Has your Google Business page been suspended? Read below for more information and feel free to contact us for a free GMB audit.

UPDATE 7/10/2019: Many business owners are reporting a suspended listing after adding a short name to their profile. The best thing to do at this point is remove the short name. See: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-my-business-listings-getting-suspended-after-adding-short-names/315855/#close
Every day Google My Business locations are being suspended. Sometimes this is because the owner added information that violates Google’s policies for GMB accounts. This could be promoting an offer in the Company Information section or adding spammy content with the intent of tricking the search engines. Other times it may be simply because the algorithm that checks your page automatically flagged your page for suspension. It’s rare that an actual human being suspends your account. There are millions so it’s impossible for even a group of people to look through every account and location.

Next Steps

What steps to take if your Google My Business Account has been suspended:
1. Log into Google My Business
2. Select the business or location that’s marked as suspended
3. Read the Guidelines and make sure you’re not in violation.
4. If you find something you did that’s in violation FIX IT
5. Submit an Appeal Request
6. Wait – It can take 2-3 weeks since these reviews are typically manual done by a real human.

Sounds easy, but there may be a small issue that triggered your Google My Business Suspension. You may have inadvertently added something funky to your listing that caused Google’s algorithm to flag your location or account. Your best bet is to get an SEO Consultant in Dallas to review your account for any issues. We do that for free and will tell you exactly what we believe caused the GMB suspension. We’ve been doing this for decades and seen pretty much every situation. We can correct your Google My Business listing and probably get it even more traffic than you had before the suspension. Again, for free 🙂
Along with fixing your Google My Business listing we can also give your site a free SEO audit to find any issues that are preventing you from ranking at the top of Google. There are over 200 factors Google uses to determine your ranking for any given search and we know them all! Call today for a free site evaluation.

Question: How do I find an SEO consultant?
Answer:
The first thing to do when searching for an SEO consultant is search Google for YOUR CITY SEO CONSULTANT. This is a good start but isn’t the only step as just because someone ranks at the top doesn’t mean they’ll give you the same care they gave themselves. Take the top 5 or so and read reviews and look into how long they’ve been in business. Also look for SEO consultants that are actually in your city or nearby. Lot of SEO consultants are based in other stated but rank well in your area. It’s best to work with someone who is close enough that you can go to their office for a meeting if needed.
Question:Should I hire an SEO company?
Answer:
Short Answer – Yes. Long answer – You should at least consult with an SEO in Dallas to understand what needs to be improved and how to take care of it. Based on that information you can decide if it’s a project you want to tackle yourself or if you need some hands on help from an SEO Company.

Most people who have a website and want to promote it have heard of link building. For most people this means having another website link to yours. While that’s true and the main focus of link building efforts, there is another aspect that’s often forgotten about – Internal Linking.

What is Internal Linking

Internal link building is pretty much what it sounds like – linking from one page on your site to another. Simple enough, right. Not so much… When working through an internal link building strategy it’s critical to have a solid plan based on verifiable data. An internal link tells Google what other pages on your site are about and give those pages some “juice”. Internal links also tell Google what pages you think are important.

Where to Start?

Google Analytics – Start by finding what pages on your site get the most traffic and what their rankings are. Based on that information you know what pages likely have extra “juice” to pass to other pages. Next you want ot figure out what pages on your site have external links. These pages are getting a lot of link juice from those other sites so they have even more juice to share.

Now you want to figure out what pages could use a boost in rank. Google Search Console can help – find pages that get a lot of impressions but are in spots 2-10 consistently. If any of those are priority pages for your business you now know where to link to.

Put this information together and make a link map. Find pages that are doing well that are somewhat related to the pages you want to do better. You may need to rewrite content or supplement the content that’s already there, but find a way to work in the title of the “to” page and use that title or a variation as the anchor text.

Now we have a good internal link. Check your ranking for that page / keyword, resubmit that page to GSC, wait 30 minutes and check the rank again. did it go up? Hopefully. If not that just means that page needs a little more TLC. Maybe a new SEO title or H1 that’s more in line with your keyword research. Maybe more internal links (don’t overdo it). Maybe more content. There are several factors that help or hurt any given page on your site.

If you want more info on internal linking or could use a professional SEO audit, call one of our SEO Consultants in Dallas for free advice and a full technical site audit.

There are more than 200 signals Google uses to rank any given page on a website. Every year they seem to focus SEO on something new (without forgetting about the others):

• SSL / https:// became a rankign signal in 2014
• mobile usability (mobile first indexing) became important in 2015
• 2017 pushed even harder on SSL
• Mobile page load speed became very important last year

These make sense – more people are using their phones and tablets on 3/4/5g networks to browse rather than desktops on WiFi. There’s an increasing emphasis on security since more and more sites (and their user information) is getting hacked.

So what’s next and what’s still important in SEO?
To sum it all up, John Mueller from Google said the key to top Google rankings is “awesomness”.

Knowing that, it makes sense to make your site awesome for your users. That means informative, interesting content and good user experience (easy to navigate, ADA compliant, plenty of images and videos that support content, etc). In the end Google wants to serve up sites that not only address their searchers query but provide a good experience.

So what are the top ranking factors?

As mentioned above there are more than 200 SEO ranking signals that puts one site above another for any given search. Although each one is important, there are a handful that get you more bang for your buck:

1. High Quality, Unique Content

You’ve probably heard it before: Content is King! Of course it is. If you don’t have useful content (text, video, images, etc) on your site no one will be interested in your site. Google and SEO authorities all say optimized content is one of the top ranking factors today and probably will always be. Here are a few things to consider when publishing content on your site:

• • Length: 300 words is the minimum you should write (I say 500+)
  • Keywords – What are you trying to rank for?
  • Keyword Density: Make sure computers can understand what your page is about. This includes synonyms (lawyer/attorney/law firm, shoe/sneakers/kiks)
  • Readability – Flesch Reading Ease Score

 

• Consider Search Intent – Example: Are you writing about Blue jays the bird or Blue Jays the baseball team?
• Voice Search – More people are asking their phone questions that need to be answered. Google “QA Markup”

2. Page load time

The faster your site loads the more likely a user will stick around and the more likely they are to buy your product or service. There are several tools that will analyze your page load speed and give recommendations on what needs to be fixed. The Lighthouse plugin for Chrome is my favorite. It analyzes several factors including page load speed. For desktop and mobile versions of your site. Here’s a screenshot of our results…

3. Mobile Friendly

More and more people are abandoning desktop computers for their phones or tablets. If your site doesn’t look good on a smaller screen you’ll lose visitors quickly. Even older sites can adopt a responsive design with some simple CSS updates. That means the same exact page and content appears differently based on the size of the users screen. Typically content, images, etc is stacked on a phone rather than side by side. I also include mobile load speed in this category. People are becoming more and more impatient and if your site loads slowly they will move on to your competitors. Recently Google implemented “Mobile first indexing” which means all search results, even if you’rs searching form a desktop, will be based on the mobile friendliness of your site.

4. Security / SSL / HTTPS

for the last five years Google has given a boost to sites that are secure and use SSL / https://. You’ve probably read about the several data breaches of major companies over the years. Although your site may not save sensitive information an unsecured site is vulnerable to hackers who can add dangerous code that can compromise your end users. Adding SSl to your site is cheap if not free so there’s no reason not to do it.
Note – Adding SSL may hurt your SEO if you end up having duplicate pages (both http and https versions) listed in Google.

5. User Experience

UX is not only about how pretty your site is but how intuitive it is and easy to use. This includes users who can not see or hear well or at all. Although Google can’t analyze your site’s appearance or usability it does glean information from user behavior metrics. This includes time on site, hoe many pages a user reads, bounce rate, etc. And also site load speed as mentioned above.
A good site hierarchy is essential to help users find what they’re looking for and understand how to get from page A to page B. A solid hierarchy also helps search engines better understand your site.

6. Internal Linking

In short, internal linking with proper anchor text will help Google understand your pages even further. For example a link to our home page with anchor text Dallas SEO Consultant will help Google understand the overall topic of our site is that we are SEO consultants in Dallas.

7. Meta Data

An oldie but a goodie – Meta data is the information that may not be visible on your pages but tell Google what your page is about and typically appears in the SERPS (Search Results). This includes the Page title tag, descriptions, structured data markup and a few other coding updates. Meta data tells Google specifics about your site, page, elements on the page. Things like video run time, logo url, site owner, and hundreds of other facts you may not need to tell users on every page.

8. Schema Markup

Considered part of Meta Data in my opinion, this deserves its own paragraph. Schema markup is critical for describing your products, services, organization and hundreds of other parts of your business and website. Proper schema markup can even affect the appearance of your search results. It can add 5 gold stars in the results or display an image or video.

If you just started a business you’re probably considering digital marketing options and SEO for Startups to get things rolling. As you should, but new businesses, specifically new websites, need a different SEO strategy than establishes companies and websites.

WHY?

Website Domain Authority

No matter how awesome your business is; no matter how great your products or services are no matter how awesome your customer service is: Your website authority is literally zero. That’s not a knock on your business it’s just how it works. A brand new website likely won’t even appear in Google search results for weeks if not months no matter how well optimized it is. You’re the new kid on the block and haven’t proven yourself to the search engines yet.

Link Profile

Similar to your domain authority, you don’t have any inbound links other than whatever you added to your social media accounts. No one knows about you so they can’t link to you even if they wanted to. It’s important to start link building as soon as possible.

Budget

Most startups are on a tight budget and most of that typically goes to the core of the business, product development, etc. Very little usually ends up in the SEO for Startups bucket. If you don’t have or choose not to put much cash into your marketing efforts they won’t get anywhere anytime soon.

How to get Rankings as a New Business?

It will potentially take years to rank well for generic terms related to your company, so what can you do to get rankings immediately?

As with any content strategy it needs to start with keyword research. However, you shouldn’t go after the big terms just yet – There are many other businesses that already rank for those and it’ll take a long time for you to get there. Start with low volume but easy to rank topics. Start writing about a new study or some interesting fact about your products.

Give one of our Dallas SEO Consultants call and we’ll explain all the ins and outs of keyword research. Free of charge…