CDG Marketing & Web Design

SEO

Critical info about Google My Business service areas

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If you got an email from Google My Business about your “New service areas”  DO NOT IGNORE IT!

Let me say that again… Do Not Ignore the email from Google My Business.

It looks like this:

screenshot of GMB email about service areas

This is related to a huge change at GMB for local businesses. If you used a “miles from” radius on your listing, it needs to be addressed. Using a radius was a common method for local businesses to designate a service area, especially when the business solely sees clients at their location. Google is guessing what cities you serve (and I’m not sure what their methodology is). I’ve looked at the listings for my own business and a few others today and all of them needed updates. My own listing didn’t include Norfolk and Virginia Beach (where most of my clients are located!), but included some random cities in North Carolina.

So, TODAY, make time to look for that email from Google My Business and click the blue “Review my information” button. Add the missing cities and/or counties, and delete the ones that are mistakes.

If you don’t do it, you will not show up in the local results for the cities that aren’t on it.

DO NOT IGORE IT

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics

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Whether your are blogging or developing another type of website, the basics to SEO remain the same:

On-page SEO includes:

  • Good, fresh content
  • Optimized content
    • Meta <Title> Tag containing keyword
    • Meta <Description> Tag containing keyword
    • A reasonable density of the keyword you are targeting in your content
    • Proximity of keyword to beginning of content
    • Keyword appearing in H tags and alt tags (there is dispute over this in the SEO world)
  • Schema markup

google search display with markup SEO

Off-page SEO includes:

  • Quality links back to your site:
    • Organic links
    • Directory links
    • Authority site links
  • Social Signals
  • Integration of products offered by the search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

The trick, of course, is doing all that optimization to make the search engines happy, and still having a site that looks and reads well to your human audience. If your visitors don’t become leads or customers all the SEO in the world is useless.

SEO is a top that changes constantly, mostly due to updates in the algorithms used by Google (primarily) and other search engines.

This barely scratches the surface of SEO. Entire courses are available on this topic because, contrary to rumors: SEO is here to stay.