As part of our SEJ interview series, I recently caught up with Greg Gifford of AutoRevo to discuss local SEO.
In the video below, Greg explains some things local SEOs are doing wrong and how they could be doing better.
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- What Greg sees most is local SEOs and small businesses who don’t understand how important NAP information is — which includes name, address, and phone number.
- There are so many small businesses that, at some point in their existence, have either moved locations or changed phone numbers. The problem is that those businesses don’t do anything to clean up all the incorrect citation information.
- A lot of local SEO agencies will start working with these businesses and won’t think to ask if they have ever moved or if they have ever changed phone numbers.
- The local SEOs may never know there’s a whole mess of incorrect information out there they need to clean up, and that really hurts these businesses when there are multiple addresses and phone numbers floating around confusing the local algorithm.
- For PPC purposes, some businesses may put a dynamic number on their site. Does that hurt their SEO? Greg says he was just recently debating this question with a PPC guy, and there is one way you can do it correctly where it won’t hurt your SEO. Make sure the number embedded on the page is your actual primary phone number, and then you can have JavaScript in place that will flip the number and show something different. That way when a human looks at the page, the phone number will change as the page loads.
- Adding to the above point, the PPC guys will tell you that’s OK because the search engine spiders are going to crawl the page and see the number that’s hard-coded. However, the problem is if you’re feeding in all of these different dynamic phone numbers then inevitably someone is going to see your website and publish the number that’s being displayed, so you’re going to end up with various numbers making their way out on the Internet. Over time, these dynamic phone numbers will start to appear online and then that just creates more work for you to clean up.
- Greg strongly advises against call tracking, unless you’re dealing with a company that offers “manual” call tracking.
- If you use call tracking, but you’re not using the data in the report, then Greg asks why not get rid of your call tracking and do local SEO correctly? That way you will get more phone calls because you’re ranking better.
For more video interviews please visit SEJ’s YouTube page.
Category
Local Search
