The Best 7 Tips to Optimize Your Google My Business for Auto Repair

The Best 7 Tips to Optimize Your Google My Business for Auto Repair

by | Nov 29, 2019 | Citation consistency, Google Maps and Google My Business (GMB)

Google My Business for Auto Repair is the solution for many auto repair shop owners that are looking for a way to increase the number of customers that visit their shops. While many of them are in a fierce battle competing with larger businesses online, their online marketing strategies are in no way working for their business.

If you own an auto repair shop, you should know that people now search online for almost every product or service they need, primarily through their mobile devices. This has made mobile phone searches the dominant method through which people find and locate local businesses.

What this means for you is that to increase visitors to your shop and increase sales, you’ll need to make yourself more visible online. Perhaps the best way to do this is to optimize your website and Google My Business (GMB) page. By optimizing both your website and GMB, you’ll be giving your customers a better experience and increases the chances of them finding you online whenever they search for your services.

Verifying your GMB page is the first step to bring more customers to your shop. In this article, we’ll offer some essential tips on how to optimize your website and your GMB page.

Tips To Optimize Your Auto Repair Business GMB Page

#1: Get Your Information Right

Thеrе аrе different раrtѕ оf your Google Mу Business listing, ѕо lеt’ѕ ѕtаrt with your core buѕіnеѕѕ information:

  • Name
  • Address
  • Phone Number
  • Website
  • Description
  • Category
  • Attributes

Google My Business will request your name, address, phone number and website (which is otherwise known as NAP) to begin the listing creation process. This information will be indexed by Google search and Google Maps, providing a foundation for your local SEO.

Your information should be consistent with what’s currently listed on your website as much as possible. Inconsistencies in this information can negatively impact your search ranking.

When entering your address, make sure it matches with the correct coordinates on the map and includes the same zip code (5-digit vs. hyphenated 9-digit zip) provided on your website. You’ll also want to use a local number instead of a national or call center number.

After you’ve provided your NAP, the next part to focus on is your business category and company attributes. You can add as many categories as you’d like, however you can only use Google’s pre-made list of categories. Use as many as apply but don’t use any irrelevant categories.

You should consider your keyword strategies when adding your business category and attributes. However, you need to do this with care so that you won’t be stuffing your listing with keywords.

#2: Update Your Auto Repair Shop with Events and Holidays

Google doesn’t want to send customers to your business when you’re closed, so you want to make sure your hours of operation include Holidays. There is an option for you to set special hours for the holidays and events in advance. Once logged into your GMB page you’ll head over to your dashboard, from there you’ll go to the info tab and on the left side will be a place for you to edit the special hours.

#3: Research Potential Keywords

Keywords are groups of words that people use when looking for your services. This is one of the essential tips for optimizing your GMB page. You must identify potential keywords related to auto repair in your area.

Keyword research is an entirely different subject, but if your GMB listing has been around, you can use it to get a basic idea of your keywords. Go to your GMB dashboard and click on Insights. Here, in addition to seeing how much traffic your GMB listing created, you can see the search terms people are using to find your listing already. This can give you an idea of the types of keywords you want to focus on.

To assess recent query, consider setting the date range to a three months to give you the most information. Then check the queries that seem to be the most popular based on the number of users searching for your services.

One exciting thing about Google My Business is that its metrics are based on unique users, unlike what with Google Search Console that reports on impressions. This means your auto repair business can easily note popular phrases most people use to find your website, and on an individual basis.

#4: Ask For Reviews and Respond To Them All

Reviews are the lifeblood of local search. It’s a simple equation. When you’ve got good reviews on your business page, your potential for getting more customers goes up. There are some instances where bad reviews can also present you with a golden opportunity. This may sound counter intuitive, but when users read a gracious response from the owner, they know that even if things go wrong, you’ll make sure to fix it.

most people like a second opinion — a good reason why 90% of people read reviews before making a purchase. A recent study done in 2018 found that 68% of consumers search for local businesses at least once a month. That’s a 10% increase from 2017.

So, how do you get reviews from your customers? It’s simple. You ask them! While some sites may discourage this, Google My Business actively recommends it. You can send a link to your customers in a few easy steps.

  • Go to your Google My Business dashboard.
  • Click on Info.
  • Select the @ symbol to create your GMB Shortname.
  • Click on Home.
  • Find the section that says “Get More Reviews” and click “share profile”
  • Copy the link and send it to your customers by email, text message, or other instant messaging apps.

While the best time to ask for a review is right at the time of service, make sure you share with your previous customers by sending the link via email or text.The worst that can happen is they don’t write you a review.

After you start to gather reviews on your listing, you’ll need to respond to all of them. Even the ones that are bad – especially the ones that are bad. Take time to write a message to each reviewer using the Google My Business dashboard. 44.6% of people say they would be more likely to visit a business if the owner was responding to negative reviews.

If your reviews are arriving with a perfect 5-star rating, this is your opportunity to turn a customer into a passionate supporter of your business.

Pro-Tip: Use keywords in your responses to show Google you’re relevant. For example, if someone writes you a 5 star review, say “Thanks customer, it was a pleasure doing your brake repair in our city.”

#5: Use your Google My Business Messager

What if your customers have a question they want a quick answer to? How will they get in touch with you?

The simple answer is “They’ll call the number on my GMB” but that’s not always the case. Many people, especially younger people, prefer text based communications. Google knows this, and that’s why they implemented the GMB messenger. If you use the GMB App on your phone, you can enable instant messaging straight on your GMB listing.

Google My Business for auto repair can use the GMB messenger

#6: Use Google My Business for Auto Repair to add posts and share business updates

Google added the posts feature back in 2017. This feature allows you to share content about your business, much like a Facebook post. You can use text, photos, and even add a call to action button.

As soon as you’ve verified your GMB listing, you can begin creating posts. Click on the posts tab of your GMB listing and click the one of the different types of posts:

  • Add Update: You can create a regular social media style post here with text and images and a CTA button.
  • Add Event: If your business is doing something special, you can create the event on your GMB page so it will show up on Google.
  • Add Offer: Got a sweet discount you’re offering? You can add it to your GMB lsiting so when users find your business they see it right away.

#7: Track Customer paths through Google My Business Insights

As with any marketing strategy, it’s important to measure thei mpact of your Google My Business listing on your auto repair business. And the good news is that Google has built-in tools to help with that.

Google My Business Insights can tell you:

  • How customers are finding your business – direct vs. discovery searches
  • Where on Google your customers are finding your listing – Search vs. Maps
  • The actions your customers are taking on your listing – visiting your site, clicking on directions, browsing the photo gallery, or calling you
  • Total phone calls and time when customers are calling
Google Insights Customer Actions

Google Insights Customer Actions

Google Insights Phone Calls

Google Insights Phone Calls

Google Insights Photo Views

Google Insights Photo Views

Google Insights Searches

Google Insights Searches

Google Insights Views

Google Insights Views

Google My Business tracks user actions in the Insights section of the dashboard, which can help you understand what customers find valuable in your listing. You can even compare some elements, like photo views, to your competitors’ performance. All of these information can be used to track your customers’ conversion path, and provides a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ actions prior to reaching your website.

The Bottom Line

There are many ways customers can find your auto repair business, but there’s no denying that Google Search is an incredible gateway to your website. So get your Google My Business page optimized and position your auto repair business where the people searching for it can see it.

Optimizing your Google My Business for auto repair is just the first step to dominating the search rankings and getting more customers. Learn how we used citations to get more customers for the largest auto repair shop in Los Angeles.

Robert Portillo, founder of Nimbus Marketing, and his family.

About the author:

Robert Portillo is the founder of Nimbus Marketing. Nothing satisfies him more than expressing his thoughts well. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons. He can often be found at local farmer’s markets, hiking trails, and the beach.

How to Do the Best Local SEO for Yacht Dealerships in 2020

How to Do the Best Local SEO for Yacht Dealerships in 2020

by | Nov 25, 2019 | Yacht SEO, Online marketing, SEO

Doing local SEO for yacht dealerships might not sound easy, but this article is here to help you get started with your SEO. According to NMMA (National Marine Manufacturers Association), the boating industry has seen an increase in the last 7 years and expects to see additional increases. The question is, are these Yacht dealerships being found online? Everyone knows that people will search online to find a business or service that they’re looking for, and the same thing goes when buying a Yacht.

The new world of Google for boat dealers

In today’s world, almost everything is digital, and the marine industry is no exception to this. Yacht dealers who understand this and getting their business found on search engines will eventually bring in more sales. If you were to do a quick search on Google with the keyword “boats,” you’d see results at the top of the page for boat dealerships. If you were to search the keyword “boat,” you’d see different results.

So how does Google determine what businesses should be included in the search result? Google considers more than 200 ranking signals to bring up the best result for their users. While many of the signals come directly from the websites or businesses, there are also some other signals that Google will consider, such as online directory listings, backlinks, citations, and consumer reviews.

For a yacht dealership, your priority is to make sure you show up in these local searches. This means you’d need to take your local SEO more seriously. While there are more than 200 ranking signals to be considered its best to capitalize on the ones that have been proven to be effective in boosting site performance in the local sphere.

How Keywords can help boost your Yacht dealership’s local domain authority

Before we can look into how you can implement local SEO for yacht dealerships. We need to first look into some important things that you should know about Local SEO, and that’s keywords.

Whether organic SEO or local SEO keywords play a vital role, keywords tell Google what your site is all about and what users can get from each page on your website. If you’re looking to build an organic presence in an area or if you want to build relevance around a subject matter, you’ll need to create a library of pages that have keywords related to that subject or area. What keywords do is help establish your site as a relevant source of information when users are looking for that topic or in that region.

If your target city was Santa Monica, even though your business location is just outside that city, you might not be able to outrank a yacht dealership in that area. But if you were to optimize your site for Santa Monica, you’d be able to rank organically for Santa Monica.

Building local content for your yacht dealership

When you’ve chosen a primary city, you’d like to focus on, the next thing to do is start writing the content. It’s important that you first identify the city you want to target and get as many relevant keywords as possible.

One great thing about writing local content is that since this is your expertise, the writing for it’ll come naturally. If you’re one of the yacht dealerships that’s involved with community events in your area, start by writing about them, and putting it up on your blog or Google My Business page, you’d then be attracting more people to your site. Anytime someone is searching for that particular event or events like it, your site will come up. Every post you put up on your site should focus on a keyword phrase. Keyword phrases should include the name of the event as well as the city it’s in. This is crucial for content.

Always try to center your writing around the keyword, and when you’re about to post the content, ensure you use the same keyword in the URL, meta title, meta description, image alt text, and in the body of content. This will give Google a clear understanding of what your pages are all about.

Why focus on local SEO for yacht dealerships?

Building local SEO for your yacht dealerships comes with a lot of benefits for your business. Here are some of the important benefits local content marketing has to offer:

  • It helps expand your library of keywords, which in turn will help drive more people from your area to your site. 
  • Having more people from your area visiting your site for relevant information will call Google’s attention to the rise of relevant traffic to your site. This can make you rank higher on result pages
  • Local SEO gets your brand some recognition. Even though most people landing on your site may be there to read up on information. When it comes time to buy that yacht that they’ve had their eye on, they’ll surely remember your site. 
  • It promotes backlink development.

Your site is Important to your sales and to your overall brand management. It’s important to do everything you can to make sure you get it noticed.

Let’s look at some things you need to do to get your Yacht dealership SEO right

#1 Get yourself into more directories

This may not be fun, but it’s worth it. You’ll be required to sign up for a bunch of online directories for your yacht dealerships. You need to do this right, so take your time! This may be the most tedious of all the many SEO tips for your yacht dealership, but it’s also vital when it comes to improving your website ranking.

Some good examples of directories are Yellow Pages, Yelp, or the Better Business Bureau. Creating a profile on these top-notch directories has a way of increasing traffic to your website as well as improving your rankings. This can also improve your site’s rankings and allow more customers to leave reviews on your page.

Useful tips for submitting your website to a directory:

  • Use the full name of your business
  • Use the same information on every directory, including your name, address, phone number, and website
  • Look for some relevant and high-quality pictures to upload
  • On the directories, write a short and captivating description or “about us.” Make sure your description is different for each directory.
  • Use relevant tags on the directories. You want to make sure your business is listed in yacht dealerships or something similar. So, use appropriate tags that’ll give you a better chance of showing up on Google.

If you’re still confused about which directories you should add to, here are some free directories to list your business on:

 

  • Google My Business
  • Yellow Pages
  • Yelp
  • Insider Pages
  • The Better Business Bureau
  • SuperPages
  • Merchant Circle
  • Manta

#2: Optimize your Homepage

Your home page is one of the most important pages on your website, so it’s important to make sure you’re optimizing it. Here are some tips on how you can achieve this: 

 

  • Make sure your home page is linked to all the important pages on your site. You can put those links in the menu bar or in buttons on the homepage.
  • Make sure your homepage vividly describes your business – who you are and what you do. Your audience should immediately be able to tell what type of yacht you sell and where you’re located immediately, they land on your homepage. So, give it your best by using the right words and keywords to describe your business.
  • Be careful and selective with your language. Make sure your language is clear, clean, short, and decisive.
  • Include some high-quality and eye-catching images. But be careful, so you don’t overdo it.
#3: Take your social media pages more seriously

Your yacht dealership also needs a social presence. When it comes to implementing an effective Local SEO strategy for a yacht dealership, signing up for Instagram and Facebook is very important. Once you’ve set up, your social media accounts use the following tips to get the most out of them.

  • Post regularly on your social media pages. Even if it’s a silly update, just make sure you put something on the page once a week. In the case of Facebook, consider using pictures; they seem to work best.
  • Ensure all the information about your company is correct.
  • Promote your posts. 
  • Get people to engage with your post. Let them contribute and share knowledge on your page.

 

#4: Blogs are important

Just like social media, blogging is also another important factor to consider when considering how to do local SEO for yacht dealerships.

Regularly update and share news on your website. Write about company news or about the industry. Focus on just one topic per blog. When your blog is well-focused, the better results you’ll get from it. Below are some tips to help with blogging: 

  • Write posts about yacht sales
  • Blog about the events you attend, host, or sponsor
  • Don’t get yourself involved in opinions. Instead, write about more insightful topics and include some relevant sources in the post.
  • Talk about industry trends. Look for what’s happening in the yacht dealership corner and discuss it.
  • Don’t forget to include relevant and quality images in your posts.

 

Here are some tips for doing local SEO. Find tips on writing a successful blog post for your website. 

Robert Portillo, founder of Nimbus Marketing, and his family.

About the author:

Robert Portillo is the founder of Nimbus Marketing. Nothing satisfies him more than expressing his thoughts well. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons. He can often be found at local farmer’s markets, hiking trails, and the beach.

The Most Successful Checklist for Blog Posting in 2020

The Most Successful Checklist for Blog Posting in 2020

by | Nov 20, 2019 | SEO

Here is the most successful checklist for blog posting in 2020. You may have heard the adage “content is king”. That’s truer today than ever. It’s becoming increasingly important that businesses create unique content for their web pages and blog if they want to convince Google that they’re the experts in their field. Writing for blogs is distinctly different than writing for other formats. It’s important that many different factors are considered when creating and writing for your business blog.

Having a blog and regularly creating posts really is complicated. If you want to be found by the search engines, there are several factors you need to consider and implement when writing your article. I have created what I feel is the most comprehensive checklist for blog posting. If you master even a few of these techniques, you could gain a real competitive advantage in your industry. I have broken down the considerations into four groups: Content Considerations, User Considerations, Search Engine considerations, and General Considerations.

Content Considerations

The first portion of this checklist for blog posting is the content considerations. This involves the way you will write and layout your blog posts.

checklist for blog posting
  • Headline: First on the checklist for blog posting is the headline. This is the most important part of the blog article. Stay away from common blog headline formats and tactics. Create bold, unique headlines that stop the reader’s eyes and beckon them to read more.
  • Reading level: for most audiences, write at a 3rd-grade reading level. Google knows that articles written for 3rd graders are more easily understood and read more often. Of course, this depends on your audience. If you’re writing articles for doctors, you’ll want to increase the grade-level much higher. There is a great tool for this and many other factors here: https://wordcounttools.com/
  • Conversational tone: don’t speak at your audience, speak to them. Try your best to write the same way you would talk to somebody. Don’t be stiff and robotic. Use contractions such as “don’t” instead of “do not” just like you would if you were talking.
  • Bolding: data shows that people often skim instead of, or before reading an entire article. Bolding key sentences cater to these types of readers and clarifies the main points the author is trying to convey.
  • Bullet points: it’s important to break up long content with occasional bullet points to help structure the content for ease of reading. Create a few short paragraphs and then a bullet point list to break up your article and make it easier to digest.
  • Synonyms: don’t stuff your article full of keywords over and over. Use a thesaurus and find words that mean the same thing, or are very similar, to your keywords.
  • Storytelling: if possible, write your blog article in a way that tells a story. The human brain is hard-wired to love a good story. There is an excellent and informative article about this topic in the Harvard Business Review located here. Storytelling should conform to a structure. Common structures include:
    • Past, present, future
    • What? so what? now what?
    • Problem, solution, benefit
  • Sub-headers: by dividing your blog article into easily readable sections, you improve the overall user experience. Increasing the user experience helps your SEO. Google wants you to focus on the user. You should want the same thing.
Word counts should be on your checklist for blog posting
  • Word count: always create blog posts that are at least 1,500 words. Google knows from billions of pieces of data that users don’t read 500-word articles nearly as much as longer articles. If you’re still writing 500 or 1000 word articles, you may be wasting your time. It’s better to write one 1,500-word article than three 500-word articles. In fact, 1,500 words may already be past their usefulness and on the way out. Research by SerpIQ shows that the majority of the top 10 search results on Google that feature blog articles have 2,000 – 2,400 words. People’s attention spans have become more extreme. They seem to either want to read 140 character snippets or they want to dig in and really learn. This article is about 2,600 words.
  • Paragraph length: break your paragraphs into 3 – 5 sentences. Create 3 – 5 paragraphs and then create a bullet point list or other breaks from the paragraph structure, such as a “Did you know?” or “Quick Facts”
  • Sentence length: keep your sentences as short as possible. Read and reread your sentences to eliminate any unnecessary words.
Fonts on your blog posting checklist
  • Font: a lot of people that like to read are older. Make sure that your font is readable. Increase the font size and don’t use strange fonts for your blog posts.
  • Proofread: your blog article can’t have any typos or grammatical errors if you want to rank highly in the search engines. Read and reread your blog article over and over to ensure it’s proper. Take a break from your article and read it the next day to help gain a fresh perspective. Ask a friend, colleague or highly-literate employee to copy edit your work. A great tool you can use to ensure this is www.typosaur.us.
  • Supporting data: if you can, use numbers and statistics to back up your points. Numbers and statistics have been proven to increase trust by illustrating the research you put into your article. This gives your readers more confidence in your information and increases the likelihood that they will share your article.

User Considerations

The next consideration on this checklist for blog posting is user considerations. This involves things like who you’ll be writing for how you’ll be helpful to them, and the useful elements of the article.

  • Know your audience: ideally, you would have developed 3 key buyer profiles. By identifying the types of people, you want to read your article or your customers. You’ll do a better job of writing content that speaks to their needs. It’s helpful to understand the 3 stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness stage, consideration stage, and decision stage. Most people who read long blog articles are researching and fall into the consideration stage. They’re most likely looking for solutions to problems they’re having. By structuring your content with this in mind, you can focus on providing solutions that might appeal to them.
Every good blog post has a target audience
  • Authority links: especially when referencing arcane, technical or industry-specific terms, these can be very helpful for readers to include authority links to define and explain what these terms are.
  • Conclusion: near the end of your article, prepare your reader that the end is near. Create a synopsis of the entire article, for those who skim, and to fortify the meaning of your article. End your blog post with a pleasing conclusion, or in the case of storytelling, with a happy ending.
  • Call to action: incorporate a call to action into your conclusion by offering advice with a link for more information, contact form, a link to a related article, a to-do list, a phone number, and free consultation or a link to your shopping cart website, if promoting a product.
  • Social: be sure to include your social sharing icons. Because there are so many social platforms, list as many as you have. Be sure to invite them to share it politely. Don’t just stick the icons there and expect readers to share. Ask them nicely. Like this: “if you enjoyed this article, maybe somebody you know will too. Please share ☺”
Blogs are great for social media shares
  • Introduction: introduce the author at the end of the article. Include a brief BIO and a picture if possible. Stay away from headshots and include a more personal picture, such as the author with their children, or dogs, or a snapshot of them playing a sport. This can humanize the author and help them to resonate with the interests of the reader and increase their fan base and subscriptions.
  • Gratitude: thank the user for taking their precious time to read your article.
  • Participation: encourage your audience to participate in the process. I recommend ending with a question. If the article was about cleaning gerbil urine stains out of Persian rugs, ask the audience what their favorite urine stain removal techniques are.
  • Moderation: leave your blog open to comments and make sure to moderate them. Be kind to off-the-wall comments, delete comments that are clearly spam, and use each comment as an opportunity to build trust and connections.

Search Engine Considerations

When ticking off your checklist for blog posting, you can’t ignore the search engine considerations. These are the considerations you must make regarding how search engines like Google will read your article.

Make sure you're considering keywords for your blog content
  • Keywords: it’s crucial to identify the proper keywords to use in the article. If you have performed keyword research, focus on one or two of your primary keywords for the article. It’s crucial to insert the researched keywords and incorporate them in a natural manner into each blog article. Ideally, these keywords are included in the blog headline and at least one heading. Keywords should be included in the introduction and conclusion of your article.
  • Meta-description and snippets: create a compelling and persuasive meta description that helps search engines create a dynamic preview of your article in the search results. The preview in the search results page is the bit of text below the search result link. This description can make or break your blog article. If the description isn’t compelling, the user may choose a different article with a more interesting description, even if the article ranks lower.
  • Internal links: always have at least one link to another page on your website. A simple way to do this is to link to an older blog article that goes more in-depth on a topic that you referenced in the current article. You could also link to one of your subpages that discuss your services on a related topic. The reason for this is that if your blog starts to rank, it will pass SEO juice to the internal page. And if you do it in a way that’s helpful for users, this will help your SEO.
  • Hosting: always host your blog on your own domain, such as www.company.com/blog. Don’t host your blog on another site, such as www.blog.company.com.
  • Speed: Test your blog to see if you can reduce loading time. You want your blog to load as quickly as possible, ideally under 2 seconds. 50% of users will leave if your blog takes longer than 5 seconds to load. There are quite a few excellent speed test websites. Google even has its own located here.
  • Compatibility: readers are using all kinds of devices to read with. It’s imperative that your blog is responsive and adapts to any device being used. If you need help making your blog or website responsive, feel free to check out our excellent services in that arena on our services page.
  • Yoast: if using WordPress as your blogging platform, consider using the Yoast plugin. This fantastic plugin guides you through the process of optimizing key elements of your blog post.

General Considerations

The final portion of this checklist for blog posting is the general considerations These are considerations that are less specific to your article, and more about your blog overall.

  • Your blog article URL: your blog article URL should be a friendly URL that’s as short as possible and easy to read. Some blog articles are still using a technical structure, such as https://www.quicktally.com/blog/2016/10/24. Google has a clear preference for articles that use a friendly structure, such as https://www.quicktally.com/blog/How-Hedy-Lamarr-Invented-ARS 
  • Introduction: start your blog with a bang and rapidly get their full attention with a surprising fact, a quick and unusual question, or a brief story that ends in a cliffhanger that’s resolved at the end of the article.
  • Subscription: offer readers the ability to subscribe to your blog. When new articles are written, subscribers can be notified. When they visit your blog repeatedly, you gain a fan base and traffic to your blog. Webpage traffic is a top SEO factor.
Offer subscriptions on your blog
  • Be different: choose interesting articles that ideally have never been written about. Write in a compelling and unique manner that engages the reader. Often creating a unique topic is the most important aspect of the blog. If you write an article that 1,000 other people have already written about, there is little chance that your article will ever rank on the first page of Google or be found. Sometimes it’s very easy to write about a topic that hasn’t been written before. You can do this by being more specific. For example, instead of writing an article on how to create a great headline, write an article on how to create a great Vimeo video headline. Or instead of writing an article on how to remove stains from carpets, write an article on how to remove cat feces stains from shag carpeting. It’s important to not write on a topic that nobody will ever search for. Use your good judgment and whenever possible, do some Googling yourself to see what other people are searching for.
  • Images: include at least one attractive image and preferably multiple images that paint a picture of the takeaways from your article. Ideally, each image is a unique image that’s not a stock photo. The image can be a photo, a cartoon, a sketch, a video or many other types of media such as social media posts, quotes, and presentation slides. Be sure to caption images with a helpful and thoughtful description. If using a video, be sure to include the length of the video to respect the user’s time. Finally, be sure to use keywords in the alt tags used for the image or media.
  • Voice: have a consistent voice for your blog. This can be informative, humorous, helpful, family-oriented, technical, sarcastic and more. The key point is to choose a voice and stick with it. By having a specific voice, you cater to a specific segment of the population instead of trying to appeal to everyone. Targeting a particular section of your market increases the likelihood of readership and shares.
  • Outreach: this is a whole other topic, but it’s important to understand that if you build it, they will not come. Or at least you can’t assume this. You have to promote your blog posts. Share the posts on your social media profiles, ask your friends to share it, ask your colleagues if you can share it on their wall. Include a link to the newest blog posts in your email signature, your bio, your social media profile descriptions, and other directory profile descriptions such as Yelp and Superpages.com. Consider posting your article on Linked-In Pulse. Perhaps even pay to boost or promote your post on Facebook and LinkedIn. Sometimes you have to prime the pump a bit to get things going. Here is an article that will introduce you to some possibilities for blog distribution outreach: https://www.inklyo.com/content-distribution-sites/
  • Be regular: it’s crucial that if you embark on creating and maintaining a blog you stick to a regular schedule. If you decide on once a month, then make sure to post your articles exactly one month apart. Never abandon your blog. It looks very bad when potential customers or fans come to your blog only to see that the last article was posted months, or years ago.
  • Have fun: if you really want to have the most impact on your readers (and search engines), have fun with your blog articles. There are billions of articles out there. Many of them are dry and boring. By having fun and taking chances with your writing, you’ll stand out from the noise and vastly increase your chances of being found, creating a readership base, and enjoying your job as a writer.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read my checklist for blog posting article. If you know anybody who might like this article, please share it. Did I miss anything? What are your favorite business blog SEO tips?

Robert Portillo, founder of Nimbus Marketing, and his family.

About the author:

Robert Portillo is the founder of Nimbus Marketing. Nothing satisfies him more than expressing his thoughts well. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons. He can often be found at local farmer’s markets, hiking trails, and the beach.

How Citation Consistency Dramatically Helped the Largest Tire & Auto Repair Shop in L.A.

How Citation Consistency Dramatically Helped the Largest Tire & Auto Repair Shop in L.A.

by | Nov 5, 2019 | Citation consistency, Google Maps and Google My Business (GMB), Local SEO, SEO

Tire and Auto Repair Shop Millionaires are Impressive

 

Bob was a self-made millionaire 2 times over. We’d been in a business networking group called LeTip for many years. He owned the largest tire and auto repair shop in Los Angeles. We had coffee a few times, and Bob explained to me how he made his millions. He had worked in the tire industry for a few years as a young man when he purchased the company he worked for. He spent the next decade building the tire shop into one of the largest around.

He did so well in the coming years that he sold his auto and tire repair shop in his early 30’s and retired a millionaire. He started spending most of his time golfing and traveling. Soon he became bored because none of his friends or family had the money or free time to join him. As a result, he would often spend his time in foreign lands and on the golf course alone. That’s when he started a new business, built it from the ground up, and became a self-made millionaire once again.

I couldn’t help but notice that his auto repair shop’s website was outdated. I asked him a couple of times if he’d thought about rebuilding it or if he was interested in trying search engine optimization, PPC, Local SEO or other types of online marketing. He always rebuffed my ideas. After all, he was the self-made millionaire twice over. What advice did a relatively inexperience business owner have to offer him?

Ultimately he was stuck in his ways. He was still fixated on sending out postcards and other physical mailers. Who could blame him? They worked for him for years. So I gave up and continued to bring my vehicles to his shop for repairs and new tires. Sadly, many years later, Bob got sick and passed on his business to his grandson.

His grandson was an intelligent and extremely motivated young man in his mid-20’s. His ambition was impressive. You could almost smell the fire in his belly. While his 4 siblings went off to college to become attorneys and doctors, he was more interested in being a business person.

citation consistency for tire and auto repair shops

Citation Consistency Problems Arise

 

Sensing a new opportunity, I asked the grandson if he was interested in growing his business by increasing his search engine rankings. He quickly replied “yes” and signed up for one of our monthly search engine optimization packages.

We immediately went to work and quickly ran into a devastating roadblock. The website was built on a template shared by hundreds of other auto repair and tire shops. This made it impossible to update anything on his site except for his blog. Search engine optimization requires updating certain parts of a web page, including title tags, H1 tags, alt tags, and 11 other elements. But we were unable to access these elements of his website so we were stuck.

When we learned of this terrible situation, we contemplated calling to tell the Grandson that we couldn’t help them improve the rankings and search visibility for their auto and tire shop. In a company brainstorming session, we discovered that they had some significant citation consistency issues. They’d been in business for around 4 decades. During that time, they had multiple business names, addresses, and phone numbers. In the SEO world, name, address and phone number are referred to as “NAP”.

Google, Bing and Yahoo local SEO NAP number of ranking factors for business

These NAP citation consistency problems were causing their business to have far lower Google Maps rankings than they should have. The reason citation consistency issues cause problems is because when Google and other search engines see different business names, addresses, and phone numbers, they lose trust in a business. They don’t feel confident sending people to the wrong place.

Since we couldn’t update their website, we started correcting all the inconsistent directory listings, also called structured citations, to improve their NAP citation consistency. Since they’d been around for so many years, they had well over 200 citations.

It took us many months to get all the citations exactly consistent. As we corrected their citations over time, their local rankings grew. Their auto and tire repair shop went from 24 number one rankings to 84 number one rankings. They also went from 31 rankings in the 2-5 position to 65 rankings. Their rankings in the 5–10 position rose from 4 to 33. The chart below shows their explosive growth in #1 rankings as the top-10 and top-50 rankings. They experienced a 340% growth in 2 years.

Nimbus Marketing Delivers Big Time For Local Shop

 

Our efforts for this family-owned tire and auto repair shop paid off big time. The Grandson called me into his office and explained to me that since they hired us, their sales increased by over $800,000. He explained that although the increase in sales was not completely because of our SEO efforts, it was a large part of it.

This is one of my favorite customer success stories. It demonstrates the power of never giving up. It also highlights the importance of good research. If my team hadn’t thought to review their citation profile, we may have cancelled our campaign for them and missed out a big opportunity to help a local family-owned business.

To this day, we still can’t update their website. I can only imagine how much more their business would have grown if we could have.

Robert Portillo, founder of Nimbus Marketing, and his family.

About the author:

Robert Portillo is the founder of Nimbus Marketing. Nothing satisfies him more than expressing his thoughts well. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons. He can often be found at local farmer’s markets, hiking trails, and the beach.

All You Need to Know to Get Your Business to the Top of Google

All You Need to Know to Get Your Business to the Top of Google

by | Oct 30, 2019 | Google Maps and Google My Business (GMB), SEO

Gone are those days when only big businesses with big pockets can benefit from large scale marketing to get their business to the top of Google. Today, things have changed and it is now about who can smartly take advantage of the several digital channels to outrun

the competition using local search marketing.
Marketing has now turned to an “even field” where anyone can play. Many small businesses are taking advantage of the internet to promote their products and services in the best possible way. And the interesting thing about this is that it is working – they are making huge success from it.
Regardless of the size of the business, the digital age is giving businesses the opportunity to leverage the power of technology to grow their presence. As more companies get found via search engines, the online marketing trend grows stronger by the day.

What Exactly Is Local Search Marketing?

Local search marketing, which is also referred to as local SEO, is an incredibly effective way of marketing your local business online. It presents a golden avenue for you to let local customers

know about your products and services at the exact time they are searching for them online.
Whether you are a local plumber or a dentist, using local search marketing means a potential client looking for your service around your local area at a particular time will be led directly to you. It helps make your business more visible to potential clients online. Therefore, helping to improve the growth of your business offline as more customers find and locate you.

Local search marketing is achieved through a variety of methods, some of which greatly differ from what’s practiced in standard SEO. And of course, some of them are also far easier to manage.

Why Does Local Search Marketing Matter?

Organic SEO is great. As a matter of fact, if you are not a local business, that is what you should be focusing on. But if you operate a local business and looking to have more clients and customers in your geographical location, you may need to look beyond organic SEO.

In order to increase the visibility of your business, local search marketing is what you need to be using. Because the only way to get local search users to notice your business is by ranking for geographically-targeted keywords.

As a local business with a physical store, your topmost priority should be getting found on the internet. Whether you are a dentist or a plumber or shop owner selling a large variety of flowers, using your business location can help you stand out from “online-only” e-commerce businesses.

Still not convinced local SEO is important to your business? Check out these stats to see how important local search marketing is:

  • 88% of consumers who search for a local business online eventually call or visit its physical location that same day
  • When looking up the location of a local business, 86% of internet users use Google Maps
  • 46% of all Google searches include a query looking for local information
  • 72% of customers who search online for local businesses visit stores located within an 8km or 5-mile radius from them.

Now, what these numbers are telling us is that leads coming from location-based searches seem to be a major avenue for potential customers. And one thing is that those numbers will only keep increasing.

Benefits of Local Search Marketing to Your Business

The age of printed phone books is over, and more and more local customers are now turning to the internet to find local businesses – both on mobile and desktop. Learning how to rightly position your business using local search marketing has lots of ways it can benefit your business. Below are some of the effects your business can experience from local search marketing.

#1: local search marketing is timely and highly targeted

The major reason people do local searches is so they can find a local business, a product or service. When many local searchers search the internet, what they are looking for is a specific business name. But the truth is that most of these people don’t have a specific business in mind when they started their search.

#2: You will never miss out on potential customer

Mobile internet is growing, and the number of people who use tablets and phones to find the best local businesses on the go keeps increasing. As a matter of fact, in the US today, mobile digital media time is now higher (51%) compared to desktop use which is at 42%. Since local search SEO targets both mobile and PC internet access, it means you will never miss out on a potential customer. That indeed means a huge success to your business.

#3: You can enjoy the highest conversion rate

Compared to every other local advertising channels, local search seems to have the highest conversion rate. This means that by using local search marketing to get your business listed on as many online directory sites as possible, you will be able to convert 1 out of 2 leads into a permanent customer that buys from you every time.

#4: Local search marketing provides an awesome return on investment

Unlike what it used to be with other traditional advertising such as local newspapers, direct mail, leaflets, etc., there is little or no wasted exposure with local SEO. It helps you reach your potential customers just at the time they needed you. This way, local search marketing is not only efficient, but it is also cost-effective.

#5: Perfect for businesses of any size

Many of the local SEO opportunities are actually free. For instance, claiming your listing on Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and many other inline business directories are absolutely free. That is nothing but a free promotion for your business!

#6: It gives you a hand over your competitors

Google My Business (GMB) is a free listing by Google for almost all businesses. Getting listed on GMB increases your chance of showing up in local search results on Google. However, only 44% of businesses have claimed a spot on GMB because many of them are yet to come to the reality of how
important online marketing could be to their businesses.

This gives you a hand over your competitors before they eventually wise up and start competing with you. Strike the iron while it’s still hot!

#7: 85% of consumers trust and rely on online business reviews as much as personal recommendations

One major factor in the success of many local businesses is word of mouth. So leverage on local search marketing. Get yourself online, ask your customers to drop positive reviews about how satisfied they are with your product or services in order to increase your company’s online reputation. This has a great way of attracting hundreds of new customers to your business.

Grow Your Business Using Local SEO

Local search marketing is becoming a strong trend and could only get stronger in the future, especially looking at how much effort Google is putting into making the local search experience better. If you have not been taking advantage of local search SEO services, now is the time to do so. Use it to get your business to the top of Google before your competitors wake up. All local businesses, from local stores to plumbers, from florists to builders, and from to dentists and accountants, can improve their business and increase their income through local search marketing. So don’t be left out!

Tips to Help You Better Your Local Search Marketing

Here are some tips to help you improve your brand’s local SEO or local search marketing without breaking your wallet.

  • You will need a real physical address

One major mistake many businesses are doing today when it comes to local search marketing is not having a real physical location in the geographical area they are targeting.

It is important that your marketing goals remain in sync with the goals of Google too. Google is striving to give its users a better search experience by displaying genuine information about a business when their users search, including the location of such business.

When your business is not having a real physical address, it stands the chance of not getting featured in Google’s high-traffic local park. There is no two way about this, just make sure you have a real physical address for your business.

  • Claim your GMB profile

Don’t be like the bulk of other business owners that are still neglecting the power of Google My Business directory. You just can’t afford to ignore it. So it’s important that you claim and optimize your free GMB page in order to get valuable exposure from your local audience.

  • Get regular reviews from happy customers

The practice of asking your trusted customers to leave good reviews for your business is a great way to both optimize your GMB presence and also to encourage more local customers to trust and buy from you. According to stats, about 85% of consumers trust online reviews just like personal recommendations.

  • Optimize for voice search

This is one aspect of local search that is rapidly growing. Because of this, it is important to optimize your business for how potential customers ask questions when they speak into their devices unlike how they type out their searches.

Here, your potential customers are using more long-tail keywords when they do voice searches unlike what it is for regular search. Due to this, it’s important you adjust your content SEO to fit the more conventional tone of someone speaking.

  • Create content based on local events and news stories

When it comes to grabbing local customer’s attention, there is nothing that can be as effective as creating content that speaks directly to a local

issue. Some strategies for creating such content include:

  • Writing blog posts around local activities, news stories, or events
  • Setting up webpages that are location-specific
  • Creating videos that home in on local charities

For instance, if you run a local estate business, you can create content around changes in the local real estate market. It is an effective strategy that will get your business ranked for your target customers to see.

  • Get your website optimized for mobile

According to studies, more traffic is being generated to local stores and businesses from mobile searches. This means you will need to optimize your site for mobile being a major player in local SEO. In order to do this, you will need to:

  • Be sure your site loads quickly
  • Use readable fonts for easy reading
  • Use images and videos to grab more attention
  • Use intuitive UI for great UX
  • Home in on local keywords

What makes sense is that you choose keywords that are relevant to your local customers. There are a few tools online that help you choose keywords based on locations so that you can easily get the search terms and volumes for a given region. An example of such tools is the Google Keyword Planner. The tool allows you to search keywords based on geographical locations and allows you to create a list for such locally relevant keywords.

Once you have such keywords, they are your gold, and you should include them in your site’s Meta content, URLs, and copy.

  • Don’t neglect other online business directories; take advantage of them

These are such websites like Yelp, MapQuest, Foursquare, and YellowPages, among many others. Getting your business details like the name, address, and phone number into these sites will both help your visibility and also boost your local SEO.

Local Search Marketing: More Important Than Ever

SEO changes all the time, and you never can tell when Google will be rolling out the next updates and features. That is why you need to take advantage of local search marketing to regularly stay on top of the game. You can’t afford to neglect this almost free opportunity to achieve your business goals. Start building a solid foundation for your business today; start focusing on local SEO.

The best tip of all is to stay on top of changes by finding reliable newsletters from industry experts. Make sure you’re paying attention to all the experts because unless they have a lot of testing behind them, you’ll have to do some filtering to find out if they actually know what they talk about.

Often times, if you ask 10 SEOs the same question you’ll end up with 10 answers. Or, you’ll end up with 9 wrong answers. A great example of that is the 

power of nofollow links. Google stated years ago that nofollow links do not pass any “link juice” but testing has shown that to be false. Even though there have been reliable tests disproving Google’s words, nearly everywhere you look you’ll see SEOs saying nofollow links don’t pass link juice.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article. If you know anybody who might like this article, please share.

How are you running your business without a fully staffed office, and what has been your experience with Google My Business? Please share your story in the comments.

Robert Portillo, founder of Nimbus Marketing, and his family.

About the author:

Robert Portillo is the founder of Nimbus Marketing. Nothing satisfies him more than expressing his thoughts well. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons. He can often be found at local farmer’s markets, hiking trails, and the beach.

Sure-Shot Ways to Improve Your Website’s Performance

Sure-Shot Ways to Improve Your Website’s Performance

by | Oct 15, 2019 | SEO

You think the need to improve your website’s performance doesn’t matter? Well, think again. Recent research has found out that a delay of a single second in the loading time of a page can decrease page views by 11 percent, customer satisfaction by 16 percent, and conversions by 7 percent.

Thus, the extra time visitors spend waiting on your website could eventually impact your website’s ability to keep them hooked, develop their interest and generate sales. Anyone with an eCommerce site would agree that losing customer engagement is not the perfect way to end a sale.
With the empirical evidence mentioned above, it is essential for
you to have a fast site with a quick response time. In this age of fast-paced technology, you cannot let your website lag behind in anyway. The speed you’ll achieve by enhancing the performance of your website will not just aid in keeping your profit ratios high but will also help your business’ website rank high in Google search engine results.

Excited to learn about how to improve your website’s performance? Well, read through this guide for more information on why speed is so important, and how you can achieve it to increase the speed of your website and keep as many visitors around as possible.

How Can Website Optimization Influence Performance?

The bottom line behind your website is to achieve customer engagement, and then influence higher conversion rates. However, slow speed can kill your conversions.

Website viewers have become impulsive and want their content to load in the fastest time possible. 47 percent of all consumers want the websites they visit to be ready within two seconds or less. 40 percent of viewers confessed to abandoning and cancelling pages taking three seconds or more to load. That is why it is absolutely crucial ti improve your website’s performance.

Just imagine losing so many of your visitors, before they can go through your website. This is the impact that poor loading times can have on your traffic. Subsequently, it impacts your sales conversions. If somehow your visitors do stick through the poor loading times and the poor performance, chances are that they won’t come back for another visit. Around 80 percent of people interviewed in a survey responded that they wouldn’t go back to a website that performed poorly and had poor loading times. Keeping the chief objective of your website in mind, a poor loading time is the last thing that you would want on it.

What is the Ideal Load Time?

Before we get to the crux of this article and give you sure-shot methods on how to improve speed and performance, we’ll give you an idea of where to set the goal for the future. With limited knowledge of the acceptable page speed, you won’t be able to set goals for yourself.

According to Google, the best loading time is three seconds or less. However, not many companies have that type of loading speed to boast of. An analysis of 900,000 mobile ads across the globe revealed that they had a load time of 7 seconds for visual content to display.

This goes to show that site owners across the globe have to put in a lot of effort and a lot of work to ensure that they rank their website attains a perfect load time of 3 seconds or less. That is why the need to improve your website’s performance is so critical for numerous reasons.

How to Speed up your Website

This now brings us to the meat of this article. We have the introduction to the problem now, with an in-depth look into how poor speed can negatively impact your performance. We will now try to tell you exactly how you can increase the speed and performance of your website.

Remember, your website can perform poorly because of a variety of reasons. This is why there are numerous steps that you’ll have to take to rectify the damage done, and to improve your user’s experience.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Cometh the hour, cometh the solution; a Content Delivery Network or CDN is just what you need to optimize your web speed across the globe. For those who haven’t heard of one before, a content delivery network is basically the name given to a set of servers across geographical locations around the globe. These servers provide quick web content to end

users, regardless of their location. Websites hosting a single server often go slow because of all requests being sent to the same hardware. The extra time spent processing these requests, kills the purpose and delays the process. The load time also increases, if your users are located far away from the hosting server. With CDN, all user requests are redirected to the closest server, which is why the load time decreases and the website becomes faster. This can be an expensive option, but optimizing load time is worth the money if you are to seriously improve your website’s performance.

Move to a Better Hosting Type

There is a reason why your website doesn’t have the speed and the buzz that you expect from it. You have gone for a shared hosting plan. For inference, there are three different types of hosting:

  • Shared hosting
  • Virtual Private Servers (VPS) Hosting
  • Dedicated Server

Shared hosting is the most popular out of these three types, because of the mere fact that it is cheaper in comparison to VPS and dedicated servers. Since most site owners are looking for the cheapest way to get their site online, they opt for shared hosting. However, if you truly want to speed up your website, and ensure that it gives optimal performance, then you’d have to make the shift towards VPS or dedicated servers.

With shared hosting, you share your disk space, RAM and CPU with other sites also using this server. The added pressure on one server limits the performance of all websites. VPS and dedicated servers are hence much
faster than shared hosting, because they offer different forms of individuality. For instance, VPS gives websites their own part of a virtual server, where their configurations don’t collide with that of other clients. A website with average traffic or an eCommerce store with occasional spikes can benefit from a VPS.

Dedicated hosting, which is the most expensive out of all hosting plans, gives you your very own physical server. This is the most desirable out of all options for big scale websites that service pretty much across the globe.

You have public cloud providers as well, which include Google, Microsoft Azure and AWS. These providers give you the option to rent a dedicated resource from the cloud. With so much variety to choose from for hosting, you can make a detailed decision based on what you consider to be best way to improve your website’s performance.

Optimize Your Images

Everyone loves eye-catching imagery. In fact, when it comes to eCommerce sites, images play a vital part in the overall structure of the website. Not only do images make your website more interactive, but they improve engagement levels as well. They increase the attention span of viewers on the website. With just content and no visual imagery, a website would barely be able to get the views and the conversions that it wants.

However, there is a downside with using too many images on your website. Images are usually large files that take up a lot of space, and slow down the website. If you upload high quality images, directly to your website, you too would see how the website is slowing down and the load time is increasing.

A solution to this problem is to compress the size of the image, without compromising on the quality that it brings. Sounds impossible? Well, it isn’t. With the help of tools like Kraken, ImageOptim and JPEGmini, you can compress the size of the image without reducing the quality. The procedure for reducing the size of the file does take some time, but it really is worth it. Another method you can follow to reduce load times without taking off all images, is to use the HTML responsive image <size> and <secret> attributes. These adjust the image size according to the users display properties. Optimizing your images, above all else, is the best way to improve your website’s performance.

Reduce Number of Plugins

Plugins are commonly applied across a wide variety of websites. These plugins add specific features designed, and suggested by third parties to your website. They ultimately enhance the overall curb appeal of your website, and make it smoother and interactive. 

However, the more plugins you install on your website, the slower it will get. The website’s speed decreases with the addition of plugins, because it now requires additional resources to run the plugins.

As time passes by, you keep adding plugins to your website, without checking on the previous ones to see whether they are still useful for you or not. Hence, we recommend that you check out all the plugins that you have on your website, and only keep the ones that are useful for you currently.

You can also run a performance test in this regard to find out the plugins that are slowing down your website. Your website’s speed cannot just be impacted by the quantity of the plugins, but also by the quality of them. So, make sure that you keep checking their quality over time, and replace or remove plugins that are hindering performance.

Use Website Caching To Improve Your Website’s Performance

 

Website caching is the ultimate way to decrease load times, and to give users better speed on your website. When there is a lot of traffic coming to your website, servers get slow and take more time in delivering the web page to all of the users. This increases the load time and makes it hard for you to ensure customer satisfaction, retention and conversion.

Caching is the process that can curtail this problem, as it stores the current version of your website on your hosting. For those who aren’t aware of it, caching takes the current version of your website and stores it on the host server. This stored version is readily presented to visitors, until your website gets updated. This means that now the web page will not render over and over again for every user, as cached web pages don’t have to send a database request each time.

This mentioned caching process largely depends on the type of platform that your website has been developed on. For websites that have been developed on WordPress, the W3 Total Cache or  the

W3 Super Cache would work perfectly fine. If you’re using a VPS or a dedicated server for hosting, you can set up caching under the general settings for the plan. However, website caching is often not available when it comes to shared server plans.

Gzip Compression

Gzip compression is an extremely effective method for reducing the sizes of the files you are working on. This method of compression greatly minimizes the HTTP requests and reduces the response time taken by the server. Gzip works by compressing all of your files, before they are sent to the browser.

 

On the other side of the screen, a browser rapidly unzips the files and presents the contents to the viewers. This method of compression can work to improve your website’s performance with almost all files within your website, and can significantly reduce the load time on your site. You can easily enable Gzip through the use of some codes or by the use of a utility by the same name

Database Optimization for Content Management System

Database optimization is quite an effective method for increasing the performance and speed of your website. Websites that use a content management system (CMS) packed with plugins of complex nature have a larger database size. This large database size puts increased load on the website and takes up a lot of data storage, considerably slowing down the website in the process.

Those who have worked on WordPress would know the amount of space that the WordPress CMS takes. Their content management system stores blog posts, comments, and all other information pertaining to the post. If you want to optimize the CMS for your website, you would have to look for the appropriate tools for doing so. The CMS for websites on WordPress can be optimized through WP-Optimize.

Detect 404 Errors

A 404 error is the most despised web page message for all users. Just imagine a visitor coming to your webpage, only to be shown a 404 message on the screen? Not only would this destroy their current experience with you, but would also set a bad image for all future visits
The 404 message is basically sent by the hosting server to the visitor’s browser, when the accessed content for a page no longer exists. These errors when left undetected, can lead to a lot of disgruntled visitors.

The first step to handling this problem requires the proper detection of all pages with 404 errors. For this, you will have to take the help of error detection plugins and tools. External tools and plugins like Xenu’s Link Sleuth, Google Webmaster Tools and Redirectioner Plugin for WordPress help you run this detection.

Once you have detected all the pages with a 404 error, you can assess the traffic that each of these pages generate. If these dead pages don’t bring in any visitors in, and are just an additional load on your server, then it is best to leave these pages as they are. However, if these pages are still bringing in traffic, you can consider fixing the internal links to redirect traffic properly. This well significantly help improve your website’s performance.

Prioritize Loading Above-the-fold Content

You can significantly improve perception and user experience, by making the content above the fold load faster than the rest of the page. With this addition, you will have some content to show, even if the page itself is taking too much time to load. This responsive method, known as lazy loading, is beneficial for pages that have great chunks of content under their fold.

 

Let’s say for example, that you post a blog post with over 10 to 15 images. Normally, your viewer’s system would load all these images, before it gets to showing anything else on the page.

However, by applying lazy loading, you can easily load the entire written content first, as the browser concurrently also downloads the images and displays them. This way, your viewers won’t be left waiting for the whole page to load, and would see the images as they load over time. This practice will significantly reduce all of your load times, and will ensure that the speed of the website is at par with the requirements of the users. Additionally, if your images are optimized through the methods mentioned above, the page will load even quicker and in a comprehensive manner.

Reducing your page load time and overall website speed to where you want it to be can often be a complex undertaking. However, if you do the job well, and give attention to all that we have mentioned above, you will get a better performing website that generates greater traffic and conversion.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article. If you know anybody who might like this article, please share.

How are you running your business without a fully staffed office, and what has been your experience with Google My Business? Please share your story in the comments.

About the author: 

Heather Singer is an SEO specialist at Nimbus Marketing. She has a passion for reading and writing. She can often be found watching her favorite teams (The Angels & Chargers) lose, or found spending time with her family outdoors.