Meetup Monday #4: Raleigh SEO Meetup
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.
Last Update: October 17th, 2016
Originally Published: September 19th, 2016
Raleigh SEO Meetup
When: 3rd Tuesday Every Month
Where: Location Varies Monthly
Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Cost: FREE! (Donations Appreciated)
Who Are They?
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 Recap?
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.
What Can You Expect?
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!
Who Is The Group Meant For?
This meetup group is perfect for all levels of SEO enthusiasts in the Raleigh, Durham or Chapel Hill NC areas. The meetings are filled with useful information, tips, guides and collaboration that can benefit anyone in the industry. Whether you are a local business owner interested in SEO or a full time SEO analyst this meetup is worth checking out.
Next Raleigh SEO Meetup
When: Tuesday, November 15th
Where: The Frontier Building
Register Link: Official Meetup Page
Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Cost: FREE! (Donations Appreciated)
This Month: The Technical SEO Renaissance with Mike King of iPullRank
2015 Meeting With Rand Fishkin
Want This Handled By An Expert?
Get back to your job and get this handled by a professional. Yes, I Need Help!Not Ready To Get Started?
We can still help you attract new business while working to grow revenue from existing clients and strategic partnerships. Get actionable advice & information right in your inbox from industry experts and professionals.
Google Creative Certified
Google Analytics Certified
Follow our story
WHERE WE ARE
Oak City Technology
800 Park Offices Drive #3202
Durham, NC 27709
GET IN TOUCH
Meetup Monday #4: Raleigh SEO Meetup
The Short Answer
YES, local Raleigh SEO can help your website if you are located in Raleigh,NC.
What If I Have A “Good” Website?
Many business owners find themselves with a nicely designed website that successfully captures the purpose and scope of their company. Once the site has been established, a period of stagnant growth can and usually does begin. A common misconception that follows the development of well-made websites is that the business can afford to take a step back and relax their focus on marketing strategies. In fact, this is quite the opposite attitude that should be held at this time. If you think a well designed website is going to rank well without any local SEO efforts your analytics traffic will probably look like this:
Business owners who rely solely on having a beautiful lead generating website will often see few returns. Why? Creating a website and forgoing Local SEO efforts is akin to opening a storefront and not advertising or telling anyone your address. How are they going to find you? Here is 9 actionable SEO tips about ranking in local search.
Why Do I Need Local SEO?
Local SEO is not a set it and forget it situation. It’s unfortunate to see organic search traffic fall over time, but all too often that’s exactly what happens when no effort is applied. With updates and improvements constantly being made to Google’s and other search engines, our Raleigh SEO team has found that local business listings require periodic updates and hold an important place for local businesses search results. Simply having a business and a website will not provide a business owner much of a return if it becomes increasingly difficult for customers to find you online.
Continually staying on top of and maintaining your local SEO efforts is essential because of:
- Old and outdated links
- Unintended negative linking
- Publishing new pages
- Periodic changing of search engine algorithms
- Outdated content
- The competition moving ahead of you because they are maintaing their SEO better
- And so much more…
Here is an actionable guide for how to do local SEO. Great for getting started or using as a checklist to maintain your SEO efforts.
Choose Oak City Tech, Your Local Web Design & SEO Company
We're local to the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area known as RTP, we take in person meetings, and we love to help local businesses and organizations succeed online. Contact us today and let us know how we can help you. We're serving actual local businesses and organizations and they're talking about us online.
Want This Handled By An Expert?
Get back to your job and get this handled by a professional. Yes, I Need Help!Not Ready To Get Started?
We can still help you attract new business while working to grow revenue from existing clients and strategic partnerships. Get actionable advice & information right in your inbox from industry experts and professionals.
Google Creative Certified
Google Analytics Certified
Follow our story
WHERE WE ARE
Oak City Technology
800 Park Offices Drive #3202
Durham, NC 27709
GET IN TOUCH
Meetup Monday #4: Raleigh SEO Meetup
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.
Last Update: June 20, 2016
Originally Published: Jan 2, 2015
First Steps
- 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.
Optimize Your Website
- 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.
Setup Your Google Business Page
- Make sure that your business is listed in the correct category.
- Make sure your Name, Address, and Phone Number on your website match those on your Google Business Page.
- Have the business owner verify the Google Business Page.
- Fill out your Google Business Page completely. Try to get the numerical percentage as close to 100% as possible.
- Include your product or service keyword and your city name in the description of your Google Business Page.
Repeat these steps for Yahoo Local, Bing Local, YP.com, and SuperPages.com
Content & Multimedia
- 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.
Domain Name
- 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.
Blogs & Newspaper Articles
- 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.
Local Citations
- Google your business. Make sure your Name, Address, Phone and other info is correct on any site you see. Claim your profile and correct it if not. (protip: Do this, seriously.)
- Update your information with local data aggregators. (Localeze, Acxiom, Factual, others)
Customer Reviews
- 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.
Link Building
Creating high quality and high value content on your website or blog is the best way to have a strong link building campaign. People will share your website across their Social Media platforms or in simple conversation if they feel it was of high interest to them.
- Build links to your domain from websites about your city or other places in your city. (ex. review sites, city guides, city business directories, your church’s website, etc.)
- Build links to your domain from websites about your industry. (local or not)
- Build links with your product or service name and your location in the anchor text. (e.g., “Oak City Tech, Raleigh, NC web design”)
Want This Handled By An Expert?
Get back to your job and get this handled by a professional. Yes, I Need Help!Not Ready To Get Started?
We can still help you attract new business while working to grow revenue from existing clients and strategic partnerships. Get actionable advice & information right in your inbox from industry experts and professionals.
Google Creative Certified
Google Analytics Certified
Follow our story
WHERE WE ARE
Oak City Technology
800 Park Offices Drive #3202
Durham, NC 27709
GET IN TOUCH