Local SEO Tips

How can I easily make my site & portfolio rank even better locally?
One great way is to keep adding lots of projects to your portfolio to keep its content comprehensive and fresh. This is also likely to help you convince website visitors to choose you. The more content you add to your local portfolios, the more words each page is going to have — and this especially valuable as your project descriptions cover niche keywords that searchers are likely to use. Beyond about seven to ten projects per city, you are likely to receive diminishing SEO returns on such project posts.

Services-descriptive domain names with keywords in them (like atlantaplumber.com) tend to rank very well for small businesses search terms. Going further, having a services-descriptive company name with your main service & location term in it can help even more. This is because search engines care a lot about not just the quantity and quality of links received, but also based on the clickable text in the link. When your business name is “Atlanta Plumber”, links to your business from other publications and directories are much more likely to include your keywords in their “anchor text” (the clickable link text). Such links are then about 5x – 10x stronger in our experience. If your business name was Joe’s Services, the links would likely boost you more for the term “Joe’s Services”, but few people are searching for that. This is why service-descriptive domain names and company names tend to perform better in search engines as it better communicates what your business is about to the search engine.

Beyond having solid on-site optimization, which our plugin can do a solid job of, search engines also rank sites based upon the quantity and quality of backlinks they have pointing to them. The best ways the plugin author has found for businesses to get these links are submitting their website to online directories like the local chamber of commerce and others that can be found online, earning local press & and links from bloggers when you have news or stories to get strong links from local online publications, getting links from distributors whose products you sell or who sell your products, and using HARO (helpareporter.com) to earn press and thus links for your company.

I don’t have a WordPress site currently — how can I best use this awesome plugin?
You can make a projects showcase website using wordpress and link to it from your main website. You can get such a website for like $4 per month at most shared web hosts.

If I go over my visitor limit, will you notify me?
We are going to do so.

What if I get an annual plan and then need to upgrade?
Please let us know and then we can give you an upgrade coupon that pro-rates your remaining months into a discount towards the upgraded package.

How does the local portfolio work?
The local portfolio serves the value-adding purpose of being a local portfolio showing who you have worked with nearby whatever city the potential customer selects, as the intro text on the home page says “You can see who we’ve worked with near you that you might know for a reference by browsing our hierarchical portfolio directory below”. Organizing content around locations is also an SEO technique the big directories use, and the big directories (including Yelp & Thumbtack, which Google has like invested $100 million into) have similar setups. Google’s Matt Cutts has confirmed to the plugin developer the legitimacy of such tactics of showing content for / nearby to a directory page’s location. By affordably democratizing these technologies to small businesses, we hope to level the playing field online to help the best businesses for a search query stand out as the plugin makes it easier for businesses to showcase details of their work in a reference-checkable manner.

Does the plugin count visits to the portfolio pages from people who were already on my site?
No. It only tracks visits referred by search engine domain names.

How do I best use this with Yoast’s SEO plugin?
The plugin will leave algorithmically optimal recommended focus keywords next to posts for you to use with Yoast and then further work into your content. You can also choose to not have the optimizer optimize particular posts / pages so that you can instead work on them with Yoast.

How can I add a link to my portfolio(s) from the WordPress navigation?
You can get the links to these from the advanced settings section, or have them automatically in the plugin settings. The links for the portfolio-by-industry and the portfolio-by-services can be found in the plugin settings.

Does it count visits from search engine crawlers in my visits count?
Probably not — we specifically exclude known search engine agents like Googlebot, etc. from counting as a visit so far as our counting, and there is like no reason for them to have a referrer URL set, let alone one from a search engine URL.

How many clients / projects do I need to add to start seeing results?
To get started, we suggest having at least ten to twenty clients / projects added to your portfolio. You can continue to add more as time as goes by. If your site has some decent page rank already, it is likely to perform extremely well within about a week or less. If your site has few links to it from other sites, the system will likely perform at about 25%-50% effectiveness

How do I do a multi-lingual portfolio?
Do multiple portfolios or set your own links to other pages by hand coding links into them, Set the country subdirectory in Google webmaster tools

How can I theme portfolio pages?
You can edit the “Local Portfolio” page and set that page’s template to be the template file you want to use. Further information can be found on the advanced theming page.

How do I undo the auto-optimizer’s work
Deactivating the plugin does so.

Can I see the SEO suggestions before publishing them?
You can switch your site into an admin-only/maintenance mode after auto-optimization to preview the suggestions. You are permitted to modify the plugin to trigger such as well.

How can I get notifications when I get new reviews?
freereviewmonitoring.com