If you are trying to improve local SEO for a small website and read this post, I will save you from reading 3 books, listening to 30 podcast episodes, and reading another 100 blog posts about SEO.
This year I read a number of great books. About half of them were business related, and the other half development related.
Among these, I stumbled into a book on SEO. It was great to finally learn about how the internet really functions after being a web developer for 6 years.
The first thing I learned is that SEO is really Really REALLY complicated. The second thing I learned is that it's complicated because of developers.
It's our fault because we are so good at automating, scaling, and spamming that is automatable, scalable, and spam-able. If you're a dev reading this right now, you are not surprised in the slightest.
As an example, I learned from GrumpySEOguy on Youtube that sidebars with links to other sites can hurt rank because back in the day this was one of the best ways to create backlinks on thousands of pages from website A to point at website B and get a lot of authority. Google has had to take great countermeasures in page rank to avoid the spamming of links because programmers are great at putting links on hundreds of pages.
There are 100 more examples like this, and they can all be summarized as "Google does X because programmers do Y if they don't do X".
But having said all of this, there's one thing I want to give y'all that I think is really nice to know if you are a website builder who builds small local websites, has a small local business, or is helping a family member of friend with their local site.
Local SEO is much simpler than SEO.
GrumpySEO guy hasn't made a video about this yet, but there's only a few things to do if you have a website that needs to serve traffic for searches with "near me" at the end. Ex: "plumber near me", "coffee shop near me", etc.
You need to fully fill out a google business profile(GMB) and add the website to it. Full out the profile in a way that users searching for your services would see you if they searched "___ near me".
Be sure that the google profile has an address or service area that is local to where you are providing services.
Be sure that any other websites that mention you, like yellow pages, facebook pages, instagram accounts, etc. all reference the same name, address or service area, etc. that your GMB profile does. This will help google to know about who your business is and tie these items together.
Get reviews. If you have already served customers, you want to follow up with them and get reviews. Reviews are going to directly help the business to show up when a local user searches for your service.
That's it. Don't go read 3 books, listen to 30 podcast episodes, and read 100 blog posts on it. Just read what I typed here, and implement it.
If you got something out of this. Follow me on X. I am always hacking on something new. Right now, it's studynearme which is my site that finds laptop-friendly places to work for a day with 1 tap.
Cheers.
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