FAQ | The Local SEO Questions that We Usually Get from Our Customers

1. What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a specialized set of techniques which aim to make your business easier to find and more visible to people near it who use search engines to locate the services they need. Its importance has been steadily rising over the past several years and along with it, the complexity of search engine algorithms that determine local rankings. This makes Local SEO a very interesting field that sparks our team's natural curiosity and drives our ambition to stay on top of the field.

2. Why isn't my Google+ Local listing ranking high for local key phrase searches?

There is no simple answer to this question - Google's algorithm for determining Google Local rankings is very complex. Although there are many ranking factors, some of the most major ones are the reviews that you have on your listing (their count, how positive they are, the trustworthiness of their source, etc.), citations (a good citation profile helps) and a well-optimized website associated with your Google+ Local listing. Social activity signals from within Google+ itself are expected to become more and more of a factor. Apart from not having taken care of the above properly, there could be specific issues preventing you from ranking well such as having a duplicate listing. Our Holistic Local SEO service is designed to create and execute an all-around strategy that takes care of all aspects of optimizing your Google+ Local rankings.

3. How do I evaluate if the link profile of my website is good?

A great question, which like most of the questions on this page, has no simple answer. A good link profile is the top priority when it comes to off-site SEO. As Matt Cutts (head of the Google webspam team) himself says, links are going to stay more important than social signals in the foreseeable future. Since having a "good link profile" is a craft in itself, we will try to touch upon some of the most important topics to be aware of in this brief space.

First of all, some of the best tools to use when evaluating your links are SEOMoz's Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO's Site Explorer.
Then, when looking up the link profile of your website using one of these tools, you should watch out for links coming from pornographic or gambling sites, article directories and the "comments" section of pages. Also, you don't want a lot of links from pages with too many links on them, the footer sections of pages, widgets and low Page Rank websites. Last but not least, paid links are a no-no.
Ultimately, you want a high number of links coming from as many domains as possible. You want the links to be in the main body of content relevant to your business or location, the pages where the links are coming from to have a high Page Rank and the anchor text of your links to not be all keyword-stuffed.

4. How do I evaluate if the citation profile of my business is good?

As explained on our citation building service page, a citation is a mention of a business' name, address and phone number (abbreviated as NAP) on some page on the Internet - a friend's website, a local newspaper, a blog post, a website dedicated to business listings, etc. It is important for a local business to have a "good citation profile" because a)it helps rank your local listings higher in the major search engines like Google and Bing and b)it helps promote your local business across the web. So, what is a "good citation profile" then?

Citations need to be placed in reputable websites. You don't want to create citations in a website that is punished by search engines, doesn't have a good number of indexed pages or has a horrible link profile associated with it. You can read more on the topic of evaluating a citation source on Whitespark's blog. We, together with Whitespark, follow the rules described in this post when choosing citation sources for your business.
(To find all your previous business listings, use a tool such as Whitespark's Local Citation Finder. You can combine that tool with manual creative Google searches for your company name, address and phone number in their different existing variations.)
All data in the citations need to be up-to-date and consistent with the data on your website. A very important citation to match your other citations with is your Google + Local listing. Any NAP inconsistencies between the business data that you want to advertise online for the long run and the data in the citations you find should be ironed out by trying to claim and update or even delete the data-inconsistent listings.
Duplicate listings of your business on the same website are dangerous. This can spawn a duplicate listing on Google + Local (formerly known as Google Places) which in turn can compromise the ranking of your original Google + Local listing.

(To find out if you have more than one listing on a website, either use the website's search functionality to look up your business, or browse the website or perform several Google searches of the type "site: [site name] [your phone number/variations of your business name that you've used]". Actually, to be safe, it's probably a good idea to use all of the above methods complementarily.)

Your citations should be filled out with as much business data as the citation source allows you to fill out, such as business hours, payments accepted, categories, images, etc. Try to use the citation website's interface to see if you can edit your citation and add more data.

5. Where are you located?

We are located in Varna, Bulgaria - a mid-sized city in Eastern Europe. Over here, we like playing and watching soccer, go to the beach during the summer (because of the awesome beaches that we have) and riding bikes.

Business-climate-wise, we've been very happy with our environment as the city has old and respected universities concentrated in Marketing & IT so it has helped us grow steadily since the beginning of our existence in November 2011. Since all of our clients are outside Bulgaria, with a big portion of them the U.S., we are very happy to say that it has been a pleasure to communicate with businesses from all over the world. Hopefully our contact options are convenient for you and - hey - if enough clients order from your country - we might get a local phone number in it, too!

6. Can I get any references of your previous work?

Absolutely yes. When writing us a message or calling us to let us know which of our services you are interested in, please also let us know if you are interested in a relevant reference from a previous client. While we do have some testimonials already published, we'd be able to provide more detailed references from a bigger number of sources if you ask us.