Quick Local Hits To Optimize For Black Friday & Cyber Mondays This Season
The biggest shopping days of the year are coming up fast, but there are still things you can do to prepare and pump up your sales further. Here are a few Local SEO quick-hitters that can improve your performance in 2014.
So, stepping up your SEO game can still pay off this season. I’ve written tips before on optimizing for the holiday season, and, I’ve now updated and added some new tips for 2014.
Holiday 2014 Tips
Some of these are quick-hitters, so even if everything isn’t perfect in your company’s Local SEO game, you can still get more juice out of this season if you can push a few more levers.
1. Listings Audit
Do a quick audit of your listings in online directories and correct any information that’s off. Business listings in online directories are one major source of Citations for Local SEO — Citations are mentions of a business’s name, location and contact information which Google uses as a measure of prominence.
2. Directory Listings
Obtain more directory listings. Pump up your local ranking potential more by insuring your listing is in more directories — this gets you more Citations which will augment your ability to rank well.
3. Category Check
Add/change categories. Check the existing categories your business is listed under in online directories — many businesses neglect to check this, and may be incorrectly categorized or may have neglected to be included in all the categories they could be.
4. Advertising
Consider advertising in online yellow pages. According to some statistics, online business directories of many types have seen an upswing in their traffic this year, perhaps due to the Pigeon Update to Google’s algorithms which seemed to raise directories in search results for many keyword combinations.
5. Product/Service Listings
List products/services on your website. So many small business websites I examine are little more than a few pages with the business name, logo, photo, basic description and “Contact Us” information.
6. Customer Reviews
Add customer reviews and endorsements onto your own site! This could provide a quick “stealth optimization” tactic to put you ahead of the competition over the holidays, because most local sites have not adopted this advantage. There are three ways that this can work, if it’s done right.
7. Meta Description Tags
Update your Meta Tag Description text to include seasonal messages and discount details!
