Category: SEO

The Importance of a Google Business Profile for Local Small Businesses
At Emphasis.LA, we love helping local small businesses develop and expand their online presence. One of the first steps we advise our customers to do, and often do for them, is set up a Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business).
What is Google Business Profile?
Google Business Profile is a free and user-friendly tool provided by Google that allows businesses to manage their online presence on Google Search and Google Maps. It provides essential information about your business, such as location, contact details, hours of operation, and customer reviews, all displayed prominently in the search results. Here’s why your small business needs a Google Business Profile:
The Locals Can Find Your Business
When potential customers in your area search for products or services related to your business, Google Business Profile helps your business appear in the local search results. This prominent placement increases the chances of attracting local customers who are actively seeking what you offer.
GBP Can Provide Some Credibility
A complete and well-maintained Google Business Profile conveys professionalism and trustworthiness to potential customers. The presence of positive reviews and high-quality photos further enhances your credibility and encourages people to choose your business over competitors.
GBP gives you data
Google Business Profile provides valuable insights into how customers find and interact with your business online. You can track the number of views, clicks, and calls generated by your profile, helping you understand your customers better and make data-driven decisions.
Mobile Users Can Reach You in Fewer Steps
Google Business Profile ensures that your business information is easily accessible to smartphone users. It offers directions, click-to-call functionality, and other mobile-friendly features that facilitate quick and easy engagement. When someone searches for you on Google they can easily click on a map to your business, click on your phone number, or click on your email address without first going to your website. The less clicks they have to make, the more likely they are to take action. If you have it set up, users can even message you directly from your GBP.
GBP Can Provide Answers and Information
The Q&A and Posts features on Google Business Profile enable you to engage directly with potential customers. Answering questions and sharing updates can build a stronger connection with your audience and provide them with the information they need quickly.
Answer questions promptly and in-depth to make a good first impression on people reading your profile.
GBP Can Give You An Edge On The Competition
Despite its impact, many small businesses are yet to fully utilize Google Business Profile. By optimizing your profile effectively, you can gain a competitive edge in local search results, making it easier for customers to find and choose your business.
Maximize Your Google Business Profile for Local SEO
Now that we’ve highlighted the importance of Google Business Profile for small businesses, here are some steps to maximize its impact on your Local SEO:
Claim and Verify Your Profile
If you haven’t already, claim and verify your Google Business Profile. This is the first step in gaining control over your online presence.
Complete Your Profile
Fill out all the relevant information, including your business name, address, phone number, website, hours of operation, and a detailed business description. Ensure that this information is accurate and consistent with your website and other online listings.
Add High-Quality Photos
Upload high-resolution images of your business, including the exterior, interior, products, and services. Visual content can significantly influence potential customers.
Encourage Reviews
Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews on your Google Business Profile. Respond to reviews, both positive and negative, in a professional and courteous manner.
Use Google Posts
Regularly update your profile with Google Posts. Share news, promotions, and events to keep your audience engaged and informed.
Monitor and Analyze
Regularly monitor the performance of your Google Business Profile using the insights provided. Adjust your strategy based on what’s working and what needs improvement.
A Free and Valuable Tool
Simply put, a Google Business Profile is a free tool that enables businesses to manage their online presence across Google’s platforms, including Google Search and Maps. It’s your digital storefront, offering a snapshot of your business’s key information to potential customers.
November 8, 2023
Google updates guidance on search ranking systems page April 2023
A lot of talk this past week on Google updating its guidance on the search ranking systems page. Specifically, they removed the sections on page experience, mobile friendliness, page speed, and site security.
There is a lot of noise about what this means, but in the end nothing really changed except for the official guidance.
Page speed was and probably still will be an overemphasized “ranking factor”. Google probably doesn’t directly measure a website’s speed when considering search rank. I say probably because no one really knows their algorithm. They definitely do measure engagement rate which is affected by page speed but not as much as some have focused on.
Page experience is another “ranking factor” that is probably not directly measured for search results. As the name suggests, it is related to the experience users have when they visit your page. Does your website use a secure connection? Do you have annoying popups or too many ads? These can all have a negative effect on your users which could lead to lower engagement rates.
The main focus when trying to make your website appear more frequently on Google is to be the answer to more queries. Visitors to your website likely have many alternative options so you should provide a good experience. If you don’t, then they will abandon your page which will lead to lower engagement. That means you should make your website fast and give users a good experience. Try to satisfy the user, not the machine. But do make it easy for the machines to find it as well.
Want to measure your websites performance and page speed. Try https://pagespeed.web.dev/ .
Need help optimizing your website? Or do you need help writing content that will properly answer your prospects’ questions?
We’re happy to help.
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April 24, 2023
Know Google’s Approach to Search
Google is the top search engine. According to Statista, Google commands 84.69% of all online search market share.
I believe that to get a good understanding of Google’s business model and how they make money is important to position yourself properly.
Read their approach to search
If you read Google’s approach to search, you will get an idea of what they are trying to achieve.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Google makes money by selling ads
They want to show you ads so that they can bill advertisers for showing those ads. They want to show relevant ads that are more likely to receive clicks.
Google wants to help you find what you are looking for
They want to understand your query and provide you with the most relevant information so that you will come back. They want to stay ahead of the competition.
Intent is important
Google uses natural language processing (NLP) to try to predict the intent of your search. If you are looking for a local business then it wants to give you results for local businesses.
Google tends to reward fresh content
They will test new content to see how people react to it. They want to make sure the data they are serving is current.
Use this knowledge as a tool to guide your strategy
A search request with some local intent might not need to answer the question better than anyone else in the whole wide world. It just has to answer the query better than other people in the local community. So using AI to write a local post can work.
If you are competing on a broader range (ex: national, international), then your content probably needs to be more in-depth and original to rank.
Keep your content updated to make sure Google counts it as fresh content.
April 10, 2023
What is a website slug?
The slug is a unique combination of letters, numbers, and symbols that forms the last part of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) link. This is what you type into the browser to find a website.
When the web was younger, it was common practice to format with non-descriptive IDs such as example.com/page_id=123. If you were looking at this URL, you had no idea what could possibly be in the page you were going to.
These days, non-descriptive slugs are commonly used by spammers and other bad actors when they don’t really want you to know what is on the page. So if you don’t use descriptive URL’s, then you could be put into the same category as them.
Modern URL structures now add a descriptive slug so people have a better idea of where they are going. URLs are often put into categories so they are even more descriptive. For example if you were a jeweler that sold rings and bracelets, you could have a URL structure of example.com/rings/slug-for-gold-ring for a gold ring. Then you could also have a slug of example.com/bracelets/slug-for-a silver-bracelet for a silver bracelet.
The full URL may or may not directly affect search engine rankings. I can confirm that it does at least affect Search Engine Optimization (SEO) indirectly because people trust a URL that is descriptive more than a non-descriptive URL. A proper slug and full URL can lead to a higher click-through rate (CTR) for your links. CTR is the percentage of people that see a link to your page and click on that link. Google and other search engines use CTR as a signal of whether your post or page satisfies the user’s search query.
Why is it called a slug?
According to the New York Times it is an old printing term from the newspaper era:
The term slug derives from the days of hot-metal printing, when printers set type by hand in a small form called a stick. Later huge Linotype machines turned molten lead into casts of letters, lines, sentences and paragraphs. A line of lead in both eras was known as a slug.
~New York Times, November 2014
Conclusion
While it may seem insignificant, tiny changes to your website can make a huge difference for your online visibility. A proper slug can help people (and possibly machines) understand what a page is about. It can help to improve your click through rate which could be a good signal to search engines.
Formatting your slugs can be beneficial to your website. If you need help choosing or changing your slugs please reach out to us.
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December 21, 2022
What is Alt-text and why should you use it?
Alternative text, most commonly referred to as alt-text, is text used to describe an image on a website. It is used mostly by blind or visually impaired people who use screen-readers to read the content of a website. When screen-readers get to an image, it will read the alt text out loud. Most people I talk to have no idea what alt text is. Most of the websites I have seen that were created by business owners, don’t include alt-text.
Alt-text examples
The best way to explain the importance of alt-text is to give you an example. Let’s use these two images of dogs as an example.
Acceptable alt-text (doing the bare minimum)
If you were a dog trainer and you had this picture of a German shepherd sitting down, you could give both images the alt-text of “Dog” and it would suffice because it is a picture of a dog. A person using a screen-reader on this website would hear “Image of a dog” twice. If you were to run an accessibility test using an accessibility testing tool, you would pass most tests. Some tools might give you a warning for using the same alt-text for various images.
Better alt-text
A better alt-text would be “German shepherd” for the first image and “Chihuahua dog” for the second image. This is a slightly better description of the image and would avoid duplicate alt-text.
Best alt-text
The best possible alt-text is very descriptive of the image. It should “draw” a picture in the reader’s mind. If I was writing a description for the first dog image above, I might write “Brown and Black German shepherd sitting attentively at the park”. A better writer might be able to succinctly add something about a grassy roadway and include text about a fall setting.
You may also want to add something related to your business in the alt-text that would make it more relevant to your business. If this was a dog you trained (and your business name was Acme Dog Training) then you could say something like “Acme trained Brown and Black German shepherd sitting attentively at the park”.
A visually impaired person on your website hearing these descriptions will likely stay on your website longer than if they just kept hearing “image of a dog” over and over again.
Do you always have to add alt-text?
No. If you add captions to your images, you don’t need to add alt-text. As long as the caption is descriptive of the image. If you have the same text for the caption as the alt-text, then the screen-reader may read the same thing twice.
Another time when you don’t need alt-text is when your background is an abstract image that has no significance. I have heard it said that in this scenario, you might still want to add an alt-text as “decorative”.
The worst kind of alt-text
The worst kind of alt text is meaningless text. I often see websites where a developer has programmatically made it so that alt-text gets added automatically from possibly the file name in an attempt to comply with ADA requirements. This makes it possible for the website to “pass” online tests but does not make the website accessible to someone using a screen-reader. Imagine an image with a file name “IMG_dfxvrspnmqrl56y” where the file name is inserted as the alt-text. Since the screen-reader cannot read it as a word, it will read each letter and character individually. Read this aloud to get a sense of how annoying it would be: “Image of I, m, g, underscore, d, f, x, v, r, s, p, n, m, q, r, l, 5, 6, y”. Do not make a visually impaired person’s life more difficult.
Help your image to be found
Make your site more robot friendly. Specifically the search engine robots such as Google or Bing. When you add alt-text, you give search engines the ability to know what the picture is and your picture can come up when people search images.
This is especially important if you have an ecommerce site. If you were selling this skirt for example, you could say “girl wearing skirt” and that could be good enough. You might even think that since people using screen-readers cannot see, they are not likely to buy a dress online. But the alt-text is also used by search engines to try to understand what a picture is about. So a better alt-text might say “model wearing a yellow summer style skirt”. Someone searching for a yellow skirt might see this image in the search results. Make sure your alt-text is relevant to the product or products you are trying to sell. In this image you wouldn’t want to go into details about the model’s hair color or the hill in the background.
Alt Text Length
They say a picture is worth a thousand words but you don’t have that much space. I have not found any information on any modern browsers having a hard maximum number of characters in the alt text. I have read several recommendations to keep the alt text to 125 characters max. A safer limit might be 100 characters. I often surpass that number. Most people don’t put any.
Quick tip: do not start alternative text by using the words “image of” or “picture of” or anything similar. When a screen-reader gets to an image it will automatically read aloud “image of”. So if you start your alt text with “image of…” the screen reader will say “image of image of…”.
Conclusion
Visually impaired people and people with other disabilities own dogs too and represent an underestimated part of the overall population. They probably use your product or service as well. You could be losing potential clients and putting yourself at risk of not complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
As we get older our bodies change. Even people who have been healthy and injury free most of their lives may develop a disability. As a friend of mine told me, we must build for our future selves.
Want to know more about alt-text? Read the in-depth post from WebAIM about alt-text.
Optimizing your images, adding alt-text, and making other changes on your website can be a tedious process. Please reach out to us if we can help you with your images or to optimize your website.
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July 29, 2022