Digital Marketing

Role of NAP in Local SEO

What is a NAP?

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. Your NAP profile gives the basic information regarding your business to search engines like Google. The information helps search engines to distinguish your business from others. Hence it is essential for organic ranking.

Companies mark up their NAP details with Local Business Schema Markup for a clear understanding among all search engines. When people search for businesses online, search engines will show the NAP information on the Search Engine Result Pages. It is a simple way of making search engines validate your brick-and-mortar business.

NAP data is one of the main ranking factors for local SEO. NAP information greatly improves customer experience as customers will find it easy to reach you. Correctly indexing your business’s NAP will help your customers find you easily through direction apps such as Google Maps.

Importance of NAP

When your potential customers look for local businesses online, Google shows them geo-specific results. It will also cross-reference your NAP details across various directories such as Yelp to check whether yours is a legit business.

Having consistent NAP info across all your listings and social media profiles will determine your ranking. Most importantly, NAP is one of the main ranking factors for search engines. Because Google thrives on recommending trustworthy and geo-specific businesses to its users, NAP and its consistency are vital for your local SEO success.

More than anyone, local businesses need NAP as around 78% of searches made online with local intent achieve a direct visit to a store in the next 24 hours.

The Role of NAP in Local SEO

Think of how a user usually searches for a local business. They are most likely to use terms like “movers and packers near me,” “best salons in Tacoma,” and “affordable apartments in Yonkers.”

Before recommending local businesses and services to users, search engines look for citations across various websites. These websites are usually directories. Having your NAP set up correctly and consistently across various sites influences Google’s recommendations.

As a local business, when you set up your Google My Business Listing correctly and list your business across various sites with the same NAP, Google will presume your business as a credible one.

Another phenomenon that one must consider is the shift from desktop searches to mobile searches. According to Think with Google, 30% of searches made on Google are related to location. When users are particular about their queries, search engines ought to recommend them the ideal local businesses. Otherwise, the users will get frustrated and may move on to another search engine for relevant results. This is where NAP gains significance in local SEO.

How to fix NAP Inconsistency?

Give No Room For Variations

Search engines are not that smart when it comes to reading your NAP. You have to be VERY, VERY, VERY specific when it comes to listing your business.

As English Comedian Michael McIntyre once put it, “…so they (Americans) can’t work with pavement, so they’ve changed it into the sidewalk. They needed to know where they were going to be walking. I think there must have been a period of time where they ran with the word pavement, but they kept hitting by cars (sic),” Google needs to be told very clearly about your business details.

Let’s say you run an auto repair shop in Tennessee, and the address looks like this:

Garage77 Auto Works,

1503, Glory Road,

Crossville, TN

931-707-8694,

https://www.garage77autoworks.com

Assuming that you have the same address in your Google Places but replaced the word ‘Road’ in your address with ‘Rd’ on your Yelp listing, Google may think both are two different businesses.

For Google, even the use of ‘.’ in place of ‘-‘ in your phone number is entirely different information. Hence, maintaining consistency in all your listings is crucial.

For E.g., Take a look at this NAP details a Video production company – Indigo productions.

They maintain consistent NAP details across all platforms like GMB and ZoomInfo.

Always Update

Businesses are prone to changes. You may need to shift to a new office or expand your business to new areas. When such things happen, make sure the changes reflect on your listings across all sites.

Having a spreadsheet with all your listings mentioned is an easy way to make changes. At times, websites tend to have a duplicate listing of your business. If you find any duplicate listing, avoid reporting it. Instead, contact the website owner and get the mistake fixed.

Consider using a tool like Moz Local Listing Score to check how accurate your listing appears across multiple sites.

Another mistake local businesses often make is having multiple phone numbers for a particular business location. This will confuse users and negatively affect the click-through rate (CTR).

3) Use Schema Markup

Local Schema Markups are codes meant for search engines to understand your business better. The use of Schema Markups will display results in the format of Snippets. Snippets contain rich data, including your opening hours, website, review, direction, phone number, etc.

For E.g., This schema markup tells the rating, number of votes and the time taken to make lasagna.

Use Google Structured Data Markup Helper for this task. Marking up the elements is easy. Start with entering your URL and click ‘Start Tagging.’

The helper will take you to your site, where you need to highlight the parts where your NAP is located. Once done, you need to generate the structured data code in JSON-D format since it is Google’s recommended format.

Once the code is generated, you can download it and test it using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Claim Your Listings

Verifying you as the owner of a business is a must when it comes to online business listings.

Let’s say that yours is a local business and you have been in the industry for a few years now. Your company might have been indexed in quite many directories even if you have not shared your NAP with directories.

Yes. That’s how it works.

When it comes to local businesses, your NAP data flows from one directory to another naturally. Start reaching out to the famous directories first and begin the claiming process.

Directories usually give you an option to review the existing NAP and make relevant changes. So make sure your NAP is correct and fill out all relevant details such as which category your business falls in, opening hours, etc.

Then Google your phone number and cross verify the results.

For E.g., When I Google +44 2072212217 it only shows “Hilton London Hyde Park” in all results.

Once everything is done and dusted, directories may contact you over the phone or email or send you a postcard with a PIN for verification.

Optimize Google My Business Page

You might have claimed your Google My Business (GMB) Listing. But have you optimized it yet? If not, you are missing out on a fortune.

To begin with, always fill out all details. Though Google says some fields are optional, it is advisable to fill out everything.

Tell Google if you have a parking space available. Tell it if a reservation is necessary to visit your business. Mention which category your business falls in. Use attributes. Tell Google about the amenities (free WiFi, pet-friendly, sea-facing room, etc.) you have. To put it in a nutshell, tell Google everything about your business except trade secrets.

Don’t even miss a thing, and be SPECIFIC. If yours is a restaurant that specializes in serving Central American Cuisine, tell the same to Google.

Not just ‘Restaurant.’ Not even ‘American Restaurant.’ Tell you run a Central American Restaurant. If you aren’t aware, Google has 2,395 local business types.

The more you optimize your GMB listing, the higher the traffic will be. Try to acquire user-generated content and reviews by interacting with your existing customers.

Keep NAP Details on Your Website up to date

For tasks such as Schema Markup, you need to keep the NAP info of your business up to date on your website.

Say that there is a discrepancy between your actual address and the NAP data on your website. Since directories tend to grab business data from sites for republishing on theirs, the chances of your wrong NAP getting republished are inevitable.

Imagine a situation wherein small-time directories start republishing your wrong NAP on their websites. In such a situation, you will be in a position to contact all those directories to get your NAP corrected.

Also, make sure that the NAP on your website is checked for grammar, format, clarity, etc. Do not shorten words such as Street and Road into St and Rd, respectively.

Always display NAP on your website’s footer or header. If yours is a local business, try to keep the NAP pop out.

Say that you are a roofing contractor offering emergency services. Display your contact number prominently on your site’s header, footer, near contact form, and wherever necessary.

Pay Attention to Citations

Mistakes in citations happen for a variety of reasons. You might have inherited the phone number of someone whose business is now defunct or inactive. Maybe you have changed your business phone number but failed to update the same on directory listings.

If those directories are leading players, the emerging ones may quickly pick up the wrong information and list them on their sites.

For E.g., Take a look at this citation from ebusinesspage.

Whatever the reason may be, if different citations have different versions of your NAP, search engines will get confused and end up recommending other similar businesses over you.

Unfinished citations also hurt your SERP performance. Always fill out all pieces of information in listings. This will give a complete picture of your picture to search engines.

Importance of Domain Authority in SEO

SEO and other white label marketing services have gained immense popularity in today’s market. The term “Domain Authority” or DA, is pretty common these days, one that a lot of people might have seen floating about when searching for SEO solutions. The question of the importance of domain authority might be lingering in your mind. 

Domain authority might seem like a complicated solution or a non-important part of the bigger picture, but experts suggest that Domain Authority is extremely important and relevant to have perfect solutions from SEO Companies. 

Domain authority is a simple tool that is used to track the performance of a website. It is not the only important aspect of SEO, but it is one of the metrics SEO’s use to get a sense of how well a domain would rank and how valuable it is in the market. 

Having high domain authority instantly improves website traffic and how credible a website is rated on search engines. A site with a high DA score is more likely to rank high on SERPs, so if you are wondering how to increase domain authority, read on. 

DA: What is it? 

Domain authority is essentially a ranking score that was created by an SEO company called Moz. It helps determine how likely a site is to pop up on the first few results or first page of a search result. Studies state that nearly three-quarters of searchers never really scroll past the first page of a search result, so the first page, especially the first few sites that prop up has the highest chance of gaining visibility and traffic. 

The scoring system Moz uses ranges from 1 to 100 and helps to gauge how well a site is optimized for Google. A site with a score of 100 is much more likely to appear on the first page while a site with a score of 1 probably might not show up at all. Therefore, companies whose sites have a higher DA tend to do a much better one with low scores. 

Of course, DA isn’t the only factor that contributes to how well a site is doing, the relevance of the page matters to a high extent as well. What DA is really useful for is having to do more with letting you know the potential trajectory of your site for clicks, without showing if it is thriving with tangible results. 

How to Improve your Sites DA

To influence your site’s domain authority, you would ideally look into practicing what is referred to as White Hat SEO. This technique focuses on the links you use on your site which seems like an easy process but in reality, it is pretty complicated. When you first register your domain, it often takes a while to build up your site’s authority.

There are many factors to be considered, like proper on-page SEO, ensuring your website’s content is of high quality, keeping your website mobile-friendly, and also the loading speed of your site, something that is often not paid much attention to. 

This is how most White label SEO Company build a site’s DA: 

1. Backlinks: Backlinks are links that are created when one website links to another site. Looking at the quality and number of backlinks you have can have a huge influence on your site’s DA. Low-quality links will harm your domain authority and are those which come from irrelevant or low ranked sites. Getting rid of any bad backlinks is the first step to influence your DA. 

• Get Good Links: Getting good links is step two of the process. One of the best methods to do so is by making your site attractive with fresh, relevant, and engaging content that adds value to the product. A lot of this step involves content marketing and relies on sources like blogs and articles. Video content can also be an important source to procure good links. These links must be embedded in the message you want to relay and thus is important to have a value-added content strategy.

• Internal Links: Internal links are those which link one page to another inside the site. This is also a good way to boost a site’s domain authority. They are also a great way to boost Google’s page rank as it crawls your site. Ensuring that the internal links are related by topic or theme, the users will have an easier time navigating the website. 

The bottom line is that, if you’re wondering how important DA is or how you can build domain authority, it is quite relevant to building your site’s success. DA scores are highly useful to give you a sight of how your website is doing, which allows you to make certain changes and ensure a high score. 

White label firms use many tools to calculate and assess your site’s DA and suggest relevant changes and strategies be enforced, to boost this score. So if your site is not doing as well as you thought, try consulting an expert immediately. 

Email Marketing Guide to Rule the Holiday Season Sales

Everyone knows that the holiday season is always a great time to cash in on sales. Not to mention it’s also the perfect time to start thinking of ways to increase sales margins.

But, is it really possible to rule the holiday season sales?

The simple answer, yes.  Researchers have tried to determine whether there is a correlation between holidays and increased sales and found out that there are exponentially more sales during the holiday season than at any other time. In fact, one study by the National Retail Federation found that holiday sales account for 20% of all retail sales. Why is that? Consumers generally tend to spend more during the holiday season.

But even with the increased affinity for making purchases, it can be difficult to make sales. Or at least sales you’d ideally expect to make. To help you out, we have outlined a few vital practices that will help you rule the holiday season sales.

Let’s get started.

Know Your Holidays

From a logical standpoint, this almost sounds too obvious of a step. Of course, you already know what holidays there are. However, knowing them is one thing, but identifying which holidays bring in peak sales is a totally different thing altogether. Luckily, there are not a lot of holidays in the US. In fact, most times, you’ll only have like one important holiday that runs from early November to early January. But then there are other events like 4th of July, Back-to-school period, also some unusual ones that you could also take advantage of such as:

●      An eclipse

●      The first day of fall

●      Midsummer Fests

As long as you have these integrated into your email marketing calendar, you’ll be able to roll out holiday messages easily.There are lot of company available in market but based on customer reviews and online feedback VerticalResponse top of the market dominance that provides all the tools you need to run a successful email marketing campaign.Aside from the best tools, you’ll also need holiday-appropriate designs for your email. Fortunately, most on demand graphic design services can design emails for any occasion.

Start Early

You’ve seen me and thousands of other marketers talk about how important it is to integrate holidays into your email marketing calendar. But if you don’t start sending email marketing messages early enough, you’ll lose your edge to your competitors.

The holiday rush is a stressful time for many, and over the years we’ve seen holiday shopping come as early as late October. Now is the time to launch your promotions if you want your customers’ attention.

So if you are targeting the November to January holiday, GoDaddy recommends that you start your email marketing campaigns between 1st and 15th November when people are more likely to open your emails. Anything after that, and you’ll start seeing open rates spiraling downwards.

Automate Your Emails

Get ready for the holiday season and set up automated workflows. Your holiday automation workflows will be your best allies in generating revenue this holiday season.

Set up your most revenue-driving workflows: welcome, browse, and cart abandonment.

• Set up a series of welcome emails to onboard and nurture your new subscribers.
• Browse abandonment emails help pull your customer a little further down the sales funnel.
• Abandoned cart emails work great as reminders to come back to the store and accomplish the checkout.

These three automations will help you better drive subscribers back to your site and convert.

Don’t forget the post-purchase automation workflows either! Customer reactivation messages are extremely useful after the holiday season ends. They can help you re-engage with your customers and transform them from “shoppers for a season” to “shoppers for a reason.”

Segment Your List

Most business owners focus more on the sleek stuff. A mobile-optimized website, a sleek looking website, and ease of navigation. But once you nab those customers, then what?

The obvious answer, you need to start nurturing those subscribers. And the secret to nurturing leads lies in segmenting your email list.

The truth is the ecommerce environment is extremely competitive. It’s just too difficult to compete if you’re simply sending customers down the same journey. You will need to separate your customers into different segments so that you can send them relevant offerings depending on the segment they fall under. The more value you give your subscribers, the more likely they are to be responsive.

In fact, according to Neil Patel, email segmentation increases open rates by 203%. In addition, based on research done by Hubspot, 39% of email marketers who segment their email lists see better open rates.

Launch Exclusive Holiday Sales Promotions

It’s an industry standard to discount around the holidays, so give your customers what they want!  And what better way to lure customers and increase conversions than by offering discounts and incentives?

It’s also a great idea to understand the psychology behind pricing. Compare your prices with those of your competitors and come up with a strategy to make your prices more attractive to potential customers.

Think about your discount strategy, and run them throughout the month of November. Use Black Friday and Cyber Monday as peak days for your best discounts, but don’t be shy about offering great deals earlier. Customers shop earlier and earlier each year.

Create a Sense of Urgency

I know it sounds a bit manipulative but adding a sense of urgency actually works pretty well. The truth is buyers instinctively go into panic mode when there’s a limited supply of goods. And since they want the perfect gift, they don’t want to risk it being sold out. Which then means that they’ll be more inclined to make a purchase as opposed to if they didn’t have a timeline.

Here are a few ways to create a sense of urgency in your holiday emails:

• Start from your subject line: Nothing grabs a subscriber’s attention like a deadline. Put your added value or promotion in the subject line, and tell customers how long they have left to get it:
  • “These favorites are going fast!”
  • “50% off store-wide for the next 24 hours only!”
  • “Flash Sale: Take an extra 20% off for the next hour”
• Use it in your visuals: If you have a popular product, use your visuals to convey a limited stock of that product. This might help convert someone that’s on the fence.
• Add in a countdown: Engaging and eye-popping, a countdown graphic in your customer’s inbox will help create the FOMO (fear of missing out) you’re looking for.
• Don’t forget your key automation workflows: Especially in browse and cart abandonment, product scarcity can be particularly powerful. Try language in your emails like “Only 3 left in your size!” or “Check availability” to get the customer to click back through to your site.

Creating a sense of urgency in your holiday emails is an impactful way to bring customers back to your store. The holiday season is a rush-period no matter how early customers start, so make sure you’re using that to your advantage.

Invest in Having Catchy Subject Lines

Are you familiar with email marketing?

Are you having any success with it? Well, it probably has something to do with your subject lines.

For most of us, the subject line often comes as an afterthought. Unfortunately, getting your customers to open your email all comes down to the subject line you have used.

In fact, based on statistics, about 70% of customers mark an email as spam based on the subject line alone. And 33% of your audience decide whether or not they’ll open your emails based on the subject line alone. So it’s pretty evident that the stakes are fairly high when it comes to developing a subject line for your email marketing.

Two factors you should consider when coming up with a subject line for your email campaign

●      A clear objective

●      A unique selling point

Optimize Your Emails for Mobile

Based on research, about 63% of all emails are accessed via mobile phone. However, out of the 63%, only about 40% are optimized for email. This means that 23% still have to be accessed via desktop. Now, this is not entirely bad. However, knowing that mobile accounts for 71% of the total online time in the US alone, it makes sense to make sure that your email marketing campaigns are optimized for mobile.

Optimizing your email marketing for mobile involves:

• Writing short but interesting subject lines
• Thinking about image size
• Using buttons adapted to fat thumbs
• Limiting text and using formatting to avoid walls-of-text
• Using responsive design that looks great on every screen

Luckily, many ESP (email service providers) offer responsive design by default, so your emails will be beautiful no matter the screen size.

Conclusion

Holiday emails don’t have to be complicated. By building a great foundation, adapting for the holidays will be a snap. Your customers are already looking for the best deals this holiday season, it’s only up to you to deliver it.

Start your holiday email campaigns now, target the customers that will find them the most relevant, create that fear of missing out, and optimize. From there, it’s testing and tweaking until you find your own perfect mix.

These tips are far from exhaustive, but they’ll help create the holiday email strategy you need to be successful.

Top Ways To Increase Sales Through Your Website

Nowadays, the internet has become an incredibly valuable and increasingly necessary tool to drive forward the overall sales and cash flow of your business. Here are the top ways to increase sales through your website and subsequently improve the health of your business and improve your overall cash flow. 

Build Trust and Authenticity

Whether the person viewing your website is a returning customer or just an interested passer-by, the best way to secure a sale through your website is to include genuine, positive testimonials and reviews from already satisfied customers. The best way of summarizing this online sales technique is by examining and employing the concept of social proof, which is essentially the idea that potential customers will conform, in order to be liked by or accepted by the influencer. 

Your SEO Score

SEO scores are one of the most useful and important tools in determining the current and far-reaching success and useability of your businesses’ website. Established and experienced SEO score providers such as Yeah!Local can provide you with a nine page, detailed SEO score generated in under fifteen seconds. 

Promote Your Best Sellers and Package Deals

There is a multitude of ways to promote your best sellers through your website, and a shrewd way to capitalize on this technique is to use geolocation to improve on a wide array of functionality benefits. Geolocation is essentially the wireless detection of the physical location of a remote device and geolocation data to predict user and potential customer behavior, increase brand awareness and subsequently increase your online sales.  

Create Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a fabricated customer profile that accurately depicts your ideal customer based on real, current data on your existing customers and current market research. 

Buyer personas are an incredibly useful tool in enabling you to humanize your ideal customer, this enables you to understand their needs more accurately and subsequently select the right marketing strategies to encourage a sale and increase your online sales on the whole. 

There are several different categories in determining your buyer persona which include:

• Personal preferences, including the types of media they consume and how they prefer to communicate with businesses
• Standard information such as age, gender, education level, income level, marital status, number of dependents and geographical location
• Professional profiles including the industry they work in and their job title
• Personal and professional career goals
• Personal and professional values 

Increase Your Leads

Your leads are basically the potential customers who have expressed online interest in your services and products and are the people who have given you their contact information to be notified of the latest deals and new information regarding your business.

There are a number of ways to assess the level of your leads, which include counting how many email subscribers you have, how many registered users of your website there are, how many contact form submissions you have, and the number of quote requests you have received.