What is an Effective Local SEO Strategy

December 15, 2020 by David Henderson

Do customers know the areas you operate in? How effectively do you target customers within a 25-mile radius of your business locations? These are just two of the many questions you may need to answer when determining if you have an effective local SEO services plan. The good news is that, even if you don’t, it’s not too late to revise it or create a brand-new one.

What Is Local SEO?

Local search engine optimization refers to the ranking performance of your website at the local level. For instance, let’s say you own a cafe in Kitchener. You specialize in creating mainland-Spanish pastries and strong coffee. If someone does a search for “flan near me” while in Kitchener, your cafe should rank in the search results. This is local SEO.

This is different from when someone in Nashua, New Hampshire, searches for “famous Spanish desserts” and your website shares a listicle that ranks flan at the top of the list. This is a regular SEO. While it does bring traffic to your website, it may not bring you virtual traffic that quickly converts into foot traffic.

How Do You Know If Your Local SEO Is Effective?

The most important deciding factor is whether your local SEO converts viewers into customers. That said, you may not immediately know how the person placing an order on your website or walking through the front door came across your business.

You may ask, but customers have begun to feel overwhelmed by the frequency of marketing surveys.

In most cases, you can create location-specific marketing solutions to this problem. When customers follow these pipelines to your business, it lets you know exactly where they came from.

Branding is another important tell-tale sign of your local SEO. How well-known is your business in the area? When locals recommend businesses in your field, does yours rank near the top of the list? Are you the go-to option?

What Can You Do To Improve Local SEO?

To have an effective local SEO services plan, hiring professionals is the most important step in planning and strategizing. Once hired, professionals can work with you to execute some of the following tactics.

Google Business Profile

When Google ranks businesses in local results, it shows business listings based on a Google Business Profile. Claim yours online and fill out the information. To improve your chances of ranking ahead of your competitors, encourage your customers to post reviews. Forbes believes this is the biggest contribution you can make toward an effective local SEO strategy.

Localized Content

In the past, companies created localized content by managing multiple websites. Today, unless products differ across locations, companies use one website and multiple geo-location web pages. While some companies still use multiple websites when creating localized content, this may hurt your SEO in the long run.

Influencer Marketing

Are there any well-known people who have some sway with your target demographic? This may not always mean a local politician or celebrity. An influencer overseas may easily become popular among the target demographic in your area. Consider partnering with one for marketing.

Location-Specific Coupons

Do you send coupons to your customers by snail mail or email? Whatever option you choose, you can create different ones for each location. That way, you can determine what sales come from each coupon and where those sales come from.

Tracking Links

There are several ways to create special links that trackback to one specific source. You may use these for affiliate marketing or to link for specific pages, such as landing pages for each location you serve.

Our local SEO services can help you determine what strategies may work best for your online business needs in Kitchener. Contact Unwired Web Solutions to get started.

Checklist for Migrating Your Website Without Hurting Your SEO

November 18, 2020 by David Henderson

An important aspect of providing search engine optimization services is forming part of the core team business owners rely on during website migration. This stems from the fact that any changes to a website can affect how well it ranks in search engines. So, before you migrate your website, here are a few things to help you create or improve your checklist for protecting your SEO.

1. Determine the Type of Site Migration

Every type or example of site migration comes with its own unique risks, so it is important to pinpoint what you plan to do. This provides a good foundation for your IT, marketing and SEO teams to work together to ensure a smooth transition. Here are the five main types:

Site Location: This may involve changing the mobile setup, merging parts of the existing site, changing to HTTPS or HTTP2, changing the domain and general rebranding.
Structural: Common changes that fit into this category include reorganizing hierarchies, changing the mapped user journeys, altering navigation and making changes to internal links.
Platform: Examples of these changes are integrating multiple platforms, upgrading to a new version, introducing new features and moving to a new platform altogether.
Design and UX: Adjusting the media, updating the user interface across devices, adding site performance features and modifying the look or feel fall into this category.
Content Changes: Introducing new locations and new languages can have big changes in SEO; other big changes include consolidating pages, removing or adding pages and rewriting content.

2. Create a Strategy

Treat website migration like any other big project your business would take on. Migration has the impact to determine how you do business and how many customers you receive. For instance, for a restaurant, if the pages that make online orders possible disappear, the effect can be as impactful as reducing the restaurant’s capacity during renovations. Because of this, your team needs to determine how it intends to manage this project and create a plan. This plan must feature a clear strategy and detailed deliverables.

3. Include a Contingency

The contingency plan you come up with depends on the type of migration you have in mind. For instance, if you plan to change domains or rebuild the entire website, you could keep the old one up while creating the second website in private. Only developers and other qualified professionals could view the new website while it is being worked on. This allows you to continue business operations with no disruptions, at least for a time.

Unfortunately, websites can still fail after launch. Here are some common backup plans:

Revert to the old website during debugging.
Create a one-page stand-in that encourages people to email, text or call.
Add a texting option to your Google Business Profile listening.

4. Complete Thorough Testing

The good news is that testing can help you maintain SEO and prevent crashes when migrating your website. Testing should begin with trying all the features on the new website to ensure they work. When migration involves rebranding and big upgrades, ask a few trusted customers to review the new changes and become part of the testing process. Finally, perform testing in stages as you complete various milestones, so you have enough time to make adjustments before launch.

5. Rely on Our Search Engine Optimization Services

The smallest changes to your website can affect its SEO for better or worse. Even changing the platform and speed can lead to improved or lowered performance. Because of this, it is crucial to work with qualified professionals. Unwired Web Solutions has the skills necessary to preserve your existing SEO during and after migration. We are also committed to helping you improve your website’s SEO.

Contact us today to learn more about what our search engine optimization services can do for your business. We look forward to serving you.

How Social Media Marketing and Branding Affects Your Online Presence

October 29, 2020 by David Henderson

For most modern-day businesses, social media plays a crucial role in how owners develop, expand and improve their online presence. In fact, many small businesses that do not have the resources to invest in a website use only social media accounts to get started. Social media websites also form part of your company’s search engine optimization opportunities. If you can use the same company that provides your SEO services to handle your social media, you have struck gold.

The Impact of Social Media on Your Brand

Companies have a love-hate relationship with social media. Build the right social brand and you could see website traffic soar through the roof for all the right reasons. Suddenly, your brand scores lots of free publicity through reviews on YouTube and photos on Instagram. However, in the wrong hands or after one mistake, social media followers can turn against the very brands they support.

So, what can companies do to ensure they experience more positive outcomes than negative ones? Here are a few tips:

Hire a diverse team to ensure people from various backgrounds vet messages that go out online.
Rely on experienced professionals to handle social media management accounts, so there are fewer mishaps.
Have a crisis management plan at the ready, just in case something does go amiss online or off.
Avoid sensitive topics that may lead to negative blowback you feel your company is unable to weather, whenever possible.
Focus on not just publishing posts but building a community and learning more about your current and potential customers.
Incorporate solid SEO strategies into your social media campaign.

How Social Media Affects Your Search Engine Optimization

Did you know that social media posts now rank in Google search results? From Quora answers to Facebook business listings and Twitter posts, your social media content can attract good SEO for your brand. What does this mean for your company?

1. Social Media Platforms Act as Search Engines

Not only do social media posts rank in other search engines, but they provide search engines of their own. YouTube is an excellent example of this. Google’s champion social media platform is second only to itself as a search engine and completes more user searches than Ask.com, AOL and Yahoo combined. Hashtags form part of the internal search engine and make for great branding tools as well.

2. Social Media Backlinks May or May Not Count

There is an ongoing debate among social media gurus about whether social media backlinks count as credible backlinks that Google actually pays attention to. Many say no, they do not. However, if you have ever had a post go viral, you may also notice your SEO performance surging. At the very least, being super shareable online can’t hurt.

3. Social Media Accounts Can Refer Website Traffic

Even if your company’s social media backlinks do not provide direct SEO juice, they do help refer traffic to your website. This is likely one of the reasons that having a linked web page go viral can boost your business. Even if you do not have a link to your website in the post, links on your social media profile make it possible for interested parties to dig further.

How To Move Forward

If you have not created social media accounts or neglected the ones you do have, you may miss out on big opportunities in marketing. After all, roughly 40% of consumers online use social media as part of their product research process. To add to this, when people complain about a brand on Twitter, 78% expect the company to respond in an hour or less. Is your social media strategy up to the task?

Unwired Web Solutions can help you create an effective social media strategy. Reach out to us to find out what hiring a local SEO company can do for your business’s online presence.

Reasons To Maintain Your Marketing Efforts During the Global Pandemic

July 23, 2020 by David Henderson

Most businesses are scrambling to recover from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The public health crisis has changed the way companies operate both internally and externally. More than ever, businesses need to connect with their customers by accelerating online marketing services and efforts. Maintaining a positive, consistent presence in your industry is vital to weathering the storm of the pandemic, recovering profits and continuing business development efforts. Read below for more information on why it is important to continue your marketing efforts during the pandemic:

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a digital form of marketing that helps companies establish and enhance brand visibility and build relationships with customers. This form of marketing aims to provide the customer with valuable informative content. Content marketing first started as blog posts and link building and has evolved to include more sophisticated strategies, including social media and SEO tactics.

Online marketing is not focused specifically on promoting products and services. Instead, current strategies involve providing the customer with relevant and timely information. It is important to offer valuable content especially during times of crisis. If you have useful information for your customers now, you can build a relationship that will be profitable in the future.

The Challenges of Marketing During COVID-19

While traditional marketing efforts involve travelling and in-person presentations, the pandemic has caused companies to reevaluate their efforts and redistribute budget funds. Because most companies can no longer attend large events, they need to refocus their efforts more on online marketing efforts.

Another challenge is shifting priorities within company leadership. Changing priorities may mean that you are forced to put a project on the backburner that you have been working on for a long time. The importance of projects must be reassessed and flexibility is more crucial now than ever.

Why Content Marketing Remains Important

Most people are spending more time than ever on the internet. Many people are working from home and few are leaving their homes as often as they normally would. A recent survey found that nearly 95% of people have bought something online in the past month. This demonstrates how online content marketing remains a successful way to reach customers. There are perhaps more opportunities than ever to expand your online strategy. You can turn in-person events to digital events and have the opportunity to scale them internationally and increase customer engagement.

The pandemic allows businesses to focus on online strategies they normally would not have considered. From paid advertising to social media advertising, this is the time to try new content delivery methods. In essence, the current market is an opportunity to experiment and find new content marketing strategies that help your business grow. You want your customers to know you are still open for business and are ready to engage with them. Here are content marketing strategies to consider implementing to remain engaged with customers during the pandemic:

Create more targeted landing pages
Perform market research on your audience
Invest in social media marketing efforts
Target younger audiences with adaptive content
Create and take online training modules
Use native advertising

Online content marketing during pandemic requires creativity and adaptability. If you make an effort to better serve your customers, they will recognize those efforts.

Contact Unwired Web Solutions Today

If you need assistance with your online marketing strategy, contact Unwired Web Solutions today. We want to help your brand expand its online visibility and grow sales. We offer services including SEO, web design, content marketing, and social media marketing to help your brand succeed in an internet environment. Contact us to find out how we can expand your company’s online presence.

Whats New with Search Engine Optimization for 2020

June 17, 2020 by David Henderson

Search engine optimization is one of the most important aspects of any marketing mix. By improving your website ranking in search results, you can also improve the efficacy of your other channels. In other words, when your business is easier to find, you earn more sales.

However, search engines are constantly changing. They update their algorithms regularly and introduce new features. These updates enhance the way that people search, but they also make optimization a moving target for businesses. Therefore, it is important to stay up to date with the latest trends. Furthermore, businesses must stay active with SEO in order to bring as many relevant visitors to their sites as possible.

Voice Search

It may be hard to believe that voice search first became part of the Google mix back in 2012. At the time, it seemed to many like a fad feature that would be fun to play with but that would never have a major impact on search. Of course, in 2020, we know that voice search is here to stay.

The growing popularity of home speakers and smartphone assistants has helped to make voice search not only a permanent fixture but also an important focal point of SEO. Today, tens of millions of searches are initiated by voice every month. To capture a slice of these, you need highly optimized content that plays well with Google’s voice search results.

Implementing structured data targeted at voice search and leveraging Speakable markup can increase your website’s visibility. Understanding Google Actions is also helpful for making the most of voice search.

Google Actions/Entities

Google is increasingly putting development time into more defined and structured data. Whereas search algorithms were once enough to provide valuable search results, today users expect more. Furthermore, there is so much data on the internet that Google expects businesses and developers to “play nice” with its functionality in order to rank well.

Actions on Google and entities are examples of this. The first is voice search actions that can be integrated into software to allow Google Assistant to control it. Entities are a well-defined thing or concept in Google’s search results. Websites and apps with data that are structured to work with these types of results tend to perform better.

Topics & Semantics Over Keywords

In years past, SEO involved a lot of gaming search engine results pages. People would pack their content with keywords to help it rank better. Today, Google and other search engines have gotten smarter. They are structuring their algorithms to more closely match what people want to see.

Perhaps the most significant example of this is the heightened focus on topics and semantics. Increasingly, Google can understand the meaning of users’ searches. The engine isn’t just matching keywords from search terms to words on web pages. Instead, it figures out what the user actually wants and finds content that is highly relevant to that topic.

For businesses, this means one thing: High-value, relevant content is king. To rank well on searches, there are fewer games to be played. Instead, the content needs to raise and answer questions that users are actually searching for. Webpages still need to be optimized so that Google can understand them. However, there is no replacing high-quality content.

Get Help Harnessing the Latest Trends

If your business needs help with SEO in 2020 and beyond, Unwired Web Solutions is here for you. We are a digital marketing agency that helps brands like yours compete online. Our services include web design, content management, social media, and search engine optimization. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help your business succeed.