More threads by Linda Buquet

Linda Buquet

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I think we all learn some great lessons from our clients. I certainly know I have. However most of us DON'T bother to document all those lessons and turn them into a top 50 list for a smart blog post, like Phil Rosek just did.

He wrote this Friday but by the time I read it, I knew most of you were either off for the weekend or busy fantasizing about it :p so I decided to hold this til today.

50 Local SEO Lessons from 50 Clients | LocalVisibilitySystem.com

I’ve had the pleasure of working with 50 clients so far on local SEO (as of very recently)...

Some of these relationships have been worth five figures to me, others three figures.

Some projects have been smooth sailing, others more like go-karting through the Himalayas.

But every single one has taught me something (or many things) about local search.

In no particular order, the lessons I’ve learned from each client:

Read the rest here

I agree with so many of Phil's points. This one in particular hit home...

43. A watched pot never boils. Business owners and local SEOs need to expect the process to take a while. If you obsessively stare at your rankings and analytics stats every day, the temptation is too great to tinker and fiddle and mess things up.

Especially since there is often such a big delayed reaction with both Google+ Local and organic changes. If you tweak, get impatient and tweak again you may not know that 1st tweak did the trick and by the time Google catches up with it you've already changed it to something else. Patience Grasshopper!

There was one point I had a different experience or opinion about.

8. Having NAP information for a bunch of different locations on the homepage is totally fine. It’s great to have a separate page of your site corresponding to each location / Google+Local page, but by no means is it necessary to get great rankings.

No not NECESSARY for ranking, however 2 problems to warn about. This practice IMO sometimes causes NAP confusion and can disconnect site and G+ L page in blended and drop the site out of local rankings. Does not always happen, but can.

The other thing is mixed NAP for multiple locations on any page of the site can contribute to Google merging all the locations into and big hot mess. Again, does not always happen, but best practice to avoid merges is separate location pages and no mixed NAP anywhere on the site.

The tip that gave me a good chuckle was:
27. A title tag with more than 300 characters is a gift to at least 7 of your local competitors. :eek:

LOL, good one Phil!

What was your favorite lesson?
 
Hey Linda,

Thanks for posting this, and for your compliments!

Regarding #8, I definitely agree that it?s preferable to have separate landing pages for each location. But I haven?t noticed any cases where two or more listings got merged together and ONLY had the landing-page URL in common. I don?t know that it?s much of a merge risk-factor by itself. Then again, you?ve probably run across some cases I haven?t.

Side note: I think you could do a really cool post on site/page architecture best-practices for preventing merging.
 

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