because when you redesign your website and launch a new website, the names of the pages change. And so if you had old pages that were indexed and then they haven't dropped out of Google's index yet, then what they're doing is people are clicking through these links and then they're going to an error page. And that looks terrible. So this tells me I had 55 people find us in Google and they went to an error page. That's not good. So we still have some work to do on cleaning up those pages that don't exist anymore in Google search engines. And you do that through submitting site maps and cleaning up stuff like that. So again, it's all technical stuff. But I'm telling you, this is the stuff that matters. So if you have your nephew or you're a DIYer on your website, chances are you're not doing any of this stuff. And you're wondering why you're not ranking. This is why. This is why you want to work with a professional. Or take the time like you're doing and watching this video and downloading this document to learn how to do this stuff yourself, because it's important and it matters. And so here's the reference to the XML sitemap that I talked about. There's a site called XMLsiteMaps.com where you can create a free XML sitemap for your website. And then what you do Is you upload that sitemap to Google Search Console and then that will help Google clean up its index. It will tell Google that your site's there, it will tell it what pages to index, and it will also tell it what pages to drop out if they're no longer in the sitemap. You want to make sure you use title references within your internal href links. And again, this is a technical thing. You want to give people the ability to share your website or your content. So there's lots of tools out there to do that. There's a tool called Share this. So if you have a blog on your website, which I highly recommend, and I'll show you that in a second, have an ability for people to share those articles direct. So if they find something interesting, they can share it on social and across other things. You want to make sure that you have links to Facebook and all the other socials. I'm going to skip down here. And also you want to make sure, number one, that you have a YouTube channel, and number two, that you are embedding videos from your YouTube channel. You can see that we leverage the strategy on MSW Interactive Designs. So every video that I make, I've got an embed here of my YouTube videos. You can come over here. Now. My YouTube channel, I really went, we're late to the game on YouTube, folks. Like most small business owners, I went in 2024. Even though I had the channel for years before that, I didn't really leverage it or do much with it. 2024, I decided, okay, I'm really going to go all in on video. So we literally went from about five subscribers to almost 5,000 in a year, which is fantastic. My goal this year is to get up to 10,000 subscribers. And this has impacted my business this, this past six months more than any other single thing I've done. So I highly recommend the YouTube channel. So you want to get your YouTube channel embedded on your website and don't worry about being good, being articulate, looking good, and when you first start, you're gonna suck. And that's okay. You gotta start, put in the reps, and that's what makes you better. I want to show you also on analytics, because I talked about blogs really quick. Excuse me. If you look here, you can see on my organic Google search impressions. See, my blogs outrank my pages by a long shot. Blogs are an important part for organic SEO. And so I actually have our blog under our Learn tab. And so I write blogs pretty consistently now. My last one was on March 13th. I broke my shoulder on March 2nd. So it's been. I, yeah, I had a dry spell here. But you can see that I write blogs around current issues in our space. So like Google's March 2025 core update, I wrote a blog about that to inform our clients and then I wrote a blog about how to jumpstart your business growth in 2025. All of these blogs, at least from the past year, did utilize AI to help write them. And then I added in my own business stories, personal stories, to make them better, more personal. And so this is quality content in the eyes of Google. And you can tell by looking at my analytics and how my blogs are ranking. Okay, and again, this is great data because if you invest in having blogs done and you're not looking at this stuff, if your blogs aren't showing up here in organic search, then Google's not digging your blogs. So you need to up the quality on your blogs. Now don't make snap into a judgment when you just first start your blog. I've been building my blogs for years. It's important to start and then be consistent. Like consistent and persistent. Consistent and persistent. Consistent and persistent. Most people try something and when they don't see immediate results, they quit. This is why you have the advantage. If you're watching this video and you've made it this far in this video, I can tell that you're committed to generating results for your business and this is how you do it. All right, let's just scan through here because I don't want to get too deep into the weeds, but socials blog robots txt file tells Google what to index, what not to index on your website. Favicon so if you look up here on convert box, you can see this little cute icon up here. These are just little minor details, but it ups the quality of your website in the eyes of Google because they know that you're paying attention and doing all the things that you're supposed to be doing. Meta tags, geometa tags validate the HTML, make sure that the load speed is fast so you can go to Google's mobile friendly test. And I've got the page speed test in here too, so I've got links and in this checklist that you can go, you want to make sure that you're updating content on your website consistently. Blogs are a great way to do that. But also reviews, make sure that you're adding new reviews. There's so many ways that you can update your website on a consistent basis. Google Likes fresh, relevant content. If you've built a site and it's just sat there for years and let's say when you first launched was SEO optimized and it started ranking well and maybe for a year it ranked well and then it started dropping but you hadn't updated it. So Google doesn't see it as relevant and fresh anymore. There's a lot of reasons why it can drop out. That's one of them. So you want to make sure you're constantly updating your website, keeping it to current standards, putting fresh content on there, new reviews on their new blogs. Google wants to know that you're an active business. Because Google's in the business of returning the best possible results to its users. Implement an SEO monitoring tool, Google Analytics at a bare minimum, just do that and then some advanced techniques, the page speed, your YouTube content. And then on Google Analytics you can go in depth and watch what people are doing, the paths through the website. So like they enter on your homepage and then they go to another page and then they bounce off the site. So if you look at things like bounce rate, you can see where people are leaving the site. If you know where people are leaving the site, then you can say okay, how are we going to keep them on the site longer? And you can modify the pages because a lot of data that Google looks at is how many pages are people looking at on your site, how long are they staying on your site? If they're just coming to your site and they're there for four seconds and they're bouncing off, that's a key to Google that it's not the best search result. So you want to make sure that you engage people on your website. This is one of the reasons why having YouTube videos on your site embedded is fantastic because it increases the duration that people stay on the site because they stay on your site and watch the YouTube video. So it's just one technique that increases that on page time. And then there's some off page strategies. So I like to tell clients it's really a 50, 50 proposition. On page strategies or the things I just talked about. But then there's off page strategies and you have to do these too. So off page strategies are building reputable links that come back to your website. So I like to talk about some quick wins and low hanging fruit like your local chambers of commerce. You can usually take your membership and buy a link from their website back to yours. You can cross link with strategic partners in your industry. So you want links back to your website. From reputable websites. You want to make sure that you submit your XML sitemaps so that will get you listed in Google and Bing. And you also want to set up Google Alerts for your brand. I also set them up for my competitors, by the way, so I can keep an eye on what my competitors are doing. You want to make sure that your website is ADA compliant and you want to make sure that you're doing local directory management. So there's a host of website directories out there that these search engines aggregate data from. You can run a free tool. I can run a free report for you if you come to our website and ask for one where you can see your listing, your business listing and all of these directories. A lot of times the information across all these directories is random. It has errors and things like that. And especially if your business has changed locations, you want to do a directory service like yext, which we are a YEXT reseller and we can get it a lot cheaper by the way, so give us a call if you need that done. But you want to make sure that your business information is correct and accurate across all these local directories so that Google sees all these backlinks as the same business and that your business gets credit for that. That will help your search engine optimization. And now just making sure that you have a Google Analytics and a Bing Webmaster account, these are all like more technical things that you can just go look up. They're off page. I want you to make sure that you've got social account set up and I want you to make sure that your social profiles are all complete. And wherever you have the ability to put a link back to your website, you're doing that. And you want to make sure that they're consistent across all of the social media channels. You also want to have a review strategy. This is so important, you guys, especially in today's world, not only for your organic rankings, but for your maps rankings and then also for just people who are searching. People are looking at reviews more than they ever have. Now, Google Maps, these reviews are super important. You can have 500 reviews, but if the last one that you got was two years ago, your rankings are going to drop compared to someone who has more recent reviews. So you don't want to leave your reviews to chance. You want to have a review strategy for your business so that every time you interface with a customer and the customer's happy, you are giving them an opportunity to give you a review. And you want to give them a link to your Google business profile. And you also want to give them a link to whatever social channels or other sites that you want reviews on. You must continue to get reviews. You must be very proactive about it. And I'm a big fan of press releases as well. So if you win an award, if you make a noteworthy donation, anything that you're doing in your local community, write a press release about it. Even if you can't get your local media to pick it up, put it on your website, okay? Put it on your website, make a blog out of it, do try to get it picked up, but it doesn't matter if they don't pick it up. I still want you to write press releases and link back to your website from those press releases. And again, I'm going to highlight the blogs. The blogs are so, so important. Now. I'm going to also just say some more off page stuff. This is a website that's great. I think they actually recently changed names, but if you Google it borrow help a reporter out, you can subscribe to these notifications. And so reporters actually send requests to businesses in a whole multitude of areas and they're looking for stories, they're looking for people to quote. They're looking. This is a great way, even if you just hire a virtual assistant for a few bucks an hour to go through these and look for good opportunities. This is a way to get featured in media free and then also to build backlinks from reputable sources which will help your search engine rankings, obviously drive traffic to your website as much as you can. And then I'm just going to say, this is what we do. This is what I love. This is what I specialize in. I've been doing it forever. So if you need help, feel free to reach out to me. That's not the point of this video. The point of this video really is to just give you some basics that if you, as a DIYer small business owner who's trying to improve your search engine rankings, if you just did 60% of the stuff and especially the stuff in the first two pages that I just talked about, you are going to be so far ahead of your competition and you will absolutely outrank your competition. So I'm going to stop my share. I'm going to say use the link to download the checklist depending on where you're watching the video. If you're watching the video in my visibility transformation challenge, it's in the files tab in our Facebook group. You can just download it there. And if you are watching this video on the YouTube channel. There's a link to our website and there's a little form you can fill out and you can download it there. It's absolutely free. And don't hesitate to reach out to me with any questions. Again, I know this is technical stuff and I'm passionate about it. I love talking about it. So few people do it. Seriously, if you just put in a little bit of work and do this, it's going to make all the difference for your business. All right, Sandy Waggett signing off. You all have a great day. I'm feeling a little better. I've got kind of a long recovery road ahead of me. Can't put a shirt on all the way. But while I've got the energy, I'll keep making the videos and you have yourself a great rest of your day.