SEO Odds & Ends Wednesday: Fire up Some Local Search for the 4th of July!
For this week’s installation of SEO odds & ends, I really had to dig–fireworks companies around Austin don’t have a great presence in the search engines. I’m basing these comments on my personal searches for “austin fireworks” in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. A few factors are causing the lack of individual fireworks shops/stands in search engine results, from what I can tell: first, the incredibly high seasonality impact might lead to less investment and/or focus on year-round marketing; also, this industry has competition from fire departments and several large directories that dominate search results, which aren’t quite what I’m looking for when I’m searching for fireworks in Austin.
Eventually I found Mr. W Fireworks, and have a few tips that may increase their search engine presence:
- Claim your listing in Google Local
- In Google Local Business Center, small businesses (or large ones!) can claim their business name and address in just a matter of minutes. Many small businesses can scoop up hundreds of visits to their site just by listing themselves in the “10-pack.” Mr. W can claim all of their locations that have a mailing address on Google Local Business, which could take awhile but could drive some serious traffic!
- Submit your company name plus a descriptive keyword–for Mr. W, a good option may be “Mr. W Austin Fireworks Stand.” Tip: Using the keyword within the name of your company will help search engines associate your company with your industry, as well as keep your potential visitors informed as to what your business does.It is also possible to type in your own related “category.”
- Encourage customers to submit reviews, upload your own videos and images, and list as much information as you can in the overview section. Finally, in this tricky economy, uploading coupons never hurts!
- Create specific pages for each location served
- Since Mr. W has locations in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, creating pages on the site that describe the locations they serve could also greatly increase traffic. By using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you can find approximate local and global search volume for a large selection of terms. I have found that major cities like Austin, Dallas, and Oklahoma City have the largest search volume, so creating those pages would be a great start.
- For other Local Search Optimization tips, see our video blog post on the topic from one of Apogee’s search experts!
- Add more content to the Fun Stuff & Safety sections
- Search engines want to rank sites with lots of content that they hope will be valuable to users. Mr. W’s website has a couple of great pages to include that crawlable content on, including “Fireworks Fun Stuff” and “Fireworks Safety.” Building these pages out over time will help improve the site in the eyes of the search engine algorithms!
- Request videos of client fireworks displays and embed them on the “Fun Stuff” page. We have talked about the basics of video submission and optimization for video sharing sites, which can be extremely valuable, as well.
I hope this has been another helpful edition of SEO Odds & Edds, and that everyone has a happy Fourth of July!!
