What are realistic goals for local serch results?

[dwallner]

I have a brand new domain, 2 months old, and am just finishing design.  What are realistic goals for the 1rst year in local search results?

My competition appears to be the local directories.   Manta, yellowpages, angieslist, BBB and so on.   Is it realistic to expect to eventually outrank them for the local search terms?  (City Service Keyword)  If so, what is a realistic time frame for someone putting in 10 to 15 hours a week on SEO, Including content creation.

This was the humbling report I just ran.  Looks like my choices are to beat them or pay them excessive amounts of money.

http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty/results.html?commit=Run+Report&date=2013-02-19&engine_id=96&keywords=Lakeville+snow+plowing&utf8=✓

[Morningside]

Ok, here's the dope.  Your best shot is local listings.   If you enter your search term in Google, notice that after the first 3 listings on the top, there is a list of local providers, with addresses?  If you have a local address, then you need to use snippets to mark it and point to them with your free Webmaster account at Google.  Snippets really do work, especially for local search.   What I can tell you from my 10+ years of SEO is find the "big dogs" and meticulously examine what they do.

Look at what they're doing in their header, H1 tags, use of strong/emphasis, copy, keyword packing, everything.  And despite what you hear about "keyword stuffing" being bad, you need to have a certain amount of keyword density to rank highly, and that's just a fact.  The other elements that will help you rise in the rankings are all the tried and true SEO methods: get links, and lots of them.  Quality matters more than quantity, although if you can blend both you're going to be in much better shape.

Check out the local "watering holes."   Where do folks in your local community gather online to chat?  Be the expert.  Pitch in to help with opinions and knowledge.  And, of course, link to your site.  Also, ask your happy customers (you have many of those, right?) to like you, Google + you, etc.  OK, fine, bribe them with discounts and free things like fridge magnets and calendars if you have to, but those ratings will do much to keep you in that coveted spot with all those delicious local listings.

There's no magic bullet here, but if you work at it consistently, getting good links, getting good references, doing your social work (Facebook, Twitter), you can eventually get up there.  It's like the old story of the two guys in the woods who come upon a bear.  One starts running, and as his buddy starts catching up, he yells "what are you doing, we can't outrun a bear?"  And his buddy shouts back: "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you."  You don't have to be the best SEO in the world ... you just need to be better than the other snowplowing firms in the area to get traction.   You're asking questions here, and that's a really good start.

[dwallner]

Thanks for the detailed response, James!

I have setup the G+ account and local listings on Google, Bing and Yahoo but I am disadvantaged there as well.  The business is run out of a home in PoDonk, MN, population 1K, while my potential customers and competitors are all in the cities. When you search for "PoDonk, MN Keyword" I do just fine.  Problem is, everyone who lives in Podonk already has a plow on their truck and half of them probably don't have an internet connection.

I noticed Google offered more options in the local listing as far as adding cities serviced, so I took advantage of that.  The search results are not good at the moment for those cities but I am hoping by taking advantage of snippets with rel=author, reviews and location to improve.  (This is where I will take your advice about offering discounts / begging for reviews and +1's.)  I do wonder if having the markups for location is a hinderence if I am not located in the desired service area?

I do have one major advantage over my competitors and that is time on my hands and a touch of internet savvy.

[littlesthobo]

Hi Derrick

Back in November I built a website for a client that is already ranking between 1 and 4 for several keywords and I had similar concerns at the outset.  One thing I noticed about that report you ran was that all the directory style competition had very low page authority scores.  Good page authority can outrank directories.

What I've written below is based on what I did...It started off with a lot of work in the initial set up, but it's generally just a couple of hours maintenance a week..

As it's local, get a google + page and link the page to your site and focus on getting some good social signals for each page - tweet your pages, facebook like and share you pages, google +1 your pages and so on and if you are blogging, do the same.  A good bit of content and plenty of social sharing can work wonders.  Set up social media accounts on a few of the main networks and use them to really connect and bulid relationships, rather than churning our rss feeds.

Also ensure you have cast iron on page, pick a keyword per page and make sure the page fully reflects that keyword so that when a search lands on it they are truly finding what they are looking for. Have that keyword in the title tag and a good meta desc that tells the user what your page is about.  Don't stuff the page with the keyword, just make sure it appears a couple of times, particularly in headings if you have it broken up.

You can also get yourself some free decent directory links - proper local business directories, not spammy ones and industry specific national directories.

The verified google plus page is invaluable and you can well optimise your google+ page, get reviews etc.

[Morningside]

Yeah.   What she said.  Well done.  Good point about a keyword per page.  Something not to lose touch of is that as people move more towards mobile search that search is changing and becoming more "long tail".  That's where good quality content comes in.  Good quality content on your site tends to capture the "long tail" search traffic.

One thing I would disagree about ... analyze your competition.  If they are "stuffing" keywords to an extent, then I would stuff keywords to the same extent.  Even though It's not popular, the fact is that keyword density can be the low-hanging fruit you can pick off to get quick results.

Jim

[dwallner]

Thanks Littlesthobo!

I feel I am doing the right things, as you described, socially.  Have all the accounts and I dedicate a couple hours every Friday to social.

"Also ensure you have cast iron on page, pick a keyword per page and make sure the page fully reflects that keyword"

I am going to start a new topic about this because I have a interesting problem.  Being that I service rural area, my ideal keywords consist of four cities and two services.  Thats tough sledding when trying to build a site that is easy to navigate, visually appealing and optimized.  I assume it's not wise to put "city y service, city x service, city z service" in the title and then try to naturally implement all those keywords into said service page.

I need to decide if I should limit my city to 1 or build multiple pages for each city.   Each has it's pros and cons from my inexperienced point of view.  The multiple pages looks amateur-ish and  takes away from navigation / appeal.  (Lakeville lawn care page, eagan lawn care page, apple valley lawn care page) The one city limits my potential customers.

As a start up business, I am leaning toward 1 city and then worrying about expanding the scope of the site later, but am certainly open to suggestions.