SEO

What To Expect Of Your Agency

Published

3 years ago

February 18, 2022

Effective location-based SEO (local SEO) can have a substantial impact on your digital marketing success comparable to any other core marketing.

For a business that has a physical location, or many company premises to optimize for, the value of dominating your local online space cannot be overstated.

The same can be said for companies functioning and servicing within specific geographic areas that are core for company revenue and related success parameters.

There are many misconceptions about local SEO; for example, local SEO is only for small businesses, or that local SEO restricts total visibility online.

It’s important that, when looking to outsource your local SEO, you ensure your expectations of an agency and the deliverables you receive match your local SEO aspirations.

I hope this column will help.

SEO Agency Fundamentals

Whether it is local SEO deliverables or enterprise-level SEO services, any established and effective search marketing agency will provide the fundamentals expected as specialists in their field.

Typically, this would include:

A clear set of objectives unique to your immediate, medium, and longer-term requirements.
An action plan that reinforces what the priorities are and when key milestones will occur.
Access to data and the building of a larger data ecosystem for insights and action-taking.
Agreed and consistent ways to communicate, report on progress, and reinforce what is being delivered for your investment.
Iterative improvement from the ongoing application of expertise and evidence-led decision-making.
Direct access to key staff working with you to achieve your local SEO goals.
Simplified and relevant ongoing support and feedback to enable agility and pivoting of approach to maximize new opportunity and react to changing threats.
Proactive and effective customer care enabling collaborative working, or full outsourcing dependent upon client requirements.

There will be other priorities that may be unique to business circumstances and areas of increased perceived value to your current requirements, and these can be added to the above agency fundamental expectations where applicable.

As a tip, one thing to avoid in your expectations is a small set of very specific and localized SEO keywords to focus on.

These will be the five or ten you may look at on your mobile phone every week and curse the competitor who ranks there.

Whilst you may have some keywords more commercially important than others, please do not restrict your focus (and that of any agency you decide to work with) to solely focus on a handful of terms.

Consider the end goal of these terms and what you wish to achieve through local SEO success.

There may be thousands of relevant and highly effective search queries, plus many new and unique ones being discovered every day in your data.

You don’t want to lose sight of these and their potential value by having a blinkered focus on just a few.

If it’s easier to move away from standalone keyword goals, consider the topic rather than the term. This can be far more useful to measure local SEO gains.

Strong Technical Performance

Regardless of your local SEO goals and objectives, every local SEO campaign should factor in the website’s health, user experience, and overall technical ability to perform.

Traditionally within local SEO, this would focus on topics such as:

Add to the above a practical emphasis on:

You may want to factor in broader items historically associated more with bigger entities and brands, as well.

This could include providing easy access to information through the site architecture, and digital simplification to enable the user to get to their endpoint as easily and effectively as possible (including broader conversation rate optimization principles).

Evidence-Driven Content

It is not enough to provide expert industry opinion and localized content on a website with the expectation to dominate local SEO.

Any competitive local SEO campaigns should ideally be fueled with data (evidence backed) content at levels of quality and volume much higher than you may expect for local-orientated SEO campaigns.

The creation of content may be delivered by you in-house or outsourced to a marketing agency. But regardless of the approach to output, the dovetailing of data, local SEO experts, and leveraging of your unique industry insights is paramount.

It is this combined approach that will provide a competitive advantage, and enable you to consistently create the best of breed content, that has true standalone value both within the local niche and for broader brand and authority building.

From an agency, you should expect them to lead the local SEO content strategy and approach, providing ongoing recommendations using all available and relevant data sets to justify the; priority, focus, purpose, and ongoing impact of content being generated.

You would expect content to be created to leverage the value and metric success of existing content you have on your website.

You would also expect a consistent focus on new opportunities to ideate and implement new content reflecting the new data sets, and changing needs of your core business audience.

As with any comprehensive content strategy led by SEO, you would want to cover a range of user intent, focus on the actual value provided, and look throughout the spectrum of the information seeking and buying cycle.

Whilst this would be skewed towards local SEO, that does not restrict the impact.

Pertinent topic areas important to the business will likely have wider appeal and opportunity to grow site trust, backlinks, and perceived relevancy beyond the local demographic.

Local Authority And Trust Building

Local authority building is a mainstay within local SEO and a necessity for gaining ground within your online niche.

There are a number of consistent threads to this including:

Local brand building with PR and local media publications.
Business entity and relevant local and regional directory sites.
Links and mentions of the brand, company, and key staff in community and business forums.
Supporting local events, and sharing of expertise (and often resource, charity support, etc.).
Content promotion and placement (both local content and topical business products/services content).

Outside of the citation and link aspect of authority building is the deeper expertise, authority, and wider trust signal gains.

This includes in no small part the management, optimization, and ongoing growth of reviews and engagement through Google Business Profiles (for every business location), formerly Google My Business.

This includes (but is not limited to) search and maps optimization, profile completeness, promotion of content, and answering questions from your audience.

The more proactive you are with generating positive reviews as part of your combined business and agency focus (including targeted location-specific reviews), the faster you will see gains in your perceived online authority and local SEO results.

This needs to be through Google Business Profiles, Bing Places, and other established and trusted third-party review sites.

Content And Social Media

You need to look at how you and your agency can enable your website and brand to become truly embedded within the local community.

For some sites and brands, this may be many local communities, spanning a number of geographically dispersed regions, whilst for others, it may be a single location and a number of miles surrounding it.

Either way, the ability to enhance your website community focus through audience-aware content hubs, free community resources, and tools, and ideally local user-generated content, the better.

This will naturally tie into social media interaction, engagement, and promotion, as well as social listening and audience building, by a genuine understanding of their wants, needs, plus pain points.

And more importantly how your people/experts/staff, brand, and products/services can positively impact them.

In Summary

Businesses will have an array of bespoke requirements for their local SEO and the deliverables expected from an agency.

Some of these will be based on filters applied tied to previous experiences, and often lessons learned.

There are, however, a number of key standard expectations which you should always consider, as outlined above.

More resources:

Featured Image: Vector_Bird/Shutterstock

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SEO

8% Of Automattic Employees Choose To Resign

Published

8 hours ago

October 5, 2024

Max

8% Of Automattic Employees Choose To Resign

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO announced today that he offered Automattic employees the chance to resign with a severance pay and a total of 8.4 percent. Mullenweg offered $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever one is higher, with a total of 159 people taking his offer.

Reactions Of Automattic Employees

Given the recent controversies created by Mullenweg, one might be tempted to view the walkout as a vote of no-confidence in Mullenweg. But that would be a mistake because some of the employees announcing their resignations either praised Mullenweg or simply announced their resignation while many others tweeted how happy they are to stay at Automattic.

One former employee tweeted that he was sad about recent developments but also praised Mullenweg and Automattic as an employer.

He shared:

“Today was my last day at Automattic. I spent the last 2 years building large scale ML and generative AI infra and products, and a lot of time on robotics at night and on weekends.

I’m going to spend the next month taking a break, getting married, and visiting family in Australia.

I have some really fun ideas of things to build that I’ve been storing up for a while. Now I get to build them. Get in touch if you’d like to build AI products together.”

Another former employee, Naoko Takano, is a 14 year employee, an organizer of WordCamp conferences in Asia, a full-time WordPress contributor and Open Source Project Manager at Automattic announced on X (formerly Twitter) that today was her last day at Automattic with no additional comment.

She tweeted:

“Today was my last day at Automattic.

I’m actively exploring new career opportunities. If you know of any positions that align with my skills and experience!”

Naoko’s role at at WordPress was working with the global WordPress community to improve contributor experiences through the Five for the Future and Mentorship programs. Five for the Future is an important WordPress program that encourages organizations to donate 5% of their resources back into WordPress. Five for the Future is one of the issues Mullenweg had against WP Engine, asserting that they didn’t donate enough back into the community.

Mullenweg himself was bittersweet to see those employees go, writing in a blog post:

“It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit.

However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!”

Read the entire announcement on Mullenweg’s blog:

Automattic Alignment

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SEO

YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features

Published

1 day ago

October 4, 2024

Max

YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features

YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.

YouTube Shorts will allow 3-minute videos.
New features include templates, enhanced remixing, and AI-generated video backgrounds.
YouTube is adding a Shorts trends page and comment previews.

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SEO

How To Stop Filter Results From Eating Crawl Budget

Published

2 days ago

October 3, 2024

Max

How To Find The Right Long-tail Keywords For Articles

Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Michal in Bratislava, who asks:

“I have a client who has a website with filters based on a map locations. When the visitor makes a move on the map, a new URL with filters is created. They are not in the sitemap. However, there are over 700,000 URLs in the Search Console (not indexed) and eating crawl budget.

What would be the best way to get rid of these URLs? My idea is keep the base location ‘index, follow’ and newly created URLs of surrounded area with filters switch to ‘noindex, no follow’. Also mark surrounded areas with canonicals to the base location + disavow the unwanted links.”

Great question, Michal, and good news! The answer is an easy one to implement.

First, let’s look at what you’re trying and apply it to other situations like ecommerce and publishers. This way, more people can benefit. Then, go into your strategies above and end with the solution.

What Crawl Budget Is And How Parameters Are Created That Waste It

If you’re not sure what Michal is referring to with crawl budget, this is a term some SEO pros use to explain that Google and other search engines will only crawl so many pages on your website before it stops.

If your crawl budget is used on low-value, thin, or non-indexable pages, your good pages and new pages may not be found in a crawl.

If they’re not found, they may not get indexed or refreshed. If they’re not indexed, they cannot bring you SEO traffic.

This is why optimizing a crawl budget for efficiency is important.

Michal shared an example of how “thin” URLs from an SEO point of view are created as customers use filters.

The experience for the user is value-adding, but from an SEO standpoint, a location-based page would be better. This applies to ecommerce and publishers, too.

Ecommerce stores will have searches for colors like red or green and products like t-shirts and potato chips.

These create URLs with parameters just like a filter search for locations. They could also be created by using filters for size, gender, color, price, variation, compatibility, etc. in the shopping process.

The filtered results help the end user but compete directly with the collection page, and the collection would be the “non-thin” version.

Publishers have the same. Someone might be on SEJ looking for SEO or PPC in the search box and get a filtered result. The filtered result will have articles, but the category of the publication is likely the best result for a search engine.

These filtered results can be indexed because they get shared on social media or someone adds them as a comment on a blog or forum, creating a crawlable backlink. It might also be an employee in customer service responded to a question on the company blog or any other number of ways.

The goal now is to make sure search engines don’t spend time crawling the “thin” versions so you can get the most from your crawl budget.

The Difference Between Indexing And Crawling

There’s one more thing to learn before we go into the proposed ideas and solutions – the difference between indexing and crawling.

Crawling is the discovery of new pages within a website.
Indexing is adding the pages that are worthy of showing to a person using the search engine to the database of pages.

Pages can get crawled but not indexed. Indexed pages have likely been crawled and will likely get crawled again to look for updates and server responses.

But not all indexed pages will bring in traffic or hit the first page because they may not be the best possible answer for queries being searched.

Now, let’s go into making efficient use of crawl budgets for these types of solutions.

Using Meta Robots Or X Robots

The first solution Michal pointed out was an “index,follow” directive. This tells a search engine to index the page and follow the links on it. This is a good idea, but only if the filtered result is the ideal experience.

From what I can see, this would not be the case, so I would recommend making it “noindex,follow.”

Noindex would say, “This is not an official page, but hey, keep crawling my site, you’ll find good pages in here.”

And if you have your main menu and navigational internal links done correctly, the spider will hopefully keep crawling them.

Canonicals To Solve Wasted Crawl Budget

Canonical links are used to help search engines know what the official page to index is.

If a product exists in three categories on three separate URLs, only one should be “the official” version, so the two duplicates should have a canonical pointing to the official version. The official one should have a canonical link that points to itself. This applies to the filtered locations.

If the location search would result in multiple city or neighborhood pages, the result would likely be a duplicate of the official one you have in your sitemap.

Have the filtered results point a canonical back to the main page of filtering instead of being self-referencing if the content on the page stays the same as the original category.

If the content pulls in your localized page with the same locations, point the canonical to that page instead.

In most cases, the filtered version inherits the page you searched or filtered from, so that is where the canonical should point to.

If you do both noindex and have a self-referencing canonical, which is overkill, it becomes a conflicting signal.

The same applies to when someone searches for a product by name on your website. The search result may compete with the actual product or service page.

With this solution, you’re telling the spider not to index this page because it isn’t worth indexing, but it is also the official version. It doesn’t make sense to do this.

Instead, use a canonical link, as I mentioned above, or noindex the result and point the canonical to the official version.

Disavow To Increase Crawl Efficiency

Disavowing doesn’t have anything to do with crawl efficiency unless the search engine spiders are finding your “thin” pages through spammy backlinks.

The disavow tool from Google is a way to say, “Hey, these backlinks are spammy, and we don’t want them to hurt us. Please don’t count them towards our site’s authority.”

In most cases, it doesn’t matter, as Google is good at detecting spammy links and ignoring them.

You do not want to add your own site and your own URLs to the disavow tool. You’re telling Google your own site is spammy and not worth anything.

Plus, submitting backlinks to disavow won’t prevent a spider from seeing what you want and do not want to be crawled, as it is only for saying a link from another site is spammy.

Disavowing won’t help with crawl efficiency or saving crawl budget.

How To Make Crawl Budgets More Efficient

The answer is robots.txt. This is how you tell specific search engines and spiders what to crawl.

You can include the folders you want them to crawl by marketing them as “allow,” and you can say “disallow” on filtered results by disallowing the “?” or “&” symbol or whichever you use.

If some of those parameters should be crawled, add the main word like “?filter=location” or a specific parameter.

Robots.txt is how you define crawl paths and work on crawl efficiency. Once you’ve optimized that, look at your internal links. A link from one page on your site to another.

These help spiders find your most important pages while learning what each is about.

Internal links include: