James Alviani

A seasoned SEO person recently told me that Australia is “the wild west” for Google My Business (GMB).

What did he mean?

He went on to explain that from his estimations, 1 in 5 GMB listings were fakes, put up there by a “lead Generation” businesses, effectively presenting as a real business, attracting leads and then selling those leads onto businesses who need leads.

Naturally, quite a few questions come to mind:

• Is this true? Are there heaps of fake GMB listings in Australia?
• Does Google know about these fake listings?
• What is Google doing about it?
• How do these fake listings affect legit listings?
• How will Search Engine Optimisation be affected?

What is a Google My Business Listing?

When you search on Google for a local service, such as a plumber in your suburb, you will see in the search results some ads, then a map with three listings and then some websites below it.

The ads are there because those businesses paid Google to be there (a.k.a. Google Ads).

Then the map with the three listings is the Google My Business listings.

This is a free directory that Google owns that business owners can submit their business to. Once you submit your business, you must verify it. In Australia this is usually a postcard with a code mailed to your business address to verify that your business is indeed located where you say it is.

Why Does Everyone Want to Show Up in the Map Listing?

The map listings have a few features that make them so effective at driving leads to businesses.

1. Proximity: Users can see on the map where they are located (unless they register as a “service only” business
2. Reviews: As seen in the example above, independent reviews are aggregated and show up right next to your business listing.
3. Business Information: Open hours, photos, FAQs and other business information can show for the three listings that come up.
4. Ease of Engagement: Local search mostly happens on a phone, and the three GMB listings will typically have an option to call the business then and there.

Given the above reasons, it’s easy to see why people are increasingly using these results to find local services they are looking for, instead of the traditional organic results below them.

Are There Fake Listings?

The short answer is probably yes. I did a quick search and was able to quickly identify many suspect listings across a lot of industries.

Sometimes multiple suburb by suburb business listings that all seemed to have no real people behind them. Just stock images and generic “about us” pages on their website. Combine this with the fact that there are hardly any reviews or information on the listings, and this raises a huge red flag.

I am not sure if 1 in 5 listings are fake, but there certainly seemed to be a lot of fake listings like these out there. Which leads us to more questions…

Does Google Know About these Fake Listings?

Google as an organisation is aware of the fake listings and various ways they are exploited. Big websites are also picking this up such as this article on The Verge, and this video looks at a report by NBC at the rise of fake listings on GMB in the US.

So while the human beings at Google would be aware, they would be keen to get their system to be smart enough to weed out these fake listings automatically without the need for human intervention.

What is Google Doing About Fake Listings?

Google does have a team of humans who look at the internet. They are called “quality raters” and their job is to monitor if the Google algorithm is working. In their guidelines they are encouraged to look at the images on the listing and the about pages on the related website to see if the business is real. They are told to look for photos of real people and biographical information that is very hard to fake.

The fact that this is in their guidelines indicates they would be trying to implement these within their algorithm too. Highlighting the importance of real images of business owners and biographical information as a key to building algorithmic trust in your local business website.

Interestingly, Google recently updated their guidelines on what you should upload to your GMB listing. They now say that we should only upload genuine images taken at the location of the premise as opposed to stock photos. Here is an excerpt from their guidelines:

Screenshots, stock photos, GIFs, other manually created imagery or imagery taken by other parties should not be uploaded. To be relevant, photos or videos must be taken by users at the location in question. If the primary subject of the content is irrelevant to the location, it may be removed.

https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7411351

How Are Legit Australian Businesses Being Affected?

Lately we have found it hard to get new legitimate businesses verified. We have requested a postcard to be sent, but it seems that the postcard never arrives. In one case we had to build out a number of directory listings and get the new website indexed before the card was sent. This whole process took over 4 months.

Other agencies are reporting similar issues with postcards never being sent. As you can see on this thread, Google provides a request system when situations like this occur. They ask you to make a video explaining your business and showing the signage with your location at the premises.

What You Can Do to Build Trust and Boost Your GMB Rankings

How Google cracks down on these fake listings gives us great insight into what they are looking for. Specifically doing the following things will help your GMB rankings.

• Original images of your team on your website and GMB listing
• Biographical information of team members on your website and GMB listing
• Add original photos of your premises on your GMB listing (some suggest downloading the GMB app, taking photos from your phone, then uploading through the GMB app so that images retain location data).
• Get your customers to “check in” to your business on their phones
• Get real customers to review your services

Final Thoughts

So perhaps Australia does deserve the “wild west” tag when it comes to GMB. One thing we are sure of is that Google will be relentlessly trying to find ways to ensure legitimate businesses are prominent in their results and that their system will learn to weed out the fake listings.

As its the beginning of 2020 I thought it would be a good time to stop, take stock of what happened in SEO during 2019 and where Google seems to be heading this year.

As you will see in this article, Google is on a mission to return credible and accurate results when people search. The patterns we saw emerge in 2019 are only set to continue and likely increase in 2020.

What exactly were these patterns?

Read on to see what we noticed in the algorithm patterns and how local businesses in Perth can take advantage of this.

Natural Language Processing

Last year we saw many of the Google updates move toward Natural Language Processing (NLP). Google is trying to provide a better understanding of the intent behind a search phrase so it can deliver a better result to the end user.

No doubt this has been triggered by the rise of voice search through devices such as Google home minis. For these products to work well, they depend on the Google algorithm’s ability to understand the intent behind search.

It’s also important to note that NLP helps to identify Entities – an absolutely critical component of Google’s algorithm development in the last two years. We will look at this soon, but first lets see how NLP has changed search:

An Example of NLP

The Google blog provides us with an example of how the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) updates in 2019 have changed the results. In the example below, the prepositional phrase “to” in the search phrase helps Google understand that the searcher is travelling to the USA and therefore in need of a result to assist them with this:

How Does NLP Affect Local Businesses in Perth?

As Google is getting better at understanding what people are asking for, it makes sense that the websites with high quality, informative content will be rewarded with better rankings.

Ensure you have a blog that you add regular content to. Describe your location and the jobs you have done for clients in and around your area. All of these details will help distinguish you from your competition as people search for your services.

The Development of Entities

Coupled with the development of Natural Language Processing, Google is also extending it’s development of Entities.

What is an “entity” in the context of online search? It is like a noun (person place or thing) but much broader. It could cover things like the colour red, or an idea someone has, or a calendar year. What’s important to understand is that Google now looks for entity associations in order to deliver better results.

An Example of An Entity Association

A very simple example of an entity association would be “dentist” and “patient experience”.

Assuming Google makes an association between these two entities, a dental website which talks about patient experience would be deemed more relevant than a dental website which did not (assuming all other factors are equal) and therefore rank higher for the search phrase “dentist near me”.

Extrapolate the above by perhaps 50 other entity associations, and you start to see that the websites which cover or are somehow associated with the right entities will be deemed more relevant by Google will rank higher than other websites.

Finding Entities

The good news for local business is that entity associations can be identified. We have been busy testing entity associations and have seen some great results from adjusting website content to include more entities that our research deemed relevant.

We are starting to use entity associations within our monthly processes so our clients benefit from better rankings.

The Importance of Entity Association

It seems like Google is giving more weight to entity association above many other traditional factors in SEO like backlinks in determining which websites rank highest in search results.

This is great news for the SEO industry. Why? Because entity association can be reverse engineered by looking at the current top results for a search phrase. Entity association is much easier to control through the content of a website.

Smart SEO people like Dave Davies regard “entity SEO as the single most important concept to understand in SEO right now. Full stop.”

Knowledge Panels

You may have noticed an increase in knowledge panels in the search results? These are images, FAQs, videos and other media to help deliver a more relevant answer.

This information has been scraped by Google from websites. It highlights how Google is using entities to deliver relevant results. It also in many cases is reducing clicks through to websites as users get the answer they are looking for in the search results.

Expertise, Authority and Trust

A final related trend in SEO in 2020 is the rise of expertise, authority and trust (a.k.a. EAT). Google is looking to provide credible results. This is especially the case for industries related to money and health.

It’s been a bit of a running joke that people consult “Dr Google” to get a remedy for a health issue. Google is trying to eliminate the joke element by providing credible results. EAT updates in late 2018 and 2019 saw many alternative health sites all but disappear from the search results, replaced by much more scientific, medically verified websites.

Webmd.com is considered by most to be a credible source of medical information. In 2019 they saw significant growth in their top 1-3 positions (how many keywords they were at the top of the search results for)

By contrast, mercola.com – considered a little more “edgy” and “alternative” in their approach to health didn’t fare as well in 2019, taking a big hit to top positions in the late July algorithm updates.

What A Local Business Can Do for EAT

Here are some of the things a local business website can do to help satisfy the EAT elements of the algorithm:

• Include a “meet the team” page with original photos of team members and their names.
• Include a comprehensive “about page” which lists the company history
• Include experience and qualifications within a business
• Link / cite authoritative websites within an industry. (You may have noticed who I have and have not linked out to in this article!)
• Include photos of recent work, listing location and the type of work carried out
• Use Schema in your website. Research the different types available and build them on a per page basis, consistent with the content on the page.

Why the Move to NLP, Entities and EAT?

The search results used to return an array of answers. After the updates in 2019 we see that the top ten results have similar content.

Speculating here, but I think this has to do with the “fake news” controversies surrounding the 2018 US elections. Facebook suffered lost credibility and took lengths to repair their reputation in 2019.

Tech giants can no longer afford to allow “wrong” results to muddy their reputation and expose them to liability. The question is how does a computer algorithm determine what is a “right” result?

Well, in Google’s case it is by entity association, EAT and NLP.

How to Leverage these Changes for Your Business

Our focus in 2020 is to leverage these changes in the Google Algorithm and deliver them in our SEO packages. We have adjusted the content we deliver so that it is entity focused and have seen positive results from this.

We have also further emphasised Schema Markup, venturing away from the limitations of plugins to custom coded solutions.

Importantly, it is critical that your website has the correct foundation to start with. Comprehensive “meet the team” pages and “about” pages will go a long way to building trust in the search results.

Google My Business (GMB) allows you to manage how your business appears in the Google search results.

Potential customers see information about you when making purchase decisions, including basics like your address and operating hours. They also find reviews or a photo.

Google My Business gives you complete control over your listing. You can approve and reply to reviews and view your business through Local SEO.

How to Set It Up

Google My Business listing is easy to set up. Follow the two easy steps below for the best results:

1. Create your GMB account

Create an account to register your business. Enter all the relevant details, like business name, address, and others when prompted.

2. Business verification

Verify to Google that you own the business. This process can be completed in a variety of ways based on your preference.

The most common method is by postcard verification, which they send to your physical mailbox. Quicker options include phone, email, and instant verification (which are available only for specific businesses).

How to Optimise Google My Business Listing

Once you have access to your Google My Business page, you need to optimise it. It ensures potential customers are accessing the most accurate information. You also want to market yourself to them in the best possible way.

• First, fill out all the necessary information in your profile. The most important details are your operating hours and contact number, which should be regularly updated.
• You also need to indicate if your place supports special conditions. For example, only allowing people of a certain age or providing Wi-Fi access.
• Be as thorough with the information as possible. The better people are informed, the more likely that they will buy from you. People are free to suggest edits on your GMB listing, so unless you like being flooded with messages from your fans, get it right the first time.
• Next, you will want to upload as many photos as possible. Businesses with pictures have a 35 percent better chance of a visit from a listing contact. It also gives your potential customers a glimpse into your establishment, product, or service.
• Photos should be high quality and clear. The minimum size requirement is 720 x 72 pixels (in either PNG or JPEG format).

Further Help

If you need assistance setting up your Google My Business, give Halo Digital a call. We are a Perth-based digital marketing agency that can help you establish a powerful online presence. Let us help you connect with your customers, from web design to PPC.

Search engine optimisation is meant to make websites more visible to internet users who may be interested in the products or services offered on the website or by the owner of the website. Since there are many businesses around the world that may have similar web content, getting a high search engine ranking can be incredibly hard. However, there is no need to compete for high ranking with businesses that are not targeting the same clients as you. This is where local SEO comes in. 

What is Local SEO?

While the internet gives you a chance to target internet users around the world, local SEO helps you to narrow down your audience to people who live and work in the location of interest. By including the name of the city in your web content as well as the street address, you can be assured of getting a better search engine ranking. Local SEO is important because nearly half (46%) of all internet searches have local intent. Therefore, you need to optimise your website to ensure it gets ranked highly on these searches. 

Local SEO Services

The following is a list of the main local SEO services:

– Website Localisation: This entails the inclusion of your county, city or region name throughout your website in a natural manner. 

– Citation Building: This entails placing the name of your business, address, phone number and website URL on online directories and citation sites. 

– Managing Reviews and Ratings: Genuine or unbiased reviews and ratings from local customers can help attract and convert new customers. 

– Getting Relevant and Genuine Backlinks: Naturally getting high-quality backlinks from authority websites can place your site higher on the search results page.

5 Reasons Why SEO Can Help You Attract New Customers

i) Timely and Targeted Search Engine Marketing

Local SEO helps to target clients or customers within a specific location. When your search engine marketing efforts are targeting a specific clientele, you can expect to get better results, in terms of attracting more new customers. After all, when they run a local search, your business will appear on top of the search results page. 

ii) High Conversion Rate

It does not matter if you have millions of visitors per day if nobody buys your products or services. The best thing about local SEO is that it is highly targeted, so it has a high conversion rate. When selling products or services, you can expect to attract new customers and increase your sales. 

iii) Attract Mobile Users

More and more people use mobile devices to access the internet. Since local SEO targets internet users on both PCs and mobile devices, you can expect to attract more customers. 

iv) Most Local SEO Tools are Free

Placing a listing on most online business directories, such as Bing Places, Google My Business and many others are free. This means the free promotion of your business to a local audience. 

v) People Trust Online Reviews

Reviews are an important part of any local search engine marketing strategy. Since 85% of people trust online reviews more, you can expect to attract more customers with your local SEO strategy.

Get in touch with Halo Digital today if you think SEO is right for your business. We will provide you with an honest, obligation-free assessment for your business.

We are, undoubtedly, living in the digital age. For any business or website to succeed, they have to have a solid digital marketing strategy in place. When it comes to learning and understanding the principles of SEO, there is a big learning curve. There are so many details, factors, and techniques to follow that it can be difficult to narrow down which ones are worthwhile and helping.

SEO is a multi-faceted approach to using analytics tools to optimise your search engine ranking and increase web traffic and ROI (return on investment). There are different types of SEO strategies from monitoring the SERPs to keyword analysis.

The List

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a host of SEO tools that help users find duplicate metadata, security concerns, and indexed pages. This tool helps users rank better on the search pages.

SEMRush

SEMRush efficiently shows users where they are in the SERPS so they can monitor any changes and see what is causing those changes. It also suggests different techniques for improving those rankings.

KWFinder

KWFinder is an expert tool for finding long-chain keywords that don’t have a lot of competition. This tool is ideal for finding the most productive keywords and running analysis reports on SERP and backlinks.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is for WordPress users and is the ideal SEO plugin for optimising content, meta tags, and generating sitemaps. SEO is a quick and easy tool to help you create SEO-friendly content.

MOZ

MOZ provides keyword recommendations, performance sites, and site crawls. MOZ provides in-depth SEO insights to its users.

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a great SEO tool for finding blog topics based on popular keywords. This tool is great for those wanting to mould their content around popular keyword phrasing and questions.

SpyFu

SpyFu is used by those wanting to rank for certain keywords. It sheds light on the competition-factor of any given keyword and presents strategies to succeed with it.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog aids with fixing content issues. This is a great tool for auditing a website or page to monitor its SEO performance.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the highest-ranked keywords tools. It also performs rank tracking, competitor analysis, viral content research and SEO audits to track how an SEO-friendly a site is.

Fat Rank

Fat Rank is a basic and effective keywords tool that allows users to follow the rankings of their keywords.

The best way any business can stand out online is to find what it is that makes them different. If you want to express that difference clearly and succinctly through your web site, you can contact Halo Digital for assistance. They are a Perth based digital agency that helps you engage with your market.

More than two decades ago, a mildly famous man named Bill Gates wrote the words, “Content is king.” These words were written in an essay that outlined his beliefs about the content-driven future of the Internet.

Today, his words ring absolutely true. Content marketing provides three times as many leads as paid search on the same spend, and three times as many leads as outbound marketing for 62% less.

However, great content can’t exist in a vacuum. It needs to be paired with a viable SEO marketing strategy to be seen in the first place.

Let’s take a look at some tips for making content that plays nice with search engine optimisation.

1. Establish A Keyword Strategy

Keywords are part of the foundation of SEO, and choosing the right ones to integrate into your content will determine how high up the SERPs your ranking will be.

Look for topics in your niche that you believe people will be searching for. Then, identify keywords associated with these topics, and implement them in your content. Ensure that your main keyword appears in the first 2-3 paragraphs of your work so that it’s associated easily with the topic.

On a small scale, you can manually perform this research by looking up the keywords in Google, then checking out the related searches that Google suggests. For a more efficient and detailed research solution, you should make use of keyword research tools that display relevant stats such as search volume.

Keyword research isn’t just for introducing keywords to your existing content. You can also use the results of your keyword research to decide on what content to produce. By looking at what topics people are searching for inside your niche, you can address these topics with timely content.

2. Make Use Of Long-Tail Keywords

A keyword strategy for your content is great. A long-tail keyword strategy? Even better.

Long-tail keywords are more targeted in their niche. This allows them to capture people who are further down their customer journey, and thus are more likely to convert.

They’re also optimised for semantic search, which boosts their search results placements in a time when voice search and user intent are growing in popularity.

The result of this is that 70% of all traffic that is brought in through organic search, comes from long-tail keyword searches. Every SEO strategy should be employing at least some use of long-tail keywords, it’s a no-brainer.

3. Optimise Your Content For Readability

Readability is a very important facet of modern content production. Highly readable content is just that much more pleasing and enjoyable to browse, which affects how much readers remember it and your brand.

Some readability tips include using shorter sentences, around 15-20 words each. Express each idea concisely, and in bite-sized blocks.

You should also ensure that your paragraphs only have a maximum of 2-3 sentences. Walls of text are very unpleasant to chew through.

Finally, consider using bucket brigades to ensure that people stay on your page. Add bucket brigades wherever you feel that a reader may be tempted to stop reading, so that you can reel them back in with an engaging question or an exciting intro.

One further consideration:

More and more people are browsing the web on mobile. This means that a lot of modern readability techniques are based on people reading on small screens that are used in portrait orientation. Try reading your content on both a desktop display and a smartphone, and make sure that it looks good on both.

4. Have A Good Meta Description

The meta description is what’s displayed under your content as it appears in search engines. This description, about 150 characters in length, should serve as an enticing summary that will draw readers in. Even if you rank highly, a bad meta description—or lack thereof—can turn off prospective readers.

5. Produce Evergreen Content

Timely content that addresses a particular event or concern is certainly useful in its own right. However, nothing beats evergreen content, or content that remains useful and shareable long after it’s produced.

Evergreen content is characterized by being authoritative, valuable, and informative to your audience. These characteristics help greatly extend its shelf life and make it highly linkable. This linkability and authority give evergreen content a huge boost in search engine ranking.

6. Create Content Of Appropriate Length

If you’re intending to create in-depth content that produces lots of value for your users, you’re going to have to aim for a little longer than just 300 or 400 words. Research suggests that search engines are biased towards content that’s above 1000 words in length, with even better ranking performance at 2000 words.

It’s not clear whether this bias is because the search engines themselves care about the length of content, or because longer content simply is more engaging and authoritative for readers. Whatever the case, aim for at least 1000 words for your content to improve the rankings.

7. Break Up Your Content With Headings

Introducing headings and subheadings into your content allows you to draw your readers’ attention to the most important bits. This keeps them engaged, and also greatly assists in readability.

On top of that, it’s very possible that search engines pay close attention to the keywords in headings. Including keywords in your headings, especially H1 and H2, has a good chance of boosting your rankings.

Conclusion

If content is king, then SEO is queen—or at the very least, an important advisor who instructs the king in how they should reign over the Web.

A good content strategy goes hand in hand with a strong SEO marketing strategy. Use these tips to improve the search engine friendliness of your high-quality content, and watch as your readership soars, along with leads and conversions!