There is no checklist when it comes to Local SEO, since every project is different. But with two sets of algos, Google Organic and Google Maps, Local SEO will be fairly involved because the latter defines what location is being referred to by the former.
30,000 of these people are located within 30 miles of the case study site. There are two international airports within 30 miles, and 200,000 of them were in the greater area during the two-week study period.
The client’s website already had a kind of good organic ranking for location-based queries, but it wasn’t showing up as a local pack for actual city searches; this is problematic for taxi companies operating mainly in cities.
Although I cannot share the domain name, the taxi industry is very competitive, and the competition from Uber is becoming ever-greater.
Several Issues:
As a result of analyzing the website’s current organic rankings (outside of the city radius) and local pack rankings, I made the following decision.
- Work Performed On-site.
- A guide to city location / content.
- Content / guides related to airport location.
- NAP changing (what is this ?).
In local SEO shouldn’t you look at your business’s NAP first?
As a general rule yes, but I was removing an entire neighborhood from NAP (I’ll explain why when I get to the section where I talk about this). Since this can be quite risky – the NAP was perfect – I wanted to target as many local searches as possible first and let the client rank organically in case this went haywire, and also change of address can be a slow process.
I was sweating a little as I did this local SEO project — after all, this is somebody’s livelihood, along with a dozen other drivers.
For advice on local SEO, please don’t hesitate to contact Roseville SEO Company. We are always pleased to assist businesses and entrepreneurs.
Tasks on-site
However, there was slight inconsistency in the site’s organic performance.
- Phone number in.
- Services on the page / city.
- Services moved to the beginning of the navigation on the homepage, particularly for mobile users.
- The coverage of the city centre and the surrounding areas is represented in structured data through the service area geoMidpoint.
Content in City Location Guides
I made sure this business had good organic search rankings out of every possible search query in the city. Things like taxi stands, curbside drop offs, parking, wheelchair friendly parking, restaurant parking, hotel parking, practically anybody that goes into the city – by car, plane, or train – could find a cab on the street organically.
You need to remember that them being in the local pack while in the city did not make them appear.
We provided written content, created downloadable Google maps (the Taxi rank guide has been viewed 170,000 times now), and generated video content using dashcam footage inside cabs to generate short cut tips around the city.
Additionally, we are working on advancing our content calendar with lots of “travel oriented” content geared toward tourists.
Content / Guides / Airport Locations
Even though not within the city, two international airports are near and airport transfers are highly profitable due to the fact that 60 million tourists visit this area every year. To push the airport transfer pages into the local pack, they needed to have more content specific to the airport, as opposed to being dependent on the visitor being in the city. Additionally, since customers tend to book in advance and compare quotes before choosing a cab, this is not a time-sensitive request like calling for an ordinary cab.
The following content / guides were included (for both airport locations): A brief introduction to the airport, maps of the various parking parking areas around the airport that can be used short and long-term, as well as detailed information for people who want to go by train.
Additionally, we included companies offering long-term parking off-site and contacted them via email / shared with them via social media when live. Don’t not use every opportunity you have to promote your content.
Changing the NAP
It was quite a unique situation in needing to update all of the address information. This particular business, located 2.5 miles from the city center, was located roughly 50 metres away from the boundary where a whole new county began.
In order to correct the PIN, I used the back side of the building to move the location to a parallel road that did not pass through the next county (state for US readers). In order to play with the PIN marker, a Service Area Business is really the only real option, and this still remains within guidelines as it was placed on top of the building anyway, just another road.
What I really wanted was taken off of the address was the area: street address, suburb, and city since it was at the boundary between this county and the next one.
Thank goodness this business had found the main directory links and not mass-diverted to the crappy directories, so within days all addresses were reflecting the address change, the suburbs just were not.
Then we published them as part of a blog on site, as well as posts on G+ (G+ is a very effective way for links to be discovered quickly). The local pack was being shown for the business on almost all search queries originating within the city itself due to these changes.
Task Completed
Although stunning results were achieved, I do foresee some fluctuations in the next month, and then we can better refine and fine-tune our pages accordingly. We also have a content plan to prevent us from losing out on all those tourists and continue moving the site forward.
The importance of talking to the business and understanding their needs cannot be stressed enough, thus the back-to-front approach I came up with for this project. We were concerned about the loss of call volume, so we enhanced visibility for all local queries to prevent any drop-offs when we introduced the address correction.
If you are in the same situation, don’t wait until the last minute to assess the client’s location in the county and whether you perceive Annabot’s city and county lines the same way.