Better ranking in the local listing plays a great role in bringing more sales to your business. Most popular search engines, especially Google keeps improving search algorithm at regular intervals. One such Google algorithm for local listing is Pigeon.

According to Google Pigeon provides a more useful and relevant experience doe searchers seeking local results. Due to this algorithm now more and more visitors can find a better match of the business/ service they are looking for. And in case you are wondering why your local listing is not getting you better rankings, then may be it is due to the changes in Pigeon.

As per the leading search engine optimization service providers these are some common reasons why you are losing out on your rankings:

• You are using the wrong keywords: This is the most common mistake done by many online websites. If you use the wrong keywords in your website, you cannot expect the right traffic and leads to come on your website.
• The homepage of your website has keywords but no content: Mere use of right keywords is not enough. Your website, especially the home page must have quality content as well. This will help the visitors know about your business in a better manner.
• You are not using tags/ meta tags properly: Unless you do not use the right tags/ meta tags search engines will not be able to crawl your website.
• The content used by you is too thin: Thin content means your website does not have enough content for the readers. In this case, it is critical that you come up with more content which is of high quality and has relevance to your business.
• Your website has a lot of spammy links: One major problem seen with many website is spammy links. You need to get rid of these links from time to time in order to improve the ranking of your website.
• You are casting your local net too wide: Casting your local net too wide is sure to hurt your local listing ranks. It is recommended that you avoid it.

Ways in which you can improve your local rankings

The only way in which you can improve your relevance in local listing and thereby boost the local ranking of your website is by making your website more useful for the visitors to your website.
You can do this by:

• Using the right keywords and title tags
• Coming up with content which is useful as well as engaging
• Build a very good homepage – one which makes things easier to understand for the visitors on your website
• Your website should have the right graphics as well as color combination

Apart from these basic steps, you need to use Schema Markup, Geo-tag your images and name all the images on your website so that it gets local focus. Along with this Citations play a very crucial role in boosting the local listings. Make it a point that that all your local offsite mentions have a consistent theme, logos, branding and business description along with name, address, phone number (NAP).

Once you make these changes in your website, we are sure that the local listing of your website will improve and thereby boost your search engine rankings. You can also hire the services of SEO experts to facelift your website and get better rankings and return on investment (ROI).

Matt tackles the following question:

How can smaller sites with superior content ever rank over sites with superior traffic? It’s a vicious circle: A regional or national brick-and-mortar brand has higher traffic, leads to a higher rank, which leads to higher traffic, ad infinitum.

Google rephrased the question of the YouTube as “How can small sites become popular?”

Matt says, we see the sites that are smart enough to be agile, and be dynamic, and respond quickly, and roll out new ideas much faster than these sort of lumbering, larger sites, can often rank higher in Google search results. And it’s not the case that the smaller site with superior content can’t outdo the larger sites.

Matt gives an example of Myspace and Facebook and then Facebook and Instagram, all these small sites have often become very big.  Even Alta Vista and Google because they do a better job of focusing on the user experience. They return something that adds more value.

Finally Matt suggests that whatever area you’re in, if you are doing it better than the other incumbents, then over time, you can expect to perform better and better. Think about concentrating on a smaller topic area and make sure you cover it really well and then you can sort of build out from the smaller area until you become larger and larger.

Here is the Matt Cutts Video:

Most people intrinsically understand that a high bounce rate is probably a bad thing. But what exactly is “Bounce Rate” is?

Let’s get into details:

In most of the cases the lower the bounce rate is the better. You can analyze the bounce rate by using Google analytics.

The key to reducing the bounce rate is to respond in the most appropriate way to the visitor’s needs. By ensuring that more visitors move to the next stage in the sales process, then it is more likely than not the overall conversion rate of the website will improve as well.

• Browser Compatibility:

In some circumstances, a high bounce rate has nothing to do with the quality of the content, you have provided and everything to do with the fact that your website isn’t displaying properly in your visitor’s browser windows. Many beginning webmasters fail to realize that what looks good on one browser might display completely differently in another. Hence check pages that demonstrate a high bounce rate using a cross-browser compatibility testing tools.

• Reduce Page Loads:

Even if you think it seems fine on your computer, it may not be the case on another one, so make sure to test this out. Because your browser caches’ assets like pictures, scripts, etc. help to make web sites you’ve visited load faster. New visitors to your site do not have this advantage. Page load timers don’t use caching and can give you a true reading of your visitor’s experience.

• Provide Better Readability and Better Navigation:

Don’t distract your visitors by showing flashy content and automatic playing audios or video’s. What else your readers observe besides great content? And please never use a tiny font size which is the worst part. Navigate through your pages with a fresh set of eyes and determine how many of these interruptions visitors must content with instead of reading your content

Bounce Rate is low, but still not seeing ant results!

There are lots of potential reasons for this but one thing that’s related to bounce rate that you can check is exit percentage.

Google defines exit percentage rate as “The percentage of site exits that occurred from a page or set of pages.”

Bounce Rate is Just a Beginning!

The above points are key to getting your bounce rate back on track, possibly the most important thing you can do to lower bounce rates is focusing on consistently creating high quality content that appeals your readers.

Think about this, if a user comes into your site and find exactly what they were looking for, an answer to their question then why should they stay a moment longer?

Matt Cutts said “I wouldn’t assume that just because you have a large number of indexed pages that you automatically get a high-ranking. That’s not the case.”

He explained that if there are more pages, chances are more to rank for different keywords  and more likely to have more overall links and PageRank , which do directly impact your rankings. But the number of pages on specific site, does not have direct impact on ranking factor.

In essence various sites are reporting that the “NOT PROVIDED” percentage of organic keyword referrals has jumped from 50-60% up to 95%, 99% or 100% , so sites are not able to pull full international statistics yet, but all signs point of SEOs and webmasters not being able to pull data on Google driven keyword traffic anymore.

Google’s latest move is interesting in the context of its own actions against the NSA as well as recent leaks regarding the agency’s activities. The leaked prism slides from early June revealed that the NSA can collect “notifications of target activity” and “special requests” both of which may involve searches, from the tech companies that are allegedly involved. If Google supplies encrypted searches to everyone, it may be able to slow down the pace at which the NSA can obtain search information from it.

The motivation here is not to drive the ads site-it’s for search users. It’s not still clear why Google seems to have ramped up things.

Matt Cutts released a new video in the Google webmaster help YouTube channel.

Cutts said that, No-follow links won’t harm your rankings in Google, but if a webmaster is spamming them on a massive scale, it could get the attention of the search Engine spam team and trigger a manual review.

Things like Blog comments tend to have a very particular footprint that would be easy to spot. Cutts mentioned a specific example of where blog comments where problematic, even though they were already no-followed, because it was done on such a massive scale.

SEO Experts have known for quite some time that putting no-follow link is a great way to tell Google that you don’t want to pass PageRank for this particular link or that you somehow don’t trust the sites link is on. In addition, giving no follow links any negative attention at all is only going to encourage people who participate in negative SEO attacks on their competitors.

A 404 error means “not found”. This is usually the page you get when you make a mistake spelling page name in a site, or if the page is deleted or moved. The problem is that the standard 404 page is ugly and unhelpful. Such error pages provide negative user experience and can harm the reputation of the supporting sites providing reference links for such content. Also sometimes important links from other such domains can be missed and relevant reference material made inaccessible.

There are 4 possible scenarios with custom pages:

• 404- Responds with an error, but shows a custom page to help your visitors.
• 200- If a page is missing, it’s replaced with custom error page
• 302- If the page is missing, it’s replaced with a temporary redirect to a custom error page.
• 301- Redirects errors to either a custom error page, or some other page in the site(i.e. sitemap, homepage or best guess)

How to find 404 pages?

Screaming Frog, Link Sleuth or Google webmaster tools can be used to find the 404 error pages. Google Webmaster Tool is best for this and will help you not only find broken links, but the source of those broken links as well. You need to select “Crawl Errors” from the Google webmaster tool dashboard and then click on “Not found” to get the list of your links. Now you can select individual links and choose the “linked from” option to examine the link routes. Additionally, Redirection plugin in WordPress can be used to check and redirect 404pages from your console.

Will 404s kill my SEO? When 404s can be bad?

There are cases, however, where a site could be scored negatively as a result of an abnormally high occurrence of 404 pages. Does your site have 10,000 unique pages but 45,000 404s this month? That could be an indicator of a bigger problem with crawling and technical SEO. That’s also probably not a very good user experience, which could be reflected in poor user engagement and falling traffic, which could be reflected again by a search engine lowering visibility of your URLs in search results.

A high occurrence of 404s – when they are spiking and continuous – is not a good thing. But forget about SEO for a moment. Is that a good thing for users? Obviously not, and remember: search engines follow users.

What are the best practices for redirecting 404 pages?

• 404s should not always be redirected
• 404s should not be redirected globally to the home page.
• 404s should only be redirected to a category or parent page if that’s the most relevant user experience available.
• It’s okay to serve a 404 when the page doesn’t exist anymore
• Don’t panic. 404s are normal.

How does Google, for instance, couple with the 404 error suppression? 

Google recommends “A good custom 404 pages will help people find the information they’re looking for as well as providing other helpful content and encouraging them to explore your site further”.

If you look at the visitors who visit your websites or use your apps then they’ll fall into one of three groups:

Anonymous visitors:

These are the visitors about whom you know very little. They have probably visited your website once or twice.  There’s not a lot to know about them as there isn’t enough data to make any sense from.  There will be limited information on which channel they came in on, for example, and what they looked at, but not much necessarily to give you a full picture.

Observed visitors:

These visitors have visited more frequently, so there’s more data and more history, and potentially more to learn. Even though you don’t know who these people are, you can begin to build up some kind of profile in terms of patterns of behavior and content consumption.

Known visitors:

These are the visitors who you really care about because you have some kind of relationship with them. That relationship might be quite tenuous because all you have is an email address, or it could be quite deep because they’re gold card carrying loyalty members.

Just as it is important to think very carefully about your geographical location and how you should move forward, the same is true for thinking about what makes you special and unique.  What are your strengths?  What makes you special in your region or area?  What incentives can you offer that help you stand out?  By pausing to answer these questions, much of your keyword strategy will come into sharper focus.

Website visitors are most likely interested in buying your products or services. By visiting your website, they already know who you are and what you offer. The problem is, only 2-3% of website visitors bother to identify themselves, which means you’ll never know who the other 97% of your visitors are. The SEO Company in Bangalore solves this problem, enabling B2B small/medium businesses and enterprises to identify anonymous website visitors, increasing new sales opportunities from the companies that are most likely to buy your products and services.

Social SEO-Why the right type of interaction matters?

Even with great SEO, you need to push your messaging out to the public. That’s one place where social media comes in. Your fans are your fans on social sites because they want content from you that matters, that they can relate to, and that they can share with others. They want to be a part of the brand experience. They want updates about sales and new products, but they also want to feel valued.

People love to talk, and conversing with your fans about neutral topics, such as sports, weather, current events (politics excluded, unless that’s your brand equity), work, and entertainment can help you get to know them on a different level. So, be sure to branch out from your standard product or company promotions on your social networks and start to have real conversations about everyday types of topics. Getting your fans engaged will make them look forward to visiting your social profiles as well as sharing posts with their friends, enabling you to extend your social reach. 

Google does not provide any guarantees or promises that will crawl or index your blog stuff. You must keep maintaining your blogs content to enter into Google boundaries. Google does not have any human workers for crawling sites, they are using a computer algorithm for this purpose, and hence it must consider the factors such as Page Rank, Back Links etc. before crawling.

The another reason why your site is not cached in Google is the “ NoArchive” directive that you found in the settings. Turning that off effectively removes the “noarchive” directive from your pages. Google and other search engines will now cache your pages.

Does the “NoArchive” directive affect rankings or search visibility?

Not that. People sometimes use this directive to prevent search engines from copying their content for redistribution. That is, if you do something on your Web pages to prevent visitors from copying and pasting the content elsewhere, a search engine cache page can still be used to copy and paste the content.

How long does Google take for indexing?

It depends on how your content interlinked, how often you update your site content. For new sites, it will take weeks or even months for indexing.

If Google not yet cached your blog after a month or two, try submitting the blog’s URL to Google yourself. To do this, Go to Google’s submit your content page. Click “Submit a URL” sign in with the email address and password associated with your blogger blog. Type the blog’s URL in the box, and then click “Submit your request”. It usually takes up to six weeks before Google indexes the blog.

After submitting, check your settings. Blogger allows you to opt your blog out of search engine results. If you accidentally enabled this option, Google never shows the blog in search results. Correct this by signing into your Blogger blog. Click “Settings” and view the Basic category. If the “No” box is checked next to “Let search engines find your blog,” check the “Yes” box instead.

For older blogs, if you are still facing indexing problem, make sure you do not have internal or external duplication of contents. And do not rely on sitemaps, because they are optional. Make sure the contents can be searched via normal links.

How long does it take for Google bots to crawl and index your blog? Have you been facing indexing issue lately?

• Dive into your analytics deeper:

Have Google analytics installed on your site and have goal tracking set up. Dive into your analytics deeper and check to see what particular keywords ads, referring sites etc, have high conversion rates and support those efforts with attention and budget.

Find this illustration by clicking Traffic sources>Search>Organic and then selecting a Goal set in Google Analytics. 

• Finding corresponding URL’s:

Determine which pages on your site are driving these keyword conversions

Click on Secondary Dimension and select Traffic sources>landing pages from the drop down menu.

• Find where these keywords Rank:

Get these keywords to work even harder for you, which means getting corresponding url’s to rank higher improve their visibility. So you need to determine current SERP position.

• Keyword conversion report:

Once you have keyword rankings, you can pop that into your spreadsheet along with list of keywords, corresponding URL’s and conversion rates and determine whether to focus on the highest ranking terms, highest converting terms, highest traffic terms.

• Focus on those keywords to improve rankings:

Review title tag structures: keyword placement in headlines, subheads and body copy, image tagging and see for any further improvements. Add anchor text links on those pages back to the pages you’re trying to rank higher and freshen up more relevant content. Social shares may not be a direct ranking signal, but good content gets shared likely can help reinforce popularity and interests.

• Iterate over your website:

Now you are aware where they rank and you’re working to improve those rankings to grow conversions. Next step is to leverage that intelligence you acquired during this processes and apply to keywords which are underperforming on your site.

Nothing prevents you from trying to increase your conversion rate. If you do things, your conversion rate will normalize over time. However while conversion is an important factor to the profitability of your marketing, you shouldn’t lose sight on big picture-that’s building your brand equity.