Samuel Edwards

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking website traffic and user behavior. It provides valuable insights that can help businesses make informed decisions about their online presence. However, in order to make the most of Google Analytics, it’s important to follow best practices. Initial Setup of Your Google Analytics Account Setting up a goal is relatively easy. All you have to do is find the Admin section for your target site, click on “Goals,” and then “Create a Goal.” Google Analytics offers a step-by-step process that allows you to set up any goal you’d like. For most users, you’ll be setting up a template goal. Some of the common goals you can choose from include “destination” goals, which are completed when a user reaches a specific page, or “event” goals, which are completed when a user takes a specific action, like playing a video. Once you’ve selected a type, you’ll be able to customize your goals and fill in the necessary information—like the URL for your destination goal. Once you’ve got your initial goals set up, make sure to run a handful of tests to make sure they are functioning properly. Designating a Value You’ll also have the opportunity to designate a value to the completion of each of your goals. Take advantage of this; it’s going to provide you with a major opportunity to objectively analyze your online marketing results later on. For some goals, coming up with this value is easy. For example, if you’re selling an ebook for $5 and you set up a goal for the completion of a single order, the value of the goal would be $5. However, if you’re selling multiple items in varying groups, you’ll have to come up with the average value of a customer order and use that as the assigned value of a goal. The process is further complicated by non-monetary goals, such as those assigned to the completion of a contact form. Here, you’ll have to determine the ratio of inquiries to sales, and then the average sale to determine the average goal completion value. This may take a few extra steps, but coming up with an accurate value is essential to determining the objective results of your campaign later down the road. Determining Which Goals to Set Up The “Goals” section of Analytics is one of the most useful tools you’ll find. If set up properly, you’ll be able to track conversions throughout your site, and run an analysis to determine the overall value of your campaign, giving you a perfect gateway to uncover the ROI of your inbound efforts. One of the most important aspects of Google Analytics is setting up goals and conversions. Goals are specific actions that you want visitors to take on your website, such as filling out a contact form or making a purchase. Conversions are when visitors actually complete those actions. By setting up goals and conversions, you can track how well your website is performing and identify areas for improvement. If a specific action on your website corresponds to revenue or the strong possibility for revenue, you should set it up as a goal. Only then can you be able to concisely and accurately project how much revenue your inbound marketing strategies are earning. Goals don’t take much time to set up, and once they’re set up correctly, you can run with them for as long as you need. Nobody has ever complained about having too much data available. Still, if you have multiple transaction points and multiple points of contact, it may be overwhelming to try and set up a goal for each one of them. Start out with the goals that are the most critical for your business goals, and once those are complete, gradually flesh out the others. Custom Dimensions and Metrics Google Analytics offers a variety of dimensions and metrics that you can use to analyze the most accurate data for your website. However, you can also create custom dimensions and metrics to track specific information that’s important to your business. For example, you might create a custom dimension to track which products visitors are interested in or a custom metric to track how much revenue each page generates. Data Segmentation Segmenting your data (typically using both live and raw data view) allows you to analyze specific subsets of your website traffic. For example, you might segment your data to analyze how mobile users interact with your website compared to desktop users. This can help you identify areas where your website might need to be optimized for specific devices or user groups. For instance, you may want to block internal traffic coming from your own IP address (or even those of your remote workers), so as not to obscure the data points. Use Annotations Annotations allow you to add notes to your Google Analytics data, which can help you remember important events or changes that might affect your website traffic. For example, you might add an annotation for a website redesign or a marketing campaign launch. Annotations can also help you see how specific events or changes impact your website traffic over time. Monitor Your Bounce Rate Your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after only viewing one page. A high bounce rate can indicate that visitors are not finding what they’re looking for on your website. By monitoring your bounce rate, you can identify areas where your website might need to be improved to keep visitors engaged. Setting Up Alerts Google Analytics allows you to set up alerts to notify you when certain events occur, such as a sudden drop in website traffic or an increase in bounce rate. When you create custom reports and set up alerts, you can quickly identify and respond to issues that might affect your website’s performance. The Funnel Setting up a marketing funnel is an optional part of the goal and overall Google Analytics setup process, but I’ve found it extremely

Google Analytics (coupled with Google Search Console) is one of the most powerful tools available for gaining insights about your website traffic and performance. With its wealth of features, you can gain valuable insights into how visitors are interacting with your site, from which pages they visit to where they come from and what device they use. However, there are many Google Analytics features that often go overlooked or underutilized. From event tracking to custom reports, these 15 critical yet overlooked Google Analytics functions have the potential to provide much more detailed information about your website and visitor behavior than you may be aware of. Dive in now to uncover new opportunities for optimization and growth for your own web analytics service! Behavior Flow You’ve probably already checked out the “Behavior” tab, where you can see how users react to different pages on your site, including how long it takes for them to bounce and where they generally enter. But the Behavior Flow section takes it to a new level. You might be intimidated by the visual component of the graph here, but if you break it down, it’s nothing that can’t be understood. In fact, it greatly assists you in visualizing the path the average user takes on your site. You can easily see which entry pages are most popular, where users go from there, and where you’re losing the most users. Use it as your guide to sculpt this “ideal” user path. Long term metrics When you run reports in Analytics, you probably take a look at the last month’s figures, or if you’re very committed, the last week’s. But have you looked at longer trends? Analytics can peer back as far as you’ve had the code on your site, likely giving you several years’ worth of information. Take a look at your traffic patterns between then and now—do you notice any seasonal spikes that could be taken advantage of? Did you have a dip or a substantial gain during a certain year? Have your bounce rates or conversions changed significantly? How have your Google Ads and marketing campaigns performed recently compared to historical numbers? How are your metrics looking in Google Ad Manager compared to overall organic traffic? Audience locations You might not think about your users’ locations, especially if you’re a national brand, but this information can be very helpful in identifying and possibly revising your target audience. Head to the Audience tab, and look at the geographic location of your users. You might find some rogue visitors from other countries that represent a possibility to expand, or you can drill down further and see what state most of your users are coming from. You can use this information to further optimize your site for those audience segments, or appeal to them in your offerings. Experiments Hopefully, you’re already conducting experiments in your online marketing strategy. They’re your best tools in learning more and doing better for your target audiences. However, you probably haven’t scoped out Google’s own Experiments section, which you can find under the Behavior tab. Here, you can set up basic experiments around metrics and parameters you define, offering up to 10 different variations of a single page (or target) to compare different segments of traffic against. If you’re interested in learning more or if you get stuck, Google has a great guide for this section. Goals If you haven’t tapped into Goals already, now’s the time to get started. It’s in your best interest to set up a goal for every significant user action on your site, whether that’s getting to a certain page from a certain page, or filling out a specific conversion form. The more you’re actively collecting data on these target instances of user behavior, the more ammunition you’ll have to adjust your strategy and optimize it further. You can set up Goals in the Admin tab, then view them in the Conversions tab. The process is relatively straightforward as long as you already have specific goals in mind. Shortcuts Do you fumble around in your Google Analytics dashboard every month to create just the right report for your campaign? If so, you haven’t found Shortcuts yet. It’s one of the main tabs on the left-hand side, but it’s often missed by search marketers. Here, you’ll be able to store your most commonly used reports and metrics, and recall them for future iterations. Device- and browser-based information Found under the Audience tab, you might have overlooked the potential of learning your users’ browser and technology preferences. The Technology and Mobile menus can give you a breakdown of exactly how users are accessing your site, giving you critical insight to ensure your site’s proper functionality and possibly come up with new strategies catering to the majority of your users. For example, if you find the majority of your users are finding your site on Internet Explorer, it might be worth spending more time optimizing for Bing. Custom Events This feature allows users to manually track events on their website and app, which can provide insights into user behavior that might not be visible in the standard reports. Site Search Reports With this feature, users can understand how visitors are navigating through their website or application by seeing what they search for while browsing the site or app. Cohort Analysis This type of analysis gives the user an idea of how different cohorts (groups) of customers behave differently over time based on certain behaviors like purchase frequency or engagement rate. Real-Time Reports These types of reports allow you to view information about active users from your Google Analytics account as well as measure performance against goals set in real-time so that changes can be made quickly if needed. Multi-Channel Funnels Users may use multiple channels during a single session when visiting a website or using an app, such as direct traffic, organic search results and referrals from other websites – multi-channel marketing funnels help you identify which ones bring the

SaaS companies have their work cut out for them. In theory, the SaaS model is one of the most profitable and scalable types of businesses in the modern world. Assuming you have a good idea and a reasonable profitability basis, there’s nothing stopping you from scaling up a business to the point where your incoming revenue is practically limitless. However, most SaaS companies rely on large-scale user bases in order to achieve that level of profitability. When you get to the order of thousands of users, your app is stable enough and your reputation is strong enough that retention and acquisition become child’s play. But every business starts with zero customers, and something needs to close the gap. That “something” is marketing, but not all marketing strategies are equally effective, or equally appropriate for a B2B SaaS brand. Defining an “effective” SaaS digital marketing strategy First, it’s important to understand what makes for a successful marketing strategy to begin with. There are many considerations for this, as the process for any given customer to make a purchase and remain a subscriber is fairly complex, and marketing strategies can operate at multiple levels. (Image Source: Content Marketing Institute) The chart above neglects the “retention” phase, after purchase, which is another important consideration for SaaS marketing strategies. Your goal, ultimately, is to earn a customer-related benefit that monetarily outweighs the capital you’ve poured into the strategy. This can happen at multiple levels, including: Raising brand awareness. Building a brand reputation. Attracting visitors to your site. Converting visitors to customers. Retaining customers for the long-term. Some strategies target all of these goals, while others specialize on one or two. Marketing strategies also range in cost and in time investment. Ultimately, this guide will consider strategies that accomplish as many of these goals as possible, as consistently as possible, for the least amount of total investment (and therefore, highest ROI). Key considerations for SaaS companies There are some special considerations for SaaS digital marketing, however. Fast sales cycle. First, most SaaS companies have lightning-fast sales cycles. SaaS subscriptions aren’t necessarily an impulse buy, but they certainly don’t rely on the long back-and-forth exchanges that most B2B operations do. Most rely on immediate conversions, usually with the offer of a free trial (as in the example below). This means SaaS digital marketing needs to have an immediate draw and reach a wide number of users to be effective. (Image Source: Zendesk) Customer retention. Customer acquisition is important, but retention is far more valuable. If your churn rate is too high, even a marketing strategy with a high propensity to generate new traffic and customers will fail. An ideal SaaS marketing strategy reaps the best of both worlds. Brand differentiation. There are tons of SaaS companies out there, partially because everyone else has realized what a valuable model SaaS can be. Just take a look at this random sampling of specialized CRM SaaS platforms: (Image Source: Software Advice) Your marketing needs to have some mechanism for strongly differentiating your brand. Long-term yield. Remember, SaaS is dependent on long-term gains and profitability over the course of years, not months or weeks. There are many marketing strategies that promise fast, short-term returns, but it’s better to invest in a strategy with a similarly long-term payoff. The fast scalability of SaaS companies means you need to find strategies that can function feasibly well at multiple stages of your growth. Ideally, you’ll be able to adopt them at launch and grow them with your company to the final stages of your growth. Niche specialization. Since there are many niches available for SaaS companies, there are some variations in which marketing strategies are effective for individual companies. However, this guide will focus mostly on strategies that can be useful for any specialized niche. With these considerations in mind, let’s explore some of the best all-around strategies a SaaS company can adopt. Content for Digital Marketing for SaaS Firms I’ve listed content marketing as the first and most effective digital marketing strategy a SaaS company can adopt. It’s difficult to prove this with numbers, since every campaign is different, but for your investment, content marketing is the strategy that offers the best long-term return in the greatest number of different areas. It operates on every level of customer acquisition—from raising brand awareness to converting visitors and even retaining your existing customer base—and it’s relatively cheap, since it doesn’t require much overhead or specialized technology. Best of all, it’s scalable—meaning it’s effective at every stage of your growth—and it’s perfectly positioned for long-term gains. In fact, the return you see on content marketing should increase exponentially as you invest more and more effort into it. Let’s take a look at some of the individual applications digital marketing can offer. Keep in mind that some pieces of content will be able to fulfill multiple roles in this list. Inbound-focused content Inbound-focused content is geared toward getting the greatest number of users to your site. This happens in many contexts, such as building awareness and visibility of your brand, sparking the interest of potential visitors, and clinching the deal by earning an inbound click. Accordingly, there are some main considerations your inbound content should focus on: Standing out from the white noise. Your first job is simply getting noticed. You can maximize your chances here by making your content visible in as many places as possible, and by coming up with truly original content topics. Appealing to your target demographics. And your target demographics can’t be “everyone.” Find the target market most likely to buy your product, and gear all your content to them. Otherwise, you’ll attract lots of visitors, but only a fraction of them will be interested in making a purchase. Offering some valuable, practical information. This will ensure that your users’ needs are met adequately, possibly driving them to that fast next step of actually converting. Suggesting your product as a solution. Your content should be geared, in some way, to

As a search engine optimization (SEO) agency, you want to provide your clients with the best possible services. You want to help them rank for their target keywords. You want to help them dominate the competition. And of course, you want to make good money doing it. But there are some major obstacles in your way. SEO campaigns can take a long time to get up and running. Economic slowdowns force companies of all shapes and sizes to cut their marketing budget (which, of course, affects their SEO spending). And on top of that, it’s often difficult to package your SEO services in a way that’s both sensible and cost-effective for your clients. Today, we have a singular solution to all of these problems: SEO sprints. The SEO Timeline Problem One of the biggest problems faced by top SEO agencies and SEO clients alike is the overall SEO timeline. Historically, it’s taken a considerable amount of time and effort to see any meaningful SEO results – and it’s because of threats on multiple fronts. Forming a marketing strategy required at least a week or two. Google updated its index slowly and (at times) inconsistently. Developing and publishing content could take weeks. And if you faced significant competition, it could be months before you could emerge as a realistic contender. All in all, that meant it could take months before you’d even appear in relevant SERPs for your brand – let alone reach the top of them. This has always been a hard sell for SEO agencies. How do you convince a skeptical client that they should pay you, consistently, for months at a time, with no immediate proof that your efforts are really working? This problem is even bigger during times of economic hardship. Today, businesses are facing threats like inflation, supply chain issues, labor shortages, and lower consumer spending due to market downturns. Marketing and advertising budgets all over the country are getting the axe – and the slowest, least immediately effective marketing strategies are getting cut first. SEO sprints offer a solution. What Is an SEO Sprint? SEO sprints take inspiration from development sprints. In the agile development world, a “sprint” is a short period of time in which a team commits to finishing a meaningful chunk of work, usually completing an important building block or reaching a noteworthy milestone. It’s a useful way to compartmentalize the entire project – while simultaneously boosting productivity. Like with ambulatory sprinting, the work is intense and done in a relatively short burst. In SEO, the “chunk” of work to be completed is usually ranking near the top of the SERP for a valuable, yet attainable keyword/phrase. Instead of gradually churning out new blog posts links over the course of months and across 10-20 keywords, you’ll concentrate all your efforts on a single keyword or phrase for a shorter period of time (usually a couple of weeks). But just because indexing happens fast, it doesn’t mean that ranking will. Those are two very different phenomena. This is possible in part because of Google’s faster and more responsive updates. A decade ago, it might have taken months for your hard work to pay off – but these days, you can sometimes see SERP updates (and greater organic traffic) in a matter of hours. The strategy has also recently become popular because increased competition in the SEO space (along with reduced payoffs for ranking highly, in some instances) is forcing SEO agencies and search optimization professionals to get more creative and strategic. SERPs are no longer a “blue ocean” opportunity, so we must be more precise and focused on the work we’re doing. Why SEO Agencies Should Focus on Sprints Why does this benefit your digital marketing agency? What makes sprints a more compelling SEO offer than, say, a traditional retainer structure or a la carte service offerings? There are many benefits to keep in mind: Appeal to budget-conscious clients. Some businesses are interested in getting more organic traffic, but they don’t have $10,000 a month to spend on a suite of SEO services and related marketing campaigns. They may be interested in paying a few hundred or a few thousand dollars for a one-and-done push – much like what they could get in a limited-run PPC advertising campaign. Obviously, budget-conscious clients aren’t the most lucrative ones, but it’s worth trying to appeal to them, especially if these limited runs produce a high return on investment (ROI). Over time, you’ll earn a better reputation and you’ll be in a much better position to upsell your clients. Appeal to time-sensitive clients. Freshly launched startups, small businesses, and event marketers are just a few examples of clients who have time-sensitive marketing and advertising needs. These people want to make a massive push, as soon as possible, and see results in a matter of days, rather than months. Ordinarily, these types of clients would never consider SEO; it requires too much of a time investment. But with SEO sprints, it suddenly becomes viable. Easier product packaging. Some SEO agencies love the idea of service offered as a product because it makes for easier product packaging. Instead of putting together vague service packages and monthly programs, you can make a clear, straightforward offer that’s tied to measurable results. You can sell each stage for a fixed fee, or offer various tiers of SEO sprint service, with variable SEO pricing based on the competitive environment and the amount of work you have to provide to get results. Options for recurring revenue. One of the strengths of an marketing sprint is that it can serve as a standalone product, but it can also provide you with an opportunity for recurring revenue. In this structure, you can put together a plan like 3 sprints per month; once your clients discover just how powerful sprints are, they’ll probably be interested in using them more frequently and with regularity. Cleaner strategic focus. In our experience, SEO agencies sometimes struggle with strategic focus.

Are you trying to rank your website in the search engines, but you have yet to see results? Perhaps you’ve noticed that plenty of your web pages have been indexed by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, but you’re not sure why your pages aren’t turning up in search results? Shouldn’t indexed pages come up in Google search results? Yes and no. While web pages must be indexed to come up in search results, indexing doesn’t determine a web page’s ranking. Getting your web pages indexed simply means a search engine knows your pages exist. If you want your indexed pages to be delivered in search results, your individual pages need to be selected by the search engine algorithms. To get search engines to select your pages, each page needs to be given a high ranking. To get that high ranking you need a search engine optimization strategy. If you’re getting indexed, but not ranked, you’re not alone. Whether you’re just starting to rank a new site or you’re trying to improve an existing site, getting indexed is just the first step. How do search engine indexing and ranking differ? In a nutshell, search engine indexing is like creating a catalog of options. Search engine rankings is prioritizing and categorizing all available options in the catalog to ensure the best options show up in a search. A brief overview of how search engines work Search engines function on three basic actions: crawling, indexing, and ranking. All three of these actions work together to deliver results to users who search for keywords and phrases. 1. Crawling. Search engines use robots called “crawlers” or “spiders” to search the internet for new content in the form of web pages or files. Google’s crawler happens to be named Googlebot. Search engine crawlers can read code. In fact, you can place commands in your robots.txt file and webpages to give directions to search engine spiders. For example, you can ask search engines not to index certain pieces of content or directories. 2. Indexing. Once a web crawler search engines discover a web page, it’s filed away to be delivered later during a search that the search engine considers relevant to the content of the page. 3. Ranking. Complex, proprietary search engine algorithms look at each indexed web page and evaluate the value based on hundreds of search ranking factors that include on-page and off-page factors. Pages considered to hold more value get ranked higher and thus come up higher in search results. In addition to crawling indexing and ranking web pages, search engines also administer penalties to individual pages and entire domain names under a select set of circumstances. Search engines have terms of use and if any page or domain violates those terms they can (and often are) removed from the search engine index or given penalties that suppress them from showing up in the search engines. Why is search engine indexing important? Simply put, without being indexed, a web page won’t show up in search results. Indexing is the foundation for search engine optimization. Why is search engine rankings important? Search engine rankings is what determines where and how often your web pages show up in search results. The higher your ranking, the more chance you have at getting your pages on the first page of results. Granted, search personalization ensures that each person will get a different set of results for the same search terms, so your pages may not rank for everyone. However, your pages will generally be delivered when a search engine’s algorithm believes that your content is highly relevant to a user’s search. Ranking is important for several reasons: Ranking can get you traffic Traffic can get you sales, leads, and brand visibility Ranking can help you dominate the search engines for certain keywords and phrases, which increases traffic even more An overly simplified explanation is that when your site shows up in search results, you’ll get traffic. When your site ranks in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for certain keywords and phrases, you’ll drive targeted traffic to your website from users who click on your links. Once those users visit your website they might sign up for your email newsletter, buy a product or service, read your blog, or bookmark your site to return. Having pages that rank higher in the results pages will increase your flow of organic traffic. The more search terms you can rank for, the more traffic you can get. All in all, your online business relies on search engine rankings for success. You can certainly generate traffic from content marketing, but you won’t get anywhere near as much traffic as you can generate by ranking high in the SERPs. Although, content marketing, when used for link building, is actually part of ranking high in the SERPs. It’s all interconnected. Ranking and indexing aren’t guaranteed Just because your web pages exist doesn’t mean they’ll be indexed. Likewise, just because your web pages are indexed doesn’t mean they’ll rank. While you can submit your site to get indexed quickly, it takes a strong SEO strategies over time to get your pages to rank. Rankings come and go. They are always in a state of flux, especially for new websites. That’s one of the reasons it can take so long to rank in Google. Some aspects of ranking pages are out of your control There are countless factors that affect indexing and ranking and only a handful are in your control. For example, redirects can prevent Google from indexing your pages. If Googlebot has to traverse through multiple redirects it’s considered a “redirect chain.” You can’t change the way Googlebot views redirect chains. Redirect chains are often created unintentionally. For example, you might redirect yoursite.com/1.html to yoursite.com/2.html. A year later, you might decide to redirect yoursite.com/2.html to yoursite.com/3.html. This creates two redirects where one is unnecessary; the best solution is to cut out the middle redirect. 4 common issues with search engine indexing Although search engine

In a phrase, any business can use local SEO, but it’s more effective if a business has a definitive physical location. There are also certain types of businesses that benefit the most from SEO. However, if you get most of your business from local clients or customers, local SEO might also be a good idea for you as well. Local restaurants, retail stores, law firms, doctor’s offices, dentists and so forth all benefit from using some type of local optimized marketing strategy. If you expect foot traffic from your website, you probably want to be the first to use local SEO. Local SEO vs. Traditional SEO Traditional or national SEO will target broad scope keywords. These keywords aren’t attaching a regional identity. For example, if you’re the marketing team behind Wal-Mart’s new national campaign for cheap tires, then your keywords will likely direct towards all markets and focus on “cheap tires,” “tire discounts” or “tire deals.” However, if you are a local auto tire company, you want to focus your keywords around location such as “cheap tires Orlando” or “tire discounts Orlando FL.” Creating a great local SEO strategy is about more than keywords but understanding this difference allows you to do accurate local keyword research, which is part of the whole marketing concept behind being local. Local Profiles on Google Creating profiles in Google is the first thing that any business wanting local traffic must do. Why’s that? Most people are using Google to do keyword research or product/service research, and when they type in something like “new tires Orlando,” a list of businesses that have profiles on Google Places will pop up at the top of the results page for the Orlando, Florida location. This means that businesses must add their complete location and details to Google Places. The profile must contain as much information as possible including a thoughtful description, pictures, contact details, store hours, and hopefully reviews. You also want to set up profiles on other social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. These sites will undoubtedly come up whenever anyone searches your store’s name or products to learn more information, and you should be the one to control that information. Be Consistent with Every Listing When you start to create profiles and even build a website, you should make sure that your address is consistent on any page that has your name, address and phone number. They should also feature the same main photo and additional images that are consistent with the rest of your profiles. It may seem trivial, but you should never abbreviate one address and not another. Using On-Site Optimization Techniques There are four things to know about local on-site optimization. For one, name, address and phone number must be on every page of your site, such as at the bottom or top. In addition, city and state names should be in the title tags, meta descriptions and content of your site. Schema local markup can also help search engines find your local content better and identify your location for users. Lastly, you can use a KML or keyhole markup language file to further your on-site optimization. The Most Important Factors to Boost Local SEO Rank Reviews, positive feedback and number of profiles is important. Reviews should be on every page that it is possible to have reviews, but Google Places reviews are seen the most, which means they contribute the most to a local business ranking in search results. Businesses often ask customers to leave reviews or add hints to review when a customer is obviously having a great experience. It’s important that you don’t pay for reviews, but businesses have had some success by offering a free gift if a customer leaves a review. Central Location Matters While having all of the above will definitely boost your ranking, your business may still not be in the lead if you are from the city’s center. That’s because when someone searches for “tires Orlando FL,” Google uses “centroid bias,” which means that the search will look for locations closest to the city center of Orlando. Basic Tips to Boost Local SEO Today This is a rundown of the steps a business owner can take to improve local SEO immediately. 1. Claim a local listing in Google Places Complete the listing until the profile is 100 percent finished. Images, videos, descriptions, contact information, links and posts are all important to finishing your listing. You do not want to use any keywords or location names in the business title unless it’s critical. For instance, if you own “Cheap Orlando Tires Inc” then it’s acceptable, but if your business is “Tires Plus Orlando,” then you wouldn’t write “Cheap Tires Plus Orlando FL.” 2. Spread information through Yext Yext is a service that allows you to spread your business information to other local platforms in the same format as you did with Google Places. Each of these becomes a “citation,” which is very valuable in terms of local SEO. 3. Set up other important social profiles Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are obviously important for local SEO, but if your business is more visual, you may want to set up a profile on Pinterest; if there is a local directory website that lists all of the local tire places, your business should be on there as well. 4. Use local keywords in your content Some of your content on your site can use local SEO keywords such as “Tires in Orlando” or “Orlando tires.” The links, title tags, anchor text, in-text keywords and meta descriptions should offer city and state keywords that relate to any of the service areas that are within your physical location’s reach. Link building is important to gaining traffic, so you should be linking to authoritative pages with PageRank 3 or above that relate to your site’s articles and blogs while also linking to a page on your site that is related to the content with a keyword as well. For example,