Here in the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) techies, have a wide variety of choices for unique meetups groups that fit our interests. There never seems to be enough time in the week to visit them all so each week we will highlight a local tech focused meetup group. We live in one of the best tech areas in the country and our meetup groups are a lively extension of this. From Bitcoin to Robotics, the Triangle has a meetup group for every subsector of the tech world. Our goal is to promote and highlight the best in the triangle to help you make your scheduling decisions easier.

The Raleigh SEO Meetup is a highly renowned meetup group in the local Raleigh, NC area since 2008. It consistently draws huge crowds, big name speakers and has valuable information for any level of SEO enthusiast out there.

Last month we had Mark Sherwin, co-founder of LeadsNearby, is president of client solutions for the full service digital marketing agency.Mark and his partner Greg Shadik took a deep dive into conversion funnels, analytics and metrics so you get a complete picture of how well you’re actually performing. It was an very thoughtful talk on the complexities of Local SEO.

The meetup itself has a format of speakers on a monthly basis, with Q&A sessions and open networking. This group in particular draws in some huge names in the SEO industry. Last year, Rand Fishkin was a featured speaker. Yes, that Rand Fishkin from Moz and one of the most influential names in SEO today. You never know who might be there on a month to month basis!

The first in a series of how to articles; we’re going to hyper focus and talk about Local Search Engine Optimization. We’re going to give you a step-by-step breakdown to ranking highly on local searches. Print and check off each item as you complete it. We’re going to use ourselves, Oak City Tech, a local webdesign/seo company based out of Raleigh/Durham, NC for any examples below. Be sure to check back from time to time as we will update this post when appropriate.

• Make sure you’re using a local area code for your primary phone number. (protip: this is the most important aspect of local SEO)
• Get a physical address in the city.
• Include your product or service keyword in your business title. (if possible)
• Update your business information with the secretary of state. Make sure the name, address, and phone match your website.
• Make sure there you don’t have more than one Google Business Page and delete the extras if you do.

• Include the City and State in the title of all pages.
• Include the City and State in your H1/H2 Tags, especially on the homepage.
• Make your site load as quickly as possible. (protip: if using WordPress speed up your website and decrease load time with the caching plugin or use CloudFlare)
• Optimize your titles, meta descriptions, and URLs to make them keyword rich and clickable, giving you a high organic click through rate.

• Write as much as you can about your industry and post articles to your blog. Write for people, not search engines. Don’t keyword spam; write the article in such a way that you, a human, would enjoy reading it.
• Create audio and video content to post on your website and video sharing sites like Youtube. It’s 2016, folks really like video.

• Include the name of your city in your domain name. (if possible)
• Include the name of your product or service in your domain name. (if possible)
• Register your domain name several years into the future.
• Make sure your WHOIS information is public and that the name, address, and phone match that on your website.

• Put out a press release. (protip: pay someone to syndicate it in print.)
• Contact local blogs and newspapers and ask them to interview you.
• Add as many pictures as you can to your Google Business Page.

• Get as many native reviews on your Google Business page as you can.
• Get reviews on as many different 3rd party review sites as you can.
• Make extra effort to seek out your customers who already use sites like Yelp and Google, and ask them to leave you a review. (protip: Reviewers who have many reviews are more authoritative in the eyes of a search engine).
• Ask your customers to mention the specific product or service they purchased in addition to the city they live in within in their review.
• Ask for reviews consistently over time, not in bursts. Make it a habit.(protip: Search engines don’t like a lot of reviews to show up overnight because they look fraudulent.)

• Open a YouTube and/or Flickr account and upload geotagged photos and videos. Be sure to link the account to your business’ website.
• Open a Facebook business page, and make sure your Name, Address, and Phone number match your website.
• Setup a Twitter account and mention your name, your city, and your product or service keyword in your bio.
• Setup your blog to automatically post to Facebook and Twitter. (protip: use IFTTT.com to do this for free.)
• Add Social Media buttons to your website and/or blog posts.