IFTS, Inc. Blog – Page 33

Is Your Business’s Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) Consistent Across the Web?

Think about the many places your business’s contact information is displayed on the internet. Is the name, address, and phone number consistent with spelling and capitalization everywhere?

Now that it’s on your mind – It’s a great time to double check on this information if you are looking to improve your search ranking and drive local traffic to your site.

Using this guide, we will cover:

What is NAP?
How to optimize your NAP across the web
How NAP consistently impacts SEO
What is the difference between a citation and a directory?
- Free download: Top 25 local citation sites

What is NAP?

NAP stands for name, address, phone number; referring to the business name, address and phone number that you use on all sites that you appear. Local SEO depends on your NAP being consistent across the web. This means that your business name, address, and phone number are listed and spelled the same exact way everywhere they are found on the internet.

From your own website to each of your social media profiles, directory listings, other websites, and even business cards, this information needs to be EXACTLY THE SAME across the board.

NAP consistency is a foundational local SEO strategy, but many people may see this as a daunting task. If your citations across the web are inconsistent, or if you don’t have any at all, this is the first place you should start.

How consistent does NAP need to be?

Search engines focus heavily on details. Consistent listings will include your basic information, but they need to have the same spelling, formatting, and punctuation.

When checking the consistency of NAP, keep these points in mind:

The company’s full name

Make sure that you use the full name of your business (no abbreviations) and that the capitalization remains consistent. Example: “Big Shot Berry’s House of Wings” in one citation should not be represented as “BSB house of wings” in another.

The address

Is the address correct in all places that it appears? Are there any abbreviations? For example, if the address is 1234 Star Street, make sure that you stay consistent with using either “Street” or “St.”

The phone number

Is the business’s phone number correct in each place that it appears? When it comes to the phone number being consistent, make note of the punctuation used. For example, your phone number may be shown as (123) 456-7890 in one spot and 123.456.7890 in another spot. Choose one option and make it the same across the board. Consistency matters even down to the parentheses.

QUICK TIP: Don’t forget about your business cards! Although this will not factor into your SEO strategy, the consistency still matters! You want to be sure that these have the correct information on them if they are being handed out.

How NAP consistency impacts SEO

Consistency with NAP is crucial for any business that wants to rank highly in local search results. This will allow search engines to understand a little more about your business, what you do, and how users can find your information on the internet to reach you.

In a way, search engines and users think alike. Inconsistency causes confusion on both ends. Businesses listed as multiple names, with different addresses and inconsistent phone numbers is bound to leave everyone feeling a bit confused, not to mention, lessen your ranking.

Conflicting information will lead search engines to be uncertain about what your business is or where it is located. They will not lead their users to a listing that they are not confident about.

The same goes for leads – they will also turn to other businesses who have consistent information because they will have more confidence in that listing and feel that they can trust that business.

If you want to rank higher and show up in search results for keywords that are relevant to your business, checking over your company’s NAP consistency needs to be your starting point.

What is the difference between a citation and a directory?

Citations are references that include information about your company’s name, address, and phone number on local directories, review sites and business listings. Any time a business is mentioned on the internet and contact information is shown is considered a local citation.

Something to keep in mind: every directory listing is a citation, but not every citation is a directory listing.

Do citations have to link back to your site to be relevant?

Citations don’t necessarily have to link back to your site to send positive signals to the search engines about your business. By having consistent data across your business listings, this is a signal in itself to Google that your business is authentic.

What if I don’t have citations? Where should I start?

Google My Business

If you have not yet claimed or created a Google my business profile, let this be your first step. We have an entire guide on creating a Google my business profile that will help walk you through setting this up. Being present on Google my business will link your business to a local audience and ultimately provide the best SEO benefits of any directory.

Facebook

Today, Facebook is an important part of local marketing strategies. Some leads may not bother to check out your business on Google but will still see what you have to offer on social media. Creating a Facebook page is a great way to open more opportunities for your business.

Apple Maps Connect

On every Apple device, Apple Maps is the default map app. This is similar to Google My Business, but specific to Apple. When you search locally on an iPhone or iPad, you will be connected to businesses via Apple Maps.

These are the top 3 directory sources, but we have created a list of the Top 25 Local Citation Sites! Download and use it to build a presence on highly ranked local citation sites and directories. This list of the top 25 local citation sites will help you build a solid foundation for your local SEO strategy.

Go here and claim your copy today: https://blog.iftsdesign.com/local-citation-pdf/

How to do Keyword Research to Improve Your SEO

Keyword research is the core of digital marketing. This SEO strategy should be performed regularly in order to stay in touch with your audience as they grow and evolve.

The goal of YOUR research is to find out what words or phrases your target audience is searching for, so you know what it will take to rank on search engines for those specific terms.

If you don’t know what keywords you should be targeting for your business – how are you going to optimize your website and create content to best serve your client?

In this guide, we will cover:

What are keywords?
What is keyword research and why is it important?
How to conduct keyword research using SEMrush
How to use that keyword research to get more clients (with some BONUS TIPS)

What is a keyword?

Keywords, also known as search terms or search queries, are the words and phrases that searchers use to perform a search in a search engine (like Google or Bing). Keywords are extremely important in an SEO strategy and should be the backbone of any written content you release on the web.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is an SEO strategy that is used to find specific terms that users enter into search engines to find products, services, and information. More importantly, keyword research helps you figure out how people find you. Using this knowledge, you’ll know exactly what to write about on your website and blog for your target audience.

In order to get traffic from Google, performing keyword research to understand the words and phrases used by searchers is essential. Google uses this information to determine what content is relevant to a search term, and how that page should rank in search.

Proper keyword research will help you:

Understand your audience
Reach your audience
Find new hot topics to cover
Improve ad campaigns
Build brand awareness

Why is keyword research important?

Do you ever wish that you could read the mind of your perfect client? With a little bit of keyword research, you CAN jump into their mind to figure out the exact words and phrases they are using to search for results that relate to your business.

Who wants to waste time creating content on topics that aren’t being searched for?

Keyword research can help you answer the following questions:

How difficult is it to rank for this keyword?
How much traffic will I receive if I rank for this keyword?
What keywords are my competitors ranking for?

How to do keyword research

Keyword research consists of collecting relevant variations of all keywords that relate to your website, products, services, etc.

We are going to walk you through researching keywords using SEMrush. This is an amazing tool that is used to improve online visibility and discover marketing insights.

Step 1: Build your keyword list

Let’s build a list of keywords for ABC painting company. To begin, we will start by searching for a general keyword relating to this business. In the image above, you can see that we searched for “professional painter” in the keyword overview section of SEMrush.

Keyword overview gives you a quick analysis of your keywords. You can see a summary of metrics for each keyword such as number of results on a search engine results page, monthly search volume, average cost per click in Google Ads, paid search competition, and more.

You can create your master keyword list using the keyword magic tool. Starting with our seed keyword, professional painter, we are now able to see lists of keyword variations and related keywords.

You don’t have to stop here; continue to search for other seed keywords if you would like to keep growing your list. When researching keywords, be sure to also search for location specific keywords. For example, “professional painter pittsburgh” or “Pittsburgh painting company”.

The photo above shows the list of keyword variations for “professional painter”. Although the results show thousands of keywords, this does not mean that they will all be relevant for you. After your initial list has been built, it will need to be trimmed down to just the terms that are truly relevant to the site you are researching.

Step 2: Analyzing your keyword list

Having a list of thousands of keywords is all good and well but how do you know which ones are the best to use? SEO keyword metrics can be used to narrow your master list down and find the best of the best.

Export the data from SEMrush and make note of the columns boxed in red – these are the categories that you want to look at. These are the keyword metrics that will help you narrow your list and find the best keywords to use.

Search Volume

Search volume shows you the number of monthly searches for a particular keyword over the previous 12 months.

Keyword difficulty (KD%)

The keyword difficulty index (from 1 to 100%) shows you how difficult it would be to outrank your competitors in the Google organic top 20 for a given keyword. The higher the percentage, the harder it will be to achieve high rankings for each targeted keyword.

Cost per click (CPC $)

Average price in USD that advertisers pay when a user clicks on an ad triggered by a given keyword.

Competitive density (Com.)

The level of competition between advertisers bidding on a given keyword within their PPC campaigns. Competitive Density is shown on a scale from 0 to 1.00 with 1.00 being the most difficult to rank for.

Now that you have formed a list using what you think that people search for, it’s time to confirm your suspicions by researching your competitors.

Competitor-based keyword research

Competitor keyword research uses seed websites instead of seed keywords to begin searching. This approach can be used in conjunction with traditional keyword research.

Discover organic competitors

Using organic search, you are able to find who Google believes your competitors are. You can also see what keywords they are ranking for.

Even if you think you know who your competitors are, it is still a good idea to check it out with this tool. One important note, if you don’t see any of the competitors that you expect on this list, there is a good chance that your website is not optimized for the right keywords.

Navigate to the organic search tab on the left side menu and enter your domain in the search bar. Click on the competitors tab to reveal the table of domains that you are in competition with.

Here is a list of your competitors that can be used as your seed domains. They are sorted by competition level showing how close of a competitor they are to the one that was entered in the search bar. This metric is based on the total number of keywords of each competitor and the number of common keywords between the competitors.

How to get your competitors keywords

Under the positions report of the Organic research for the seed domain, you can find all of the keywords that a domain is ranked for.

Each keyword that a domain ranks for is shown in this list and is accompanied by a link to that corresponding landing page along with metrics to help further your research. So, for each of your competitors, type their URL into the search bar under “organic research” and you will have access to all of the keywords they are ranking for.

Between using a seed keyword and your competitors’ keywords, this method should help you create a list of keywords relevant to your business.

What Should I Do With a Keyword List?

Taking the time to create this list can help your business in multiple ways, but the ultimate goal is always to get more clients.

So how do you use this list?

Write Relevant Blogs for Your Clients

You can use the list to write blogs or articles about the things that your target market are searching for. SEMrush will also give you FAQs about the keywords your search. Pick a few of these questions that are focused on a keyword and answer them.

BONUS TIP – You can also turn that blog into a script for a video that you can post on YouTube.

Improve Your Onsite SEO

You can use the list to improve the onsite SEO of your website. Make sure that common keywords and phrases are found in your website headers, page titles and more.

BONUS TIP – Include keywords when you are naming images. This is one trick that people do not typically take advantage of.

Improve the SEO of Your Social Media Profiles

Use the list that you create to craft the perfect message in your social media profiles. By using words and phrases that they are using frequently, they will feel like you are talking to them and that you understand them.

Create Google Ads that Perform Well

Keyword research is critical when it comes to creating Google Ads and not spending a fortune. Be sure to figure out what people are searching for when it comes to your business so you don’t waste your time and budget by showing ads to people searching the wrong thing.

Questions about keywords? Need help doing with your keyword research? Contact IFTS today and ask about our keyword research package! We do the keyword research for you and set you up with a content plan for the next 365 days!

On-page SEO Techniques that will Help Boost your Search Ranking

On-page SEO specifically focuses on web page and content optimization. The factors associated with this all have to do with the elements of your own website, which you can change and improve over time.

The 2 main factors to look at when you want to optimize your on-page SEO are:

CONTENT on your site
HTML SOURCE CODE of a page

The goal of on-page SEO is to make it easier for both search engines and users to:

Understand what is being presented on a web page
Relate that page to a particular search query (or keyword phrase)
Find that page useful and worthy of ranking in a top position on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

Ready to improve your search ranking? In this blog post, we will review five on-page SEO factors and explain techniques for optimizing those specific areas.

How to Optimize Your Page’s Title Tag

What is it?

The most important of all tags on your page is the title tag. The title tag outlines what the page is about; it is the clickable headline users see on the search engine results pages, and also the words that appear at the top of each tab in your browser.

Why is it important?

You are helping your website rank better just by having heading tags on your web pages. Having heading tags alone won’t do the trick to get you to the #1 position. By having heading tags optimized specifically to the content on that page will work in conjunction with the other optimizable elements of your site

Techniques to optimize your heading tags

Adding keywords to your heading tags is a great technique to use when trying to outrank your competition. Be sure to only use keywords that are relevant to the content within the page.

Another suggestion is to add keywords that are synonyms of the main keyword in lesser headings. So, if the main keyword phrase that you are targeting is “Finding a Pittsburgh Attorney”, a good synonym phrase to use in an h2 or h3 header would be “Working with Lawyers in Western PA” or something similar.

How to Optimize your Image Names & ALT Tags

What is the image name and alt tag?

Image optimization is often overlooked when it comes to SEO. For search engines to understand your photos, they too need to be optimized.

Image name is simply just the name of the image file. For example, the original name of an image of a woman at a fitness center may be “img74635.jpg.” This can be renamed with a more descriptive title such as “woman-running-on-treadmill-at-planet-fitness.jpg.” Using hyphens when naming your images makes it easier for search engines to individually read each word.

Alt tags or alternative text are not only used to help search engines accurately index your images, but they can be used to help provide context for visually impaired users too. This can aid in your page’s ADA compliance. Alt tags can include more detail than the image name, but it is best to keep it between 10-15 words.

To create an alt tag, you add an “alt” description to the image’s html code. For example, the html code for an image may look like this:

When you add an alt tag, it will look like this:

To create an alt tag in WordPress, you need to click on your “Media Library” and select an image. This will open the image properties on the right-hand side of your screen. In the example below, we show the image properties for a lapping compound called “LINDE-A”.

To add your alt text, click into the “Alternative Text” box and add a description that would benefit a person if they could not see your image. This also gives you a chance to use a keyword phrase for your SEO.

To finish on our example, we have now added an easy to understand description that would benefit anyone that could not see the image, but also uses the keyword phrase “lapping compound”:

wordpress media library showing alternative text example

Why are they important?

Choosing the right name for your image is extremely important for your page’s SEO. When using images on your website, make sure to include your most important keyword in the image name or ALT tag. This is such a great way to help search engines better index your images and they can even appear when users search for images with that certain keyword.

Techniques to optimize your image names and alt tags

Describe the images as specifically as possible while using relative keywords. The more specific you can be, the better chance you have of that image ranking highly. Keep in mind that it won’t be beneficial to use the same keyword for every image on your page. Write unique text that is specific to the contents of each individual image.

How to Optimize Internal Links

What are internal links?

A great way to help search engines learn a lot more about your site is by building internal links to other content on your website. An internal link is a link from one page to another page on the same domain.

a link from one page to another page on the same domain — The content in one blog post links to another blog post on the same domain.

Why are they important?

Internal linking allows users to easily navigate a website and help spread ranking power. Search engines use these links to navigate your website which is important because they will not find a page if there are no links to it.

They also help describe to the search engine bots how your site is organized. If you think of your website as a spider web, these are the inner strings that connect related topics.

Techniques to optimize your internal linking

Make sure that all of the most important pages on your site are linked. Search engines heavily rely on sitemaps and internal links to discover web pages. Another good rule of thumb is to include breadcrumbs on your site.

Set up an internal linking strategy and determine a structure for your website. Imagine your site as a pyramid with your homepage on top, sections or categories in the middle and individual posts and pages on the bottom. Having the ability to reach each page on your site within 3 clicks of the homepage is considered a good internal linking practice.

Want to Keep learning about SEO? Check out these other helpful resources