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Local SEO-How To Dominate Local SEO With Or Without Google Places
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With Google Places results dominating SERPs for a massive range of keywords, your Organic and Local SEO efforts can be seriously effected even if you continued to rank on Page 1. Whether the target keywords are local or not (e.g. try searching for the word ‘Weddings’), you will find that Places results appear at the top of the page hence pushing down well-established organic results. Even though Google Places dominance continues to increase influence on SERPs, other elements of Google Shopping, Google Travel etc are also starting to show up. It is therefore important to have an updated SEO strategy along with appropriate tools to counter the threat. Under these circumstances, there are 2 important things to consider in your SEO strategy.
With Google Places results dominating SERPs for a massive range of keywords, your Organic and Local SEO efforts can be seriously effected even if you continued to rank on Page 1.
How to use Google Places to your local seo advantage or bypass the problem strategically.
It is not all doom and gloom with the presence of Google Places in SERPs, because Places has opened up new doors for local SEO in the local business market. There are a few ways you can use things to your advantage.
a) If you have a local address, you can register as a local business and use that for a Google Places place page. Many businesses are run from home and it is perfectly legal in many countries to do so. If you are able to register as a local business on Google Places for optimizing for your target keyword, you stand a great chance to rank within the places pack for your target keywords. In fact this might get you a local seo advantage too if you organize your strategy properly.
b) There are usually some spots available immediately above the Google Places pack where Organic results are displayed in the SERPs. If you are doing Organic SEO and if competition analysis tells you that you can rank above the places pack results, this is a big plus. In a lot of cases, this can be achieved through keyword domain match. If a keyword domain match is hard to achieve, a series of aggressive seo campaigns can achieve this result as well.
c) Double Whammy: If you setup your campaigns properly, you can achieve both of the above for target keywords – in this case you have seriously achieved a massive outcome.
d) If your competition and keyword analysis tells you that none of the above can be applied, it is best to move on to the next target keyword without wasting time, effort and money. Planning is 80% of your local seo work and if planning tells you to stop no matter how good the keyword is, that is very good advice.
How to easily check for the existence of Google Places results for target local seo keywords.
For all of the strategies highlighted above, you need to check whether Places results are showing or not for the target keywords. It can be tedious to check each keyword by entering the keyword into Google repeatedly, especially when most of us start out with 50 or so target keywords for various purposes and then drill down. There is a useful piece of free google places software that will come in very handy to check all your target keywords in one go. The video below will explain the details of how this software will tirelessly work and do all your work for you.
With best wishes to you and to the success of your SEO efforts in 2012.
This is a guest article contributed by Huss of Local SEO Australia website. Huss is an SEO professional promoting local businesses on Google Places and is heavily involved with Organic SEO. Huss is also a publisher of prominent SEO software Google Places Local Rank Tracker, Local Citation Finder and Google Places Pack Finder.
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