Local SEO: How to Rank #1 on Google

good morning from sunny downtown toronto my name is chris a hughes co-founder of nerdsworld.com and today we're going to do a deep dive into local seo as you can see i have my seo shades on i can predict the future i can tell you exactly what you're doing right and wrong and what it's going to take to bring your ranking to the next level and if you're new to my channel i know because i got those rankings i got them i got them i'm confident in what what my recommendations are and let's move forward and jump into today's video [Music] also if you're new to my channel i'm currently on a mission a personal challenge to shoot 30 new videos in 30 days and today is day two so if you enjoy my type of content you want to learn more hit the subscribe button and we're going to help grow this community you can personally help grow my community as you can see here i've started a new playlist for seo for dummies and this section this playlist is going to be like all in depth deep dive as to like little elements and aspects of seo so if you want to learn seo i recommend you check out this playlist and yes i only have two videos there right now but during this week i'm gonna keep adding and adding and adding this is going to be the playlist for those that want to learn about seo and how to get incredible rankings on google say no more i'm excited to begin today's deep dive so what is local seo you might ask local seo refers to the process of optimizing your online presence to attract more businesses from local search searches so to dummy this down if your business in toronto for example a restaurant there is going to be a certain percentage of users that come to google and type in best restaurant in toronto or best italian restaurant in toronto or more specifically they might include an area like best pizza in little italy little italy is a section of downtown toronto and those are all examples of local search so locally means you're targeting the local demographic because you're attempting to sell a product or service or promote your business there are three distinctively different sets of results one is the local three pack on google so what is the local three packs that's website design toronto i'm hit first with advertisements that's not relative to seo so we're not going to touch upon it as i continue to scroll down i see the local three pack in today's video we're going to talk about how to get featured here and what you should do in order to entice google to add you to this section and next if we come over here and we put the regular organic search results these are just these organic rankings um yeah i guess straight as simple as that and here you go the nerds world number three i don't really like the ranking of number three i'd much rather number one but for that keyword i'll take it next voice search so voice search is like find me the best vegetarian restaurant in downtown toronto or best pizza near me or best italian romantic restaurant in toronto those are all different examples of local search using voice activated search this will be a separate video i'm going to put a new video together just for this it's going to be like seo for dummies voice activated search something along those lines in today's video we're not going to exactly get into greater detail with this so let's go into this how to rank on google local three pack uh you need to have an optimized website meaning your on page optimization has to be on point we'll get into that greater detail later on in today's video next we have to optimize your google my business if you haven't set up a google my business and verified and all that is very important in order to getting ranked on the local three pack you need to claim as many social media platform profiles as humanly possible so i mean any profile online that's free twitter linkedin pinterest blogger instagram facebook etc etc etc you need to set up those profiles and make sure that all of the information is consistent and that jumps into this you have to confirm your nap consistency so your name address phone nap name address phone very important in order for you to rank locally the phone number has to remain consistent on all platforms email address etc okay number five is you need to get more reviews for your business now that is on anything from google to yelp and etc the more reviews the more likelihood you have of ranking in the local three pack ask yourself this is google gonna recommend your business if none of your clients are leaving positive reviews and the straightforward answer is no they're not so step it up not all reviews come organically like i mean if you have a good experience with a customer and you sell a service it does not hurt for you to reach out to them a week after you've completed the service and say hey john i appreciate your business can you please leave an honest review here's a link to my google page and if you're not proactive and you're not searching for those type of results they don't always happen so you need to do some work now let's jump into this you need to create local content that focuses on local keywords so if i want to rank in toronto for web development i need to include that text in the content on my website page if i want to rank number one for best pizza in niagara falls and i'm a restaurant in niagara falls selling pizza i need to have best restaurant in niagara falls somewhere on my pizza website am i getting going through this too quickly you will not rank for a keyword if you do not have that keyword on your website pretty simple right let's really dummy this down google knows what your website is about based on the content that you add to that page so without having that type of content on your page like local specific location specific you're not going to rank for those type of keywords so i mean simple as that create local content and have it on your page next local keyword research is not overly complicated guys this is not rocket science look keyword research is keyword research no question but if you want to be targeting local specific keywords you got to put some thought as to what the people in your area are going to be typing in google because without knowing what they're going to type in google you're not going to know what type of content to create and which keywords to rank for so let's go through a little demo as to how this works let's say that you're attempting to sell your service of website design in toronto how do you think people will search for your service they'll probably go to google and type something like this website developer in toronto best web developer in toronto affordable website designer in toronto who is the best web design company in toronto those are just very quick examples off the top of my dome in which i'm spitting out now if i were to ask a thousand people the same question and they were looking for the same service or product they would all type in something slightly different although there will be some keywords that are used more often than not so what you need to do is figure out first of all and we're going to walk through that step by step how to put together a local keyword list very important and this should be the first step before you start creating content and making presumptions as to what people are typing figure out the answers by actually creating this list and let's jump into creating a list right now in real time how do i create a local keyword list let's walk you through my steps so i use my brain aka the dome this this thing we all have one some of them are bigger than others some of them are smaller than others and i want you to use it for a moment so simply open up a notepad you know what let's just do it right here let me use myself as an example we'll do this in real time let's pretend that i'm targeting barry barry's a little city about an hour north of toronto let's say that i'm just opening up a location there and i want to target on barry keywords first and foremost i use my my dome i sit down and i think about what would somebody in barry type in if they're looking for my service so barry website design barry website designer barry webb developer barry website design company barry webb developer development company best berry website designer best berry web developer okay very quick example no not much thought not much ram is being used this was fairly simple and right off the top of my head so that's always for me number one now we're going to use google which now the numbers system change but we're going to do this google auto complete so we're going to open up google which i already have open here i'm going to start typing in barry webb and already i'm seeing right here berry website design very web design now i have some of those already but what i want to do is just document them so berry website design berry web design so here we come here very website design berry web design so i might come back and do something different like best berry web no i don't like that so that's a bad example it's not relative to the search i want so i might type in website design berry uh and look so i'm seeing here website design barry i'm also seeing web design barry i'm also seeing web design barry ontario i'm also seeing website design barry ontario so those are keywords that i hadn't thought of website design berry ontario web design berry web design berry ontario okay there are a couple more examples next we want to reverse engineer our competitors now i'm going to use a paid tool although i'm sure you can find a free tool a free way to do this so let's use one of the keywords that we think we want to rank for barry web design simple now what we want to do is we want to bypass this these are ads what we want to do is come down to here number one normally i do one two and three hey look at this nerds world's number four and we're not in berry that was just a fluke stroke of lightning here's the website that ranks number one for this so i can manually go through this and say hey let me see what words they're attempting to rank for manual is okay nothing wrong with using your brain but what i'm going to do today is i'm going to use semrush i'm going to enter semrush i'm going to do a domain overview and see what information i can extract what vital information i can use to my own advantage so i can come over here simply i just typed in their domain name and domain overview and it shows me their traction so last month they got 68 visitors not spectacular but i want to come down here and see which keywords are generating them the most traffic and they will also spark ideas for myself so i'm going to click on this because i want to view all keywords that they're ranking for and i just want to take note so web design very and i understand some of this stuff can be duplicate like i can come up with it over and over again when i eventually enter this into my keyword tool it's not it's going to get rid of any duplicate copies so web designer barry website design barry and look it starts oh web site creation berry i never would have thought of that web site creation very are those exactly yeah those are exactly the same um web developer developer very so i can continue on look if i continue reading through this i got to pull and extract anything it shows me if you don't know this shows me what their current position is on google so they're currently second on google here's the volume of searches per month and even better if i want to see which page is actually ranking i can click on this and it will show me which page is ranking for this term so when i create content i got to create better content than that page so very quickly that's a way to reverse engineer it's endless i can sit here all day entering in competitors and if i don't know the competitors it's simple as this all i have to do is google the keyword i'm attempting to rank for and it will show me the competitors this isn't once again it's not brain science okay lastly i use the google keyword sorry i use the semrush semrush sem rush uh keyword planner tool so what i do is i can take a word such as this web design berry i can use my wonderful tool which is right over here keyword magic tool i can type in the keyword in which i would like to get inspired by and look at this it will give me a bunch of new keywords that i might have thought of and might not have thought of so i would manually come through here and just start entering them web designers in web page design very very web designers web designer barry web design very i can also download this i can export it i can copy paste it i can scroll around to see different keywords based on different subjects and that's how i put together my local keyword search then what i would do is i would take all this i'd get rid of these get rid of this let's just do it let's do it in real time so i would get rid of this and remember this is very quickly i would put more effort into it but walks you through my exact process let's get rid of this so that's a keyword list i put together for one location in one keyword what i would then do is i would take this so i'm a semrush user so i would then click clickety click i would add those keywords to my follow list i want to see them and watch them so basically i would just walk through and manually add them to my organic keyword list to see where i currently sit and what the volumes are and then i can sort of predict as to what i have to do in order to start ranking for those type of keywords so let's jump into it let's continue on are you doing local seo for a business in a small town this is a question comment concern i hear quite often like chris i'm in the middle of nowhere there are no search volumes for the service or product i'm selling within my area what the hell should i do and the answer is this uh either move into a bigger city with more potential or target other cities that have volumes so if for example i was located in barrie and we switched this around and toronto was an hour south of me first i would target barry i understand the volumes are not huge but there are some clients there looking for my service and once i start getting some good traction and rankings locally then i would start targeting toronto and surrounding areas i really want to dummy this down for you let me just explain if you are targeting more than one city you can even if you do not live or have an office in that city and we'll get into that in greater detail so if you are doing local seo for a business based in a small town here's a small trick you do not need to live in the city that you are targeting and you can focus on multiple locations at the same time at once so for example step number one is to swap out your location modifier for example instead of burlington we've used the word berry so we might as well use barry you can swap out the word for a larger city so for example if i were to add to my keyword list i'm just swapping out the modifier so i can come through here and just change this to toronto and toronto i don't want to keep doing it it's going to take too much time but you get the idea and because i'm in toronto if i were to literally draw a circus circus if i were to draw a circle around downtown toronto and put like a hundred kilometer radius let's say uh i would probably have about 20 to 30 cities that touch that circle so i would manually go through and decide on which which locations i want to target and i would add more so i would do another section where it might say burlington or oakville using the same keywords i want to target all of these and even outside of you know i'm at the point now where i want to go for i don't know north pole you know i like i already ranked ranked number one for north pole if you guys want to watch that video you can watch that video somewhere up here so if you're getting me i'm trying to add to this keyword list it's all location based because the topic of today's video is local seo and the sun is right in my eye hopefully you can still see me let's go to the next little trick besides just switching out the modifier a little trick is if you do not want to use a a costly tool like i'm using semrush you can do a simple little trick that i've used for years and years and years wonderful let's do it on myself so let's look at my website nerdsworld.com so if you come before my my url and simply type in this and enter site colon backslash backslash it will show you how many pages are on my website so it says there's about 1550 pages currently on my website and you can break it down you can go through and look you can see i have a berry seo page you can see i have an oakville seo page you can see i have a peterborough seo page you can see i have a waterloo seo page and so on and so you can do this for your competitor there's no way to hide the pages they've created in order to rank so very simple easy way to reverse engineer success without having a fee now quickly let me show you an example of how this works i can type in north pole seo i've never been to the north pole i'd like to go and if you see a nerd's world ranks first a nerd's world ranks first second and third for north pole seo and reason being is because we created content that's about the north pole seo content means a page the actual text so let's look at the page hey there's me with my crown look i want to rank for north pole seo location based i'm not loco i just incorporate the keyword into the content and if you do a search and find you'll see i'm using north pole 12 times seo 40 times and look at the url structure seo hyphen north pole so i'm incorporating the location within the url pretty simple no so that's just one example of how i rank and i'm not physically at that location so it's definitely possible to do now another question i get asked quite often is multiple locations targeting many locations so let's say pizza hut okay chick-fil-a opens up 100 locations in a certain area of the country and you want to rank for all of them completely makes sense doesn't it yeah it makes sense to me no problem at all each physical location needs its own google my business meaning you have to submit and verify that you have this location meaning they'll send you a posted note in the mail with a pin number and you also have to set up individual social media accounts and submit to local directories you have to do that for each location okay so every physical location needs its own instagram twitter etc you need to manually submit to local directories which we're about to touch upon now now if you have no physical location and you simply want to take over the world create great content on each location like i do i don't have a physical location in barrie or the north pole but i also want to rank there because i want to take over the world and i need that traffic i need that money i need those clients and don't think i'm doing something wrong here because you're not this is not a fraudulent activity this is not black hat activity the average person in barrie which is an hour away from toronto would rather hire somebody that ranks first even though we're located in toronto than somebody that ranks first in barrie and not capable of taking on their service so if you believe in your product and your service why don't you or why wouldn't you want to get that traffic and the answer is you should local search does not always mean that you are local to the area that you want to rank for if that makes sense hope so okay lastly we're going to jump into this my top 10 local seo strategies let me minimize this so we can really get into this make this a little bit bigger let's go through this shotgun style very quickly i want you to claim and optimize your profiles on google my business instagram linkedin twitter facebook etc you need to set up these profiles very important first step very very simple to do if you have multiple locations you need multiple accounts for each location simple number two manually submit your website to local directories so look if i'm in toronto because i am and i want to find out so i might go like online business directories toronto i want to submit to local directories that are business related so here we go here's a quick list so i have to open up each of them manually and submit so i'm not going to sign up or log in but basically you want to have your no your name here locally with the location that you service next i want you to join local business associations and groups so if you're in a certain demographic i want you to be a part of the community that that could mean physically going to meetings that could mean virtually where you just reach out to groups business we call them bias here in which that you're gonna connect yourself with because that type of local networking is gonna really show authority to google i want you to start getting reviews on local review sites like google and yelp and as i mentioned prior you might have to reach out might not happen by itself uh reach out to people if they're your clients your past clients even if it's a client from two years ago i want you to target relevant and local keywords i want you to incorporate the location in which you're targeting in the keywords so without doing that as i mentioned previous you're never going to rank so the word for example if i'm trying to rank toronto i need to incorporate the word toronto quite often in the text the url and all the key places on my website if i want to attempt to rank so i want to create location specific website copy website pages h1 h2 urls etc going back to this let's look at this one more time this is a perfect example the url includes the location and the service i'm providing north pole if i come through here north pole is here throughout the body of the text look free north pole on the anchor text i'm incorporating the keywords that i want to rank for this is one specific page a landing page that was set up with one purpose and one purpose only to target those that are typing in north pole seo so if i don't create this type of page i will not rank for this type of keyword if you physically have a location in montreal i want to see a map on your website somewhere on one of your very prominent pages that shows what your physical location is of your office embedding a map a google map will definitely help with your local rankings so i want you to get backlinks from reputable local businesses goes back to networking so that could mean that you're paying for it it could mean that you've done it organically you've built a relationship with a fellow business owner in your neighborhood that has some online stats their websites ranking when they link to you it's going to help with your your stats so the more authoritative people that you partner up with online locally the better your stats are going to become it's as simple as that lastly i want you to include external links to reputable local websites and businesses that's it do you want to rank locally well become the authority locally it's as simple and stupid as that if you're not incorporating the keywords in which you want to rank for on your website page google doesn't know which city you're targeting this is your quick crash course into local seo i got my local seo sunshade blockers on and this is your crash course local seo is not difficult at all when you start trying to take over the whole globe it becomes a lot more complex but if you're a local business looking to get better local ranking follow what i have just given you and this is the secret recipe to success before i let you go let me just show you a few stats locally for me i'm here so my traffic last month i got 11.2 000 visitors to my website in canada last month and here are the keywords that i'm targeting so it shows like i rank number one in canada for web design and that one search gets 9 900 search volume per month nerds world toronto website design look which is very location specific i ranked number two toronto seo i ranked number four web design toronto so you'll see my local search it's huge and without it my business would not be able to survive and thrive as it has so if you appreciate today's video leave a like this is day two of 30. tomorrow i'll be coming back with another video that's it i hope you guys have a wonderful evening goodbye

Channel: A Nerd's World

Views: 5,853

Keywords: local seo, what is local seo, how to local seo, local seo for dummies, seo for dummies, local search engine optimization, what is local search engine optimization, best local seo tips, best local seo tricks, white hat seo tricks

Id: VSGO2X2wU1g

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020