This year’s holiday is going to be one for the books.
Even if all previous sales records are not broken, a good holiday season is going to seem like a major success come January.
Still, for your small business in Orange County or anywhere in Southern California, the holiday sales season is going to be a major test of your acumen.
Let’s get ready.
There are 34 cities and another 19 unincorporated communities across Orange County. Every one of them is loaded with restaurants, eateries, bars, lounges and cafeterias. There are cafes, bistros and lunch counters and all of them miss out on at least some of the people looking on-line for where and when to eat.
Orange County is a savvy market, too. Some of your toughest competition is probably all over the local and mobile SEO scene, but then again, lots of other restaurants are not. There are restaurants well positioned enough that they can get away with basically letting their store-front do all the marketing. But guess what? They’re still leaving the entire Local Search and Mobile Markets to chance.
That’s literally leaving money on the table, so let’s start scooping some of it up!
This article is just to give you a start – with five fast and easy tricks – to optimize your Orange County restaurant for local and mobile search. It’s a big field, but there’s no reason not to get going now.
1. First, Claim Your Google+ Listing!
That might seem obvious. But just because Google has indexed your business and listed you, it doesn’t mean they’re going to optimize things. Do a search and find your listing in Google Plus. If it’s there but the main image is a giant map, then it’s still unclaimed. Google actually makes it pretty easy, to select the “Manage This Page” button and claim the listing. You need to have a Gmail account and you’ll need to verify that you’re the business owner or an authorized rep by telephone or a post card through the mail.
If no listing exists, you’ll need to set one up. Just go to google.com/places and click on “Get Started For Free”. You’ll need to fill out everything as accurately as possible and while you shouldn’t use the page to try to replace or stand in for a website, it’s almost as important. Make sure they get the restaurant name, physical address, and phone number, and the web address right. Categories, especially for food type are tremendously important, too, so select them carefully. You can continue working on it for several weeks or even months so don’t worry about getting it all correct during the first sitting. You’ll also want to add some photos.
2. Check Your Mobile Compatibility
One big reason that your Google Plus page is important is that it’s thoroughly mobile compatible. So even though it’s not recommendable to totally abandon your website in favor of a Google Plus page, you can get away with letting your Google Plus page stand in as a purely mobile page – at least while you’re optimizing for mobile search. It’s a big market, and restaurants are foolish to ignore the growth potential of mobile.
3. Optimize for Local Place Names
As we mentioned above, the city names, unincorporated communities and all kind of place names are an important part of optimizing for local. One good way to distinguish your business from others is with the place name used as a keyword. In many cases, that can mean optimizing pages for your food type and your place name. Santa Ana Pizza is almost ok, but Santa Ana is a pretty big place. If your reputation is good, people will drive across the city for it. Otherwise they’re going to want the Pizza that’s closest. Otherwise, you need to be optimizing for “Heninger Park Pizza” and all the communities you’re serving.
We’ve written a lot about keyword research, and for local search optimization, local, community level and neighborhood names can be among the most important keywords.
4. Do Your Research
Building on that thought, think about how people are likely searching for Pizza, or your food, in your area. Especially if your selling a niche food, or an alternative, such as vegetarian only, you’ve got to be aware of the most important combinations of keywords people are using to search. You should also check the Google Adwords Keyword Planner for a more thorough understanding of how people are searching in your area.
5. Understand Off-Site SEO
Local search SEO for Restaurants is very much an off-site process.
Dozens of directories will help with your rankings, particularly if they accept some reviews (and you get some reviews) but you need to claim the most important of your listings and optimize them. Make sure your contact information is consistent across each of them, and don’t feel overwhelmed. There can be literally hundreds of listing sites. You don’t need to claim and be on every single one, but the most important for your market should be sufficient.
Keep in mind also, that Orange County is home to some listings directories that are in and of themselves as important as the big national directories like Yelp and Foursquare.
BestRestaurantsinOrangeCounty.com is a good place to start. And while the OCStandard.com, for example, will accept your listing for a fee, it’s really the type of market you’re serving that will determine how much, if anything, you might budget toward online marketing or advertising.
More on SEP: Illustrating the importance of being on top, an infographic on SearchEngineJournal.com shows clicks from paid search listings are now outnumbering clicks from organic (unpaid) search listings by almost 2:1 in keyword searches with high commercial intent, or keywords where the searcher is looking to buy a product or service. Click here to read more. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/are-google-ads-winning-an-data-filled-infographic/ |
Google and Bing are powerful search engines catering to millions of users worldwide. With the advent of smart devices online search has increased manifold. Users now have the powerful internet medium at the disposal of their hands and on the go. In such an era of online search it’s imperative for websites to implement certain strategies to end up within the top 10-15 online search results.
Global searches are now narrowing down to local searches. Someone looking for a car repair shop expects search engines to display results within a 10-15 mile radius or maybe within the same city where he lives. This concept of search engines coming up with geographically smarter search results is called “Local Search”. It takes into consideration what an online user is searching for and combines that with where the user is located.
So how do search engines identify relevant localized results? The answer lies within the tactics implemented when designing a website. These practices are called Search Engine Optimization strategies. SEO implementation is of utmost importance for any website, blog or online entity. It helps search engine index and rank websites accordingly.
Local SEO Best Practices
Over the years SEO has evolved in tandem with changes of the search engine algorithms. Global SEO and Local SEO are two different aspects. Local SEO takes into consideration keywords which relate to geographically smaller vicinities. Search engines then crawl looking for websites that have local-targeted content or local listings to provide the best possible localized results to the online user. Let’s dig into some of the best Local On-page SEO practices a website should incorporate –
Localized Search Results
Search engines are intelligent entities which run on algorithms. When a user types in a keyword in Google or Bing the algorithm hunts for information based on that keyword. The websites which have implemented the correct SEO practices and are indexed correctly show up in the search results. These results can also be locally focused depending on the search term, the user’s IP address or the user’s search history.
Localized search results target local audiences. A user located in Los Angeles looking for the best Greek restaurant in town would not benefit from a search result showing up an authentic Greek café somewhere in Athens. If a Greek restaurant in Los Angeles has been implementing local SEO best practices its name is bound to show up within the top 10 results.
Another aspect of ranking higher is to build up your online listings. Foursquare, Yelp, Google+ Local, Bing Local, YP.com, etc. are few of the major online databases. Users tend to find reviews and ratings on these websites. If your business or website is listed on these databases it helps you build reputation. Customers can leave feedback, connect with you through social media and drive more business through these strategies. Superpages.com, MerchantCircle.com and BOTW.org are other such platforms where listing your local business helps you gain ranking during searches. A great place to check your current local listings health is on GetListed.org. There you can get a free comprehensive look on any listings you are missing, unclaimed listings, and listings that are properly set up.
Local listings and localized search is growing in importance with each passing day. The trend of global search is now diverting towards local search, especially given that proliferation of smartphones. Creating an online presence through different avenues helps gain traction in search results. Social media, listing platforms and SEO tactics combined together is the perfect recipe for your website or business to appear atop relevant search results.
Nett Solutions is an SEM agency working with Yahoo! and Google. We are a Southern California-based company built of an eclectic cornucopia of marketers, mothers & fathers, husbands & wives, college grads & MBA’s, surfers, church-goers, athletes, comedians (and those who think they are comedians). Our common bond is that we like to help people succeed.
