6 Ways To Improve Your Local SEO Marketing Effectively

Although traditional marketing strategies remain to be the best sales driver for any businesses, local SEO marketing also influences how businesses acquire new customers nowadays. Establishing your online presence can significantly affect your sales since most customers are now accustomed to searching the internet for products and services that they need.

Local SEO has been practiced by several businesses for a while now. You probably did this to your own site when you built it but have you reviewed your local SEO marketing lately?

If you haven't updated your local SEO yet, you should do so because the rules of SEO are continually changing. Here is a quick review to refresh you with the benefits of optimizing your local search.

How Does Local Search Work?

Local Search, as the name suggests, is focused on providing a list of businesses within a particular town, city, or region on the search results. These local search results also referred to as a local pack, appear on the right side of the SERP.

Of course, you would want your business to be on top of the list whenever a customer searches for products or services that you offer right? Getting that most coveted spot in the rankings, however, is getting tougher since Google has implemented changes such as the introduction of ads to the local pack.

Ads now appear above the true local listings which affect the organic CTR of sites. Another problem with the local pack now is the initial results dropped from seven to three. Users now need to click a button to see the full list of the top local search results.

These constant changes make local SEO more challenging which is also why you should take the time to review your own strategies. As the internet continually evolves, several changes are yet to come making SEO even more challenging in the future.

As you start checking your own local SEO marketing strategies, try adding these 6 effective ways to enhance your local SEO marketing. You will be surprised how these tips can benefit your business in the long run.

Optimize for On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is critical for the search engine optimization to be successful. The best practices in optimizing for On-Page SEO varies when it comes to local search marketing. One of the things to be considered is the nature of the business.

If you are a shop or restaurant owner, optimize your site by targeting the location of your business. Adding the exact location of your store on your website can increase your chance of getting featured in the local pack.

Make sure that all the information about your business such as your business name, location, and phone number is uniform in all the pages on your website as well as in all of your directory listings.

For businesses that offer services at several locations, optimization might be more difficult to do. To be more successful in local SEO, create pages that are specific to each location and optimize each page for the local area where the services are provided. Whether it is for different neighborhoods, cities, or states, having specifically optimized pages for each location has a huge impact on the SEO results.    

Quality Link-building

Link building is still one of the most important off-page ranking factors in SEO. The key to improving your local SEO is by acquiring relevant quality links. 

As with other SEO strategies, having a sustainable link building campaign can be hard. The strategies that you should implement also depends on the niche of your business so there is no one-size-fits-all approach to link building.

Creating high-quality content can help you earn quality links. You may also try to reach out to content creators to mention or get a link to your own content. Make sure to take advantage of every PR opportunities and social channels to help in increasing your inbound link count.

Sign Up For A Google My Business Account

Creating an account in Google My Business will help improve your rankings for free. A simple sign up will ensure your local business listing on Google which also includes your own business page.

A Google My Business account kick starts the online presence of your business and confirms your ownership. You may then add images that best represent your business as well as engaging descriptions that will catch the customer's attention.

Google My Business also allows you to get online reviews from customers. This will help strengthen your reputation and attract more customers.

Keep Your Citations and Listings Updated

Search engines keep track of the quality of your citations and because of this, having accurate information on your citations is crucial.

Consistency is essential in citation building since inaccurate or inconsistent details on your citations and listings might confuse Google which can lead to unexpected site errors. This can gravely affect your rankings and CTR.

Take the time to check all your listings and citations to make sure that all the information about your business especially your location and contact details are up to date. Having accurate NAP shown across the web will help your customers contact you and find your stores with ease.

Produce Genuine Social Proof

Peer recommendation is a major sales driver. People value customers reviews more than product descriptions when they decide to make a purchase.  Public review platforms such as Yelp can be helpful for businesses.

To reap the benefits of social proof, you must first find customers that are willing to give you reviews. While most of the customers don't have time to write reviews for your site, using an alternative service like Yotpo can help you solicit customer reviews. Review generating services use methods that are guaranteed to get reviews from your customers.

Once you have collected a number of customer reviews, make sure to go through each of them to see how your customers rate your products and services. If you are given negative feedbacks, respond to them personally in a timely and professional manner. A personal response from a business owner can help the business recover from bad publicity. Remember to address the issues right away and mention how you are going to deal with them.

Be Active On Social Media

Social media platforms are arguably helpful in improving your SEO rankings. One thing is for sure, your social media activity affects how your customers perceive your business. Social signal is an important factor in establishing the online presence of local businesses.

People are more likely to deal with businesses with active social media. An active Facebook or Twitter profile has become a pre-qualifying factor that helps customers decide if they will visit your store or make a purchase from you. Having engaging content on social media pages will not only help you advertise and attract more customers but will also help you build brand loyalty.

This gives you more chance to have co-citations and brand mentions that you can't possibly create on your own.

As a rule of thumb, create social media accounts on platforms where most of your customers can be found. Always remember that the contents of your social media pages should be consistent with the information on your site. To establish your brand recognition, add recognizable logos and images on both your site and social media pages.

In conclusion, SEO requires tons of work to be successful. More SEO strategies can be done to ensure the improvement of your rankings but starting with these steps can greatly affect your local SEO marketing. SEO needs continuous updates and improvement which means that you should research for more ways to keep your site on the top of the search results.

Professional SEO services can help you develop effective strategies to grow your online presence. Keep in mind that success relies not only on the major changes you do on your marketing strategies but also on the little steps you take for consistent improvement. Apply these steps to your current local SEO strategy and see the difference that it can bring to your rankings. For more information, visit: https://seovendor.co/seo/palm-desert/

How to Measure the Efficiency of Call Centers

Call centers serve as the front line of most businesses. For this reason, call centers are required to be closely monitored to determine their efficiency in providing service and support to customers. Outsourced call center utilizes information systems that help in monitoring the performance of the customer support contact center and their agents in real time. Call center metrics, as well as key performance indicators, are carefully monitored to evaluate the efficiency of service delivery.

Since call centers are the most common services being outsourced nowadays, it is important to evaluate their performance for a company to learn if they are investing in the right customer support contact center. Call centers are connected to almost every department of a company since they serve as a key customer touch point. What happens in the call center has an impact on a company's brand so it pays to get a closer look at your company's inbound contact center performance.

Call center managers have the ability to monitor a call center when it comes to its performance, set key performance indicators or KPI metrics, and quality. Performance issues which are metrics that involve how quickly a caller can reach a call center and how fast they can reach an agent, the speed of the call resolution and the average time a caller has to wait when put on hold during a call are measured by an Automatic Call Distributor. Quality issues which involve set KPI metrics that assess the agent's courtesy and ability to follow procedures, on the other hand, are measured by call center quality monitoring programs which usually involves monitoring by people rather than a software. 

To give you an overview of the things that are included in the performance reports of an inbound contact center, here are the most common metrics for inbound customer service performance which are centered on the quality of customer experience.

Service Level

Service level is the percentage of calls received by the center which is answered by an agent within a certain time frame. This measures your organization's accessibility to your customers. The global metric for service level is 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds. Service level is the most common benchmark for measuring the level of service that a call center provides its customers.

Average Speed to Answer

This benchmark measures the average number of calls including those that are not answered within 20 seconds. The global metric for this is 28 seconds. It is advisable to employ additional staff if this metric is high to maintain customer satisfaction.

Abandon Rate

Abandon rate measures the number of calls that are abandoned while the customer is waiting for an agent.

Aside from the average wait time in queue, there are other factors that cannot be controlled by the call center that affects this number, such as time of day, individual caller tolerance, availability of service alternatives, and many others.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance monitors the overall caller experience and the way the agent handled the inbound customer service calls. Quality scores are typically measured over between 5 and 10 calls per agent per month and assess agents’ communication skills, etiquette, and adherence to procedures like workflow processes or call scripts.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is a significant benchmark. It measures the average of callers that are satisfied with your inbound customer service experience. Customer satisfaction is monitored through several methods but the most common ones are post-call surveys and follow-up emails.

You shouldn't be afraid of leveraging customer service outsourcing in your business since there are ways for you to monitor the efficiency of services rendered to your customers. The key to a successful outsourced call center is closely monitoring their performance so you can get the most out of the service you are paying for.