February 7, 2017 – SEMpdx welcomed two SEO experts to speak at our February event. Kevin Chow, from Webfor, shared his insights on the future of local search, and David Portney, from 3Q Digital, discussed real-world SEO strategies and tactics that everyone can start implementing right away. Following are a few key take-aways from the evening:
- Centroids are not always located downtown. With desktop search, the centroid is located where the cluster grouping is for each vertical. With mobile search, the user is the centroid.
- When it comes to data aggregators, consider the overhead. Kevin recommended Whitespark as a good primary resource. For example, you’ll find citations by industry, by location and by country.
- Make sure your Google My Business profile is fully implemented. Include the correct name, address and phone number (NAP), and list the correct categories.
- A few of the negative ranking factors to look out for are an incorrect business category, the presence of malware on your site and the absence of crawlable NAP on your site.
- The SEO keyword mapping process includes four main steps:
- Keyword mining: Grab as much keyword data specific to your site from as many tools as you can.
- Keyword expansion: Take at least 5-10 of your most important keywords and plug them into your tools one at a time. Identify all of your competitors’ keywords that you don’t rank for and export each data set to Excel where you can then de-duplicate the list.
- Keyword analysis: Categorize and classify each keyword. For example, brand versus non-brand, relevance, funnel level, commercial intent, difficulty, etc. Include whatever categories and classifications matter to you.
- Keyword metrics: Use a keyword ranking tool such as SearchMetrics, Authority Labs, or another favorite tool you have to retrieve your engagement and conversion data. Pivot the data table in Excel to help you identify low hanging fruit.
Kevin and David both provided hands-on strategies and a generous selection of tools to consider using in our own companies.
Sarah is a search marketing consultant, helping clients improve ROI through paid search, SEO and social media initiatives. She is also the Official SEMpdx Event Blogger and can be found at all of the monthly events.