6 LOCAL SEO MISTAKES Killing Your Google Rankings in 2021 (And How to fix them)

hey guys welcome back to the channel in today's video i'm going to share with you six of the most common local seo issues i find when i audit my clients websites which almost always impact their google ranking based on my experience i feel confident your very own website is likely affected by some of them so if you want better google rankings i suggest you stick around learn how to diagnose the problems and fix them if you're ready let's start with the first one you've created dozens of nearly identical location pages on your website to target multiple cities or postcodes this is a common issue for service area type of businesses such as plumbers electricians window cleaners etc who do business at their customers homes they build what is known as location pages to target multiple cities and attract more local customers from a wider area here is an example from this heating and air conditioning website if you scroll down the homepage there is a list of cities they claim to serve 24 of them to be precise all linking to a page specifically crafted for that city but if you compare two of the location pages side by side you can see the only thing that changes is the name of the city everything else apart from the city name is nearly a hundred percent identical here is another example but this time for a pest control business once again when you compare the pages side by side you can see they are almost near identical why is this a bad idea these pages will be considered by google as doorway pages meaning they were created purely for the benefit of search engines which can harm the quality of the user's search experience although it won't necessarily affect your site google will simply not rank them and you will have spent a lot of time creating useless pages if you were planning on doing this for your own website don't if you've already done it i would suggest you focus on the location pages that are nearest your business don't go crazy and stick with around five location pages maximum make sure they are filled with unique and relevant content which will have a much better chance of being discovered by users let's move on to the next common issue duplicate content when creating a website many local business owners struggle to write their own copy instead of creating something from scratch and completely unique they simply steal existing copy from competitors web pages and paste it onto their own pages yes it happens all the time this is called external duplicate content so why is this bad google doesn't want to show identical information in its search results so if two pages from different websites have similar content it will decide which one should rank over the other the worst of it all is even if you were the original creator of the content google may choose to rank the website contents thief over yours so what can you do head over to copyscape.com copyscape is an online plagiarism tool that detects duplicate content on the web unfortunately it is not free but it's very inexpensive to run checking an entire page will cost you only a few cents and you can buy credits for as little as five dollars for the sake of this demonstration i'm going to use the example of this electrician's website located in london all i need to do is copy the url i want to check into the search box in this case the home page and click on go within seconds copyscape will produce a list of results where potential duplicate content was detected click on each result to check which piece of content was flagged as duplicate which will be highlighted in red the first result shows duplicated content on a site for the exact same business this is because this business owner created a second website using the free google website builder and used some of the copy from the original site he's probably hoping he will rank with two websites instead of one which is a bad idea let's try another example here we go in this case the top five paragraphs are almost word forward identical to my electrician's homepage you can access the link of the website where the duplication has been found in the top panel right here i don't know who copied who here but if i was the original creator of the content i wouldn't be happy so how do you fix this if you feel someone has stolen your content reach out to the website owner to remove it if that fails file a digital millennium copyright act notice with google so the duplicate page gets removed you might want to warn the website owner first this is what you're about to do it might shake them up a bit and speed up the process let's now have a look at another type of duplicate content but this time within your own site this is called internal duplicate content just like external duplicate content having internal duplicated content across your pages will hurt your seo performance once again google wants to show unique information in the search results so if you have multiple pages on your site that are near identical it's going to affect your overall website visibility to check if this problem occurs on your website head over to siteliner.com siteliner is a free tool that can crawl your entire website and flag internal content duplication to start a crawl add your website to the search box then click on go i'm going to use the example of the swindle cleaning company called duluxwindowcleaning.co.uk the crawl should only take a few seconds depending on how many pages you have on your site once completed you will see the overall percentage of duplicate content that exists on your site to see the detailed information just click on the duplicate content link which will lead to the breakdown of all the pages which are flagged as having duplication issues for each page you'll see the number of words that are duplicated the match percentage and how many pages the duplicate content is found on in this instance the content on the home page for this window cleaner is 83 identical on 22 other pages if you click on the page itself sideliner will highlight in red the content of the page that is duplicated on the right hand side you'll see the pages where the duplicated content can be found on you can click on the open windows symbol to open the page in your browser comparing this page with a home page side by side clearly shows we are dealing with almost two identical pages which is pretty bad news the solution here is simple don't copy and paste your pages once again make them unique once you've updated your content don't panic if you still see duplication there's always going to be information replicated across some pages such as your footer header but aim for a much lower percentage i would say that under 10 duplication should be acceptable let's move on to the next common issue thin content for those of you who are not familiar with the concept of thin content here is a brief explanation thin content is content that sits on your website and provides little to no value to the users the example of city pages and duplicate content pages i have just covered would fall into the thin content category and you already know how to fix them other examples would be pages that have been poorly written where you can find spelling mistakes or grammatical errors so make sure you proofread your content thoroughly another type of content considered as low value or thin is pages with hardly any information on them which seem to have been created just for the sake of creating a page here is a typical example of thin content on this dentist's website located in fort lauderdale his homepage only has one paragraph of copy and when i start visiting other pages it doesn't look any better there's even a blog which is shockingly awful it looks like no effort has been put into this website at all and based on what i'm seeing i doubt very much this site is ranking in google search results for anything at all as i've mentioned already google wants unique and useful content which more often than not means reach and in-depth type of content let me show you what i mean with another dentist's website if i search for dental implant miami the first organic result that comes up is for a dentist called implant center miami you can see the homepage for this site is filled with relevant content which includes a lot of copy some before and after images testimonials etc and all other pages on their site are built in the same way this is useful to the users it's unique to this business and contains rich information that's exactly what google wants and that's why this business is rewarded with high rankings so how do you find out if there is some thin content on your website the best way to do this is to check the word count on each and every page of your website a law word count on a page generally signifies your content is too thin and needs to be improved you could do this by hand but it would take forever instead we're going to use another tool which can be downloaded for free head over to screamingfrog.co.uk screaming frog is a website crawler that helps you improve your seo performance it's a great tool that will enable you to identify major seo issues on your website in seconds screaming frog offers a free version allowing you to crawl up to 500 urls which should be more than enough for any local website to start using it just download it install it and launch it once launched this is the interface you will see don't be intimidated by it i'm going to run through what you need to do copy and paste the url of your website in a screaming frog search bar and click on start in this instance i'm going to use our dentist's website located in fort lauderdale this will launch the crawler which will go through each and every url on the site you can see the crawl progress here once the crawl is completed you can access a range of tabs with detailed information related to your pages such as page title meta description etc there are a lot of tabs so they might not all show on your screen you can see the full list using the drop down arrow at the end of the ribbon pick the wand called content it will display the list of all your pages along with detailed word count for each of them order the word count column from smallest to highest i would recommend that any page with a word count below 1200 should be revisited and the copy improve to hit that number at the very least aim for a higher number if you can i generally try to hit nearer the 2000 mark but don't write content for the sake of it remember it needs to be valuable to the user time to move on to our next common issue your page titles if you've done a little bit of seo research you probably already know that page titles are a very important component of any given web page not only your page titles will be displayed in search results which will influence whether or not users will click through to your website but they are also a key seo signal used by google to understand what your page is about so it's important to get them right the most common mistake i see website owners make is to use the same page titles across multiple pages this is very bad practice as it may confuse google about which page should rank for what keyword to check if there are duplicate titles across your pages go back to the result of your screaming frog crawl and this time choose the page title tab this will list all your pages and the title next to them to find out if any duplicate exists just use the drop down menu and select the duplicate option it will highlight the pages which have the same title which i recommend you change you can also narrow down the page titles that are all over 60 characters which will get truncated in google search results let's now look at the next common issue images the first problem i encounter the most when it comes to images is their file size it's all very well to take a picture with your phone which you want to use for your website but you need to optimize it before adding it to your web pages why because a very heavy image will slow down the page load of your site since page load speed is an seo signal it will affect your rankings but how do you find out if there are some heavy images on your site i told you screaming frog was a great tool so go back to it one more time and select the image tab from there you'll be able to see the list of all the images that are on your site along with their file size order the file size column from largest to smallest to find out if you have any heavy images which could drag the performance of your pages down for this website i can see there are a large number of heavy images there is even one that is 1.3 megabytes which is way too much and unnecessary the solution replace that image with a much lighter version if you don't know how you can use a free image optimizer i recommend using something like jpeg optimizer.com choose the picture you want to optimize select the level of compression and specify the width of the image so it fits with your web page requirements then click on optimize photo look at the new file size compared to the original one pretty cool right if you're happy with it just right click on the picture and save it then load it on your web page this now brings me to the last common issue which will hurt your seo visibility broken links as time goes by your website evolves you move pages add some new ones and delete others and this could result in broken links across your website a page that once lived under one web address and moved to another address means links pointing to the original version may return an error a couple of errors on the website are not really harmful but google might assume you're not really providing your visitors with high quality content thus resulting in lower rankings these areas are very common and easily fixed head over to screaming frog for one final time and click on the response code tab from the drop down menu select the client for xxx errors this will highlight pages that no longer work on your site which links are still pointing to select a page from the list in the panel below click on the in link option this will show the exact page where the link can be found right click on the link and select the open from in your browser then locate where the link is placed on the page all you need to do now is fix it on your website that's it for today if you go through this exercise i'm pretty certain you're going to find some issues fix them one by one it may take some time for some of you but i can guarantee you will reap the benefits from it i hope this was helpful if you have any questions post them in the comments below and until next time happy marketing

Channel: Ranking Academy

Views: 6,547

Keywords: local seo, local seo tips, local seo tutorial, how to do local seo, local seo training, local seo marketing, local seo 2021, local seo strategy, google local seo, local seo guide, local search engine optimization, local seo tips and tricks, local seo solutions, local seo tips 2021, local seo hacks, local seo expert, local seo ranking, local business seo, local seo step by step, seo local 2021, local seo tools, local seo hack

Id: 6EGC5FCEoKQ

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021