Although there is no silver bullet to soar the search engine, a few smart strategies can help you climb the charts gradually. And local SEO is one such tactic.

With today’s modern technology, more people are using Google Maps and associated business listings to find local companies. According to eMarketer, eight out of ten consumers prefer to use search engines to find local products/services.

Therefore, dominating Google search these days is critical for a business. If you are one of the big corporate gurus, you probably have many resources to do so. However, if you belong to middle or lower corporate strata, you should opt for local SEO practices.

Local SEO is, unfortunately, not always focused on by many business entities. This is why their original customer base dwindles. In fact, a bunch of recent studies has confirmed that most online purchases happen after people search for these products locally.

• 72% of consumers who did a local search visited the store within five miles. (WordStream, 2016)
• 28% of searches for something in surroundings result in a purchase. (Google, 2016)
• 78% of local-mobile searches turn into offline purchases. (Search Engine Land, 2014)
• 30% of mobile searches are linked with a location. (Google, 2016)

A local presence is your way to go if you are a start-up or a new entrant in the field. Below, we have some reasons to convince you even more.

Greater Local Visibility

In a lot of ways, a local presence is easier to obtain than a national one. Once you learn what you are doing, you can understand your local market much better than anyone else. Or you can take locally reputed professionals on board. For example, SEO experts in Seattle can bring more valuable insights if you want to pursue your venture in Seattle.

They will devise strategies to promote your products/services to potential customers by scrutinizing the current trends. Signals such as social profile pages, links, local content, and citations are local SEO information. This allows the search engine to bring relevant results for the users, improving rankings and escalating sales.

To start with, get yourself on Google my Business listing. Plus, there are plenty of others like Yelp, Yellowbook, Bing Places to improve visibility. Chatmeter states that if the first position of a local listing gets 30% of the clicks, local listings after the sixth ranking get fewer than 2% of clicks. And this is for search results that are still on the first page.

So make sure your local SEO strategies are in place to retain a higher position in the list.

Establishes Business Credibility

Google handles more than 63,000 search queries each second. (Quora)

This staggering search statistic reveals how critical it is for a small business to strive for the higher ranks. It gives the audience a reason to check you out.

Users find local listings that pop up on the top of a search engine more authentic than paid or organic search. As per Hubspot, SEO is 5.66 times more effective than paid search advertising. Be sure to use long-tail keywords with local modifiers and semantic variations to expand your keyword coverage.

Steps like including directions on Google Map on your contacts will allow the customers to find you easily. The local algorithms will have further data to confirm your location.

Along with this, having customer reviews is another factor in enhancing your authenticity. Research by BrightLocal revealed that about 88% of local users trust online business reviews. Hence, it is essential to ensure you get your regulars to share their experiences. After all, word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing, and it’s free!

Better Return on Investment (ROI)

Brian Halligan, the co-founder at Hubspot, staunchly believes in an organic-first strategy for its strong conversion performance and longevity.

Spending money on advertising may appear like throwing your bucks down a dark pit as you struggle to calculate the return on investment. On the contrary, targeting a local audience allows you to find the exact audience you are looking for. You can select the target audience based on search terms like gender, age, interests, and location.

SEO ROI accumulates with time as content creators establish visibility and authority of your platform. Potential buyers tend to visit a website more than once before making a purchase or filling a form. Thus, ranking higher for more keywords increases the likelihood of conversion as time passes. Acknowledge yourself with Google Ranking Factors in the upcoming years to maintain your SEO plans.

In the past, local companies had to operate traditional marketing routes, such as newspaper adverts, leaflets, and radio ads. These methods are in steep decline (given how the local newspaper agencies are gradually shutting down).

Research from Poynter found that local newspapers have lost about 80% of their readership over the last two decades. The internet allows people to consume news when and how they like. Local SEO makes sure prospects find you when they need your solutions, not when they don’t.

Let’s Wrap it Up

Knowing that consumers are looking for local brick and mortar stores for instant purchases, it is more crucial than ever to have a solid local SEO strategy. For this to work, it comes down to 3 main categories:

• Reviews
• Online Business Listings
• Local Search Rankings

As search engines notice a growth in “near me” searches with urgent words like “open today” or “now,”  companies should ensure their local visibility is in line with their customers’ needs. Remember understanding your market is the primary factor to uncover what they require. Make sure you have a strong team to evaluate the market and upgrade your virtual presence accordingly.

We hope our blog will help you jumpstart your Local SEO tactics. Let us know what would be your first step!

Today, the eCommerce industry is saturated with hundreds of options, each trying to have a piece of this lucrative pie. But, only a few have cracked the code of running a successful eCommerce store.

Amid the cut-throat competition, you have to develop out-of-the-box strategies to rise above your competitors and make your store the preferred shopping destination for the customers.

If you feel like you’re drowning in the sea of sheer competition, or don’t have the heart to compete with multinational companies holding onto huge ad spends, think again.

What can you do that hasn’t been done before? What is the most inexpensive way to beat your rivals? The answer lies in your link building strategy.

After all, it’s a crucial aspect of SEO. Experts believe that link building can contribute 50% to your SEO success.

Sit down and take a moment to read this blog. I’ve compiled a guide to help your eCommerce link building campaign get off the ground.

1. Set the bar high

You’ve got to understand that link building is all about offering value to the target audience so that at the end of the day, someone will link back to you.

So what do you have in mind?

• In-depth information

Blogging is the easiest way to get backlinks. According to HubSpot, businesses with blogs are getting 97% more backlinks than those without it.

Content full of fluff is not going to get you anywhere. But you already knew that, right?So, provide additional value through interviews, quotes from industry experts, citing research statistics, etc. The most important advice- keep information current.

More importantly, identify trending topics and products. As soon as you find something, contribute to or create content around it ASAP. You can get links by answering questions on forums and Q&A networks.

• Onboard visually appealing content

KISSmetrics has a secret to share. Photos can get you 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more clicks on links than text-based posts. Sure, visuals are a great way to enhance engagement.

But stock photos are boring. How about investing in custom-made images to make them more unique? Remember, leveraging image SEO can increase organic traffic to your website and earn links over time. Image search comprises 27% of Google searches in the US.

• Don’t forget to add videos

Many eCommerce brands don’t understand the true potential of video marketing. With over 3 billion searches per month, YouTube is the second largest search engine – bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, and AOL combined.

Have you considered promoting your brand through video? You can attract quality links by producing tutorials, instructional videos, how-to guides, and much more. And since video content is more popular than text, you have a better chance of acquiring links.

Sephora got over 1,000 backlinks to their video section. Consider embedding videos on your shop page or including them in your blog. After all, it’s a great way to boost SERP rankings.

2. Email outreach

Link building via email requires developing a relationship with customers. Even though acquiring links through email outreach can be time-consuming, it is a useful strategy to secure more leads.

Most link building relationships start by sending a cold email to a prospective customer. However, an average cold email has only a 15.22% chance of getting opened. Yikes!

You need to backtrack and try a smother approach. Start with your contacts and people who have a positive attitude towards your product.

I recommend using a two-step process. In the first email, introduce yourself with a personalized email. A link prospect will want to see your credentials, so mention one of your best blogs. Showcase how you can bring value to their audience.

Present your pitch in the second email. Make it attractive for the link prospects and convince them how they benefit from your offer. In this way, you can demonstrate the mutual benefits of publishing content on their blog.

3. Get social

Everyone knows the quickest way to reach your target audience is through social media exposure. You can easily amplify impact and extend reach, primarily through an influencer campaign.

The comments and social shares convince people that you’re valuable and famous, and therefore link-worthy.

Remember that you need to reach out on all your social media networks. However, you may need to publish content multiple times to get more engagement.

But there’s something else you can do as well.

You can create sponsored accounts just like ASOS did for selected influencers and established fashion bloggers. They posted pictures wearing branded outfits and offered fashion tips. Customers were inspired to “buy the look” by clicking on the targeted links.

4. Consider brand ambassadorship

One of the easiest and most effective ways to get links is to get people talking about your e-commerce brand, whether that’s by meeting people, guest blogging, contributing to charities, engaging on social media, or gifting giveaways.

Ann Smarty, the founder of Viral Content Bee, claims she got links to her site by building many connections. But don’t confuse influencer marketing with a brand ambassador program.

Influencers are contributors, motivated by what they receive in return, often money or discounts.

On the other hand, brand ambassadors are unpaid loyal customers. Their passion for a brand is what drives them to tell others, whether through word-of-mouth (WOM), reviews, user-generated content (UGC), etc. It helps generate more traffic and sales to your eCommerce site.

More importantly, as your ambassadors mention your eCommerce store in their videos, social media posts, and blogs, you’re getting precious backlinks. Yeah!

But remember, it all begins with developing a strong relationship with your customers and maintaining that relationship. I bet you didn’t know happy customers could be part of your link building campaign.

Ready to give it a try?

Link building is a process that requires extensive research and expertise to get results. Therefore, hiring the services of a reputed link building agency will ease the job for you. The agency will bring their expertise to the table and curate a link building strategy for your e-commerce store to earn maximum leads.

However, e-commerce stores have hundreds of product pages, and doing link building for an e-commerce store can be an overwhelming task even for a reputed SEO company.

So, if you’re an SEO company who is finding it tough to deal with the burden of e-commerce link building, you can reach out to a white label SEO company and delegate some of your link building tasks to them.

For example, Growth Proton provides whitelabel SEO services in Delaware; similarly, various other SEO companies provide area-specific link building services. You can acquire the services of these companies to do link building for your client in some states and ease the burden off your shoulders.

They can create high-quality, industry-relevant content that can significantly improve the customer acquisition rate of your client.

Final word

It requires considerable effort and hard work to run a successful eCommerce store. You need customers to keep coming back to your website. For this, you have to be there, not only in people’s minds but also at the top of Google search results.

You’ll be surprised to learn that human psychology can be used to sell your products and build backlinks. With content that is unique, relevant to your audience, and evokes a strong emotional reaction, you’re off to a good start.

Do you wish to know that which is an important Google ranking factor that directly influences the SEO practice? If yes, you can find the right information here.

What the year 2020. The formation of the new history is going around? Moreover, Google stays on smartening its search algorithms. In the last years, there have been several major algorithm updates, as Google put the efforts on the toes. There is nothing different; we got the news related to the AMP news and Page Experience update. However, the debate about whether or not you require E-A-T for ranking rages on.

How do the prime Web Vitals locate in changing the game of search in 2021?

Simply look ahead with the right innovations and check the things which will modify the techniques of handling the SEO and which will lighten into darkness sooner instead of later.

1. Significance of core web vitals for SEO

Core Web Vitals are the rest of the definite factors that Google considers essential in a webpage’s overall user understanding. Core Web Vitals are prepared with the three main specific page speed and user interaction dimensions: major contentful paint, first input holdup, and increasing shirt layout.

There’s something more to learn about the Core Web Vitals, but they keep the three biggest problems on the webpages:

LCP

The term ‘LCP’ is referred to as the Largest Contentful Paint. It deals with the speed of loading on the biggest single object associated with the webpage.

CLS

The term CLS ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’, it is a right calculation of how much the content of the page bounds while loading content, regularly visual content, after loading.

FID

The term ‘FID’ is referred to as the First Input Delay. It implies that the time of the reaction of the page to the first user input after clicking, tapping, and pressing the keys.

How core web vitals influences rankings

Finely, it’s going to directly affect the regular search results, mobile, and desktop, depending on the specific condition. However, it is an essential point; Core Web Vitals are going to turn an important condition to look in Google Top Stories. There are the news results that normally appear at the best of the search results.

Earlier, AMP was an obligation to add in the top stories. AMP is going away. Therefore, you still have to answer the needs for regular Google News addition, but AMP is not going to be a necessity anymore toward appears in Top Stories. However, you are going to have to meet the least doorstep of Core Web Vitals.

The verdict

Meanwhile, it would be early to tell and more work by SEO’s around the web requirements to be completed here. However, it appears that if you aren’t utilized on technical SEO, Core Web Vitals turning ranking signals might not pressure your everyday work at all. If you are performing the complex technical SEO, then Core Web Vitals will surely change the way you work in as-yet unforeseen ways.

2. Significance of AMP for SEO

The word AMP implies for “Accelerated Mobile Pages.” It is an Open Source Framework that was introduced as a joint proposal by Google and numerous other technology and publishing firms. With the help of AMP, it is easy to make a simple mobile web portal that loads almost immediately.

The importance of AMP’s is significantly increased. It is considered as a good option to boost the speed of the page, the concern about privacy has been voiced constantly as the technology’s very setting up.

How AMP influences rankings

Do you think AMP influence SEO? Yes, meanwhile, it is essential to keep in mind that it is not a magic tool that will assist you in getting better the user experience overnight.

However, the SEO strategy is aimed to improve the website’s ranking. However, Google has mentioned multiple times that now, Accelerated Mobile Pages are not a ranking issue; things are expected to change in the future. Google has previously pinched its algorithm to make use of mobile sites as the main account to index. AMP assists you to make mobile-friendly sites that can enhance the ranking of the website.

3. Significance of E-A-T for SEO

Proficiency, Trust, and Authority, all ideally positive words and rather we should all endeavor for in our specialized lives. However, what about search optimization?

Coming directly from Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, E-A-T has been the talk of the town for a good moment now. Let’s jump in and see how they might modify the way we optimize for hunt.

How E-A-T influences rankings

The majority of us consider that it doesn’t really. Sure, Quality Rater Guidelines give precious insights into Google’s ranking procedure. Meanwhile, E-A-T is one of the lesser-essential factors we must be focusing on, partially since these are nebulous, theoretical concepts, and partly since Google doesn’t precisely wish us to. The official Google’s representative added E-A-T is not in itself a ranking issue.

Receiving follow-up queries, Google’s John Mueller then repeated that point, and Ben Gomes, Google’s VP of search engineering corroborated that quality raters don’t power any page’s rankings straightly.

Meanwhile, in practice, we frequently see that the supposed YMYL web portal previously can’t rank without having some proficiency and authority recognized. A good example is that it’s virtually not possible to rank a website offering medical advice without a definite doctor writing the editorials.

Here, the difficulty is that authority, expertise, and trustworthiness are not simply understood by the search algorithms, which just appreciate code. And at the time, there seems to be no reliable way for Google to change these signals into rankings, excluding to read the quality feedback raters before each update of the algorithm.

Conclusion

At the time of the writing, the Core Web Vitals appears to a quite essential ranking news to appear in 2020 in sensible terms. Meanwhile, the search is quite a volatile field: what worked two weeks ago might not work nowadays, and what works now might not work for the majority of us.

Wondering how to improve your domain authority? You need to understand certain things that help you to get the best results. It’s good to consult with an expert and you can get familiar with the ways following which you can increase the number of visitors to your site.

Domain authority indicates the popularity of your site and it defines the page rank. Improving the domain authority helps you to reach the target audience. In this way, you can now make your site popular and it gives you the confidence to go ahead.

It’s important to know how to calculate the domain authority and thus you can make the right approach to improve the position of your site. A popular blog comes up with a DA above 80. The popular media websites usually have a DA above 90. A few of the top sites achieve a DA of 100.

 

Tips to Improve the Domain Authority

Here are a few tips that help you to improve the DA:

 

Inserting High-Quality Backlinks

Make sure that you insert the high-quality backlinks and you can use the analytics tool to find the top sites. Hence, you can now comprehend the true importance of using backlinks and it gives you a better experience. In this way, your site gains attention amid the crowd and it helps you to achieve an estimable position in the competitive market. So, you can come up with a successful website and it helps you to achieve success in real-time. Also, you can check the competitor’s sites knowing the backlinks they are using and you can thus make the right decision.

 

Create a Comprehensive User Interface

Make sure that you come up with a comprehensive interface. A simpler site structure helps you to achieve a higher DA and you can get a good rank in the search engines. Ensure that users find it easy to use your site and thus your site gains popularity in real-time. In this way, you can get a higher position and thus you can comprehend the true importance of getting a simpler site structure. Nowadays, you can create a mobile-friendly site and it brings in the smarter aspects as you want. Make sure that the site loads quickly and it helps you to increase the number of visitors. Gradually, you can increase the DA of your site and you can comprehend the real benefits.

 

Incorporate Interesting Contents

Next, you need to hire an experienced writer who creates SEO-friendly and interesting contents. It motivates users to go through the contents and thus you can now find more visitors showing interest. Hence, you can increase the domain authority and gradually your site gains popularity. It’s time to find a professional writer who has ample experience to frame the contents on different topics. Ensure that you can incorporate meaning contents and it’s the key to achieve success. It helps in increasing your root domain score and you can feel confident knowing that your site becomes the top-ranked one.

 

Conducting a Link Audit

Next, you need to conduct a link audit and it helps you to find the best links to add. It’s important to hire a professional who analyzes the link and comes up with the ideal ones that improve the page rank. You need to come up with effective link strategies and thus you can now comprehend how it brings in the positive aspects. It’s time to find the best links and make sure that the backlinks help you to find more users. There are manifold tools where you can enter your site name and you can find a list showing the backlinks you can add. Now, you need to choose the one that helps you to get the results as you want.

 

Include Media

Inserting images, videos, animations, etc. makes users feel good. They would become excited to learn more about the site and you can now promote the products and services in a nice way through the animated videos, images, etc. It helps you to find potential buyers and you can expand your business with a higher sale.

So, you get an idea of how to improve the DA and it’s time to achieve a better rank in the search engines.