Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Audrey with Let's Be social digital marketing. Welcome to our ranking locally, Siri's. This is a two part series that is geared towards helping small business owners and entrepreneurs improve their local rankings. After finishing this two part series, you'll have everything that you need to dominate your local market online. In this first part of the series, we're going to cover the importance of your nap profile. Specifically will cover how to manage your nap profile, the dangers of an inconsistent not profile, proper nap placement and how to publish your nap across the Web. At the end of this class, you'll have the opportunity to build your nap profile and see how your business is performing online. Let's get started.
2. What's Your NAP?: So first things first. What's your nap? Nap stands for your name, address and phone number. It's also accompanied with a W for your website. These four things represent your nap profile. This is your digital footprint that accounts for roughly 15% of signals measured by Google to determine your websites. Local ranking. The way this works is that Google Cross references your NAP profile across business directories, social media profiles and your website to ensure that the name, address and phone number provided on each is exactly the same across all platforms. Within this 15% of signals, Google's accounting for your businesses social signals, including activity on all major social media platforms as well as review signals including review, quantity, quality and diversity. The main goal with your nap is consistency and validity. If you're trying to build a strong local presence online, the keys toe have a wide reaching and consistent that profile. That way, Google recognizes your business for exactly what it is and can properly rank you among your other local competitors within the market. The goal with this strategy is to create a very strong nap profile presence for your business that allows your Google my business listing to perform well enough to show up in this map pack. So these map packs will appear for specific, localized searches, and they usually show up below any ads on that page but above any of the organic rankings. So this is a great way to get seen locally. If your business isn't performing so well. As far as like organic listings go, you still have an opportunity to show up within the top three. If you have a strong Knapp profile presence and a great Google, my business listing before we conclude, let's go over to more examples of what you're not. Profile should look like. Here we have the company's name, their address, and they're phone number once more. The company's name, their address. M phone number. Now that you know what, you're not, profile should look like we're going to cover what it shouldn't look like in our next lesson, will go over not profile inconsistencies
3. An Inconsistent NAP Profile: when it comes to building, you're not profile. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Consistency is the key to success. If you're just getting started with building your business presence online, then you're in a great place to get started on the right foot with a consistent that profile. But what happens if you have a pre existing business with a pre existing online presence? Chances are, if you've ever changed your name, address or phone number, you haven't inconsistent, not profile online. This happens because the majority of business directory websites auto populate their listings based on information provided by a major data aggregator that is constantly combing the Web, looking for new business information that they can then sell to the listing websites. These sites will then go and create listings that you can claim and hopes that you'll see the listings want to clean them up, beat the information, and then some of these websites will even charge you to update and claim your own business listing that they created. Based on this information, there are hundreds of different business directory listings online that have access to your businesses information and whenever a new variation of your not profile is released. They create new listings on their website, so long term neglect of your not profile will lead to a long list of inconsistent listings . Before we move on, let's go over some examples of an inconsistent, not profile. Here we have an auto repair shop located in Huntington Beach. These three variations are available as listings for this auto repair shop online. Let's start by looking at the name for these three different listings. As you can see in the first listing, they used the ampersand sign. However, in the second listing, they spell out the word and and in the final listing, they've dropped the first name from the company altogether. The's are small yet major differences in the name of the auto repair shop, and Google could think that these are three completely different businesses. Next, let's take a look at the address again. You'll see that the variation of the address is very slight, but it is different. So when you're writing out a sweet number or sweet address, you want to make sure that you're either using the hashtag all the time or you're using sweet all the time. I said, just using the HASHTAG as this is the most commonly used way to indicate an apartment or suite number. Last but not least, you'll see that the phone number also changed. This is something that's very standard. Your number might change over time, but always make sure that whatever listing you have for your business that you go in and update the phone number on all of them. This is huge because you want to make sure that people are calling the right number. The last thing you want is for someone to call a disconnected phone number and think that your businesses out of business altogether. These little but big differences can really make an impact in your businesses. Online presents. Make sure that you're keeping your nap profile consistent and cohesive across all platforms . If you're going to use an ampersand, used the ampersand across the board. If you're going to use the hashtag for your sweet location, use the hash tag across the board and always make sure that you're keeping your listing as updated as possible To see what the status of your current not profile looks like. Visit mas dot com and choose mas local, then go to check my business listing from here. You want to type in your business name as it appears online, along with your ZIP code that's associated to your business from there. Check your listing and you'll see your business appear in the results. This search will give you a fairly comprehensive look at your potential inconsistencies that you have across the Web, as well as where you have complete profiles, incomplete profiles and potential duplicate profiles that need to be cleaned up completed or fixed toe help. You have a better nap profile across the Web. Now that you know what an inconsistent that profile looks like, we'll talk about how to build your local presence with a consistent that profile in our next lesson.
4. Proper NAP Placement: Now that you have, you're not profile established, it's time to start building your local presence online. As we discussed in our earlier video, This is your digital footprint that accounts for 15% of the signals that Google uses to properly rank your business online so you want to make sure you're not. Profile is accurately listed on as many websites as possible. Includes both general directory websites like Yellow Pages, as well as industry specific directory websites like Thumbtack for freelancers. First things first, you need to make sure your name, address and phone number is on every page of your website. The easiest way to do this is to put your not profile in the foot of your website. That way it automatically appears on every single page of your site. Also, if you have access to the back end of your website, you'll want to add in schema markup of your not profile in your footer. Your schema markup will look something like you see on the screen. Well, you'll want to do is with this coding Fill in your company name, address, city region, host code, phone number, latitude and longitude. You'll then take this coding and put it into the footer of your website. All link this coding in the note sections for you to copy and paste and still out with your specific businesses. Information. This coating is an added level of verification for Google to know your exact location, contact information and also the type of business that you are on the Web. The second most important place you'll want to put your not profile is directly on Google. You can do this through a Google, my business listing. It'll take a little bit longer to verify, but it's totally worth it. And the reason being that Google will send a postcard to your address to make sure that you are actually doing business at the address that you're listing online. Once your Google my business listing is live, it will begin appearing and search results for your business name and also for other local search results. Based on the type of industry that you mark your business in to improve your local rankings , you'll want to start getting reviews on your Google. My business listing. This is something that will go over in detail in part two of the ranking locally Siri's. But for now, try to focus on getting as many reviews as you can and the more five star reviews you get, the better your chances are of ranking locally proper. Not placement starts in these two places, but it doesn't end here. In our next lesson, I'll teach you how to build your local presence online.
5. Your NAP Across the Web: after you have your website and Google, my business listing set up. The second key to building a great local presence online is by creating as many accurate business directory listings as you can when creating your business listings. Be sure toe. Have the following prepared a short bio describing your business a long description of your business. Your business is phone number. Your address. A high resolution profile photo and cover photo. Any other related business photos, your hours of operation. I'm individuals that you can request reviews from. I recommend compiling this information in a spreadsheet or a word document so that you have this along with the links and log in information to all of the directories you set up housed in one place. That way you always have access to the information, and you can log in to any of these listings should you need to update or change them. Somewhere down the line, there are five main places. You'll want to set up a business directory listing Facebook, yellow pages, Yelp, foursquare and Apple maps. Let's start with Facebook. This directory listing will be in the form of your business page, where you can receive likes reviews and run advertisements on Facebook. This is one of the first things you can set up to start marketing your business because you don't even need a website to start building a following here. Next is Yellow Pages. Believe it or not, you don't need to pay for a physical yellow page listing in an address book anymore. You can create a free business listing on yellow pages dot com. This is a great place to build your online presence and also gain reviews from happy customers. After that's done, move on to yo. You don't have to advertise with Yelp to claim and manage your listing, so definitely be assured to set up a listing with Yelp that's free and try to avoid an advertising plan. With, um, I've seen multiple companies get taken advantage of by their ad services so they do not come highly recommended. You simply need to make sure you have a presence here. If you're in an industry where you know a lot of people will be searching for your business on Yelp, try to add as many photos and ask for as many reviews as you possibly can and make sure that your listing is claimed so that people know that you're providing updated information about your business here. After that, you'll want to move on to four square. This is a bit of an outdated pot formas faras popularity goes, but it still helps tohave acclaimed and complete listing here. You don't need to worry about getting reviews as much here as you do on the other three listings that we talked about. But make sure you have some photos and add the most accurate information that you can about your business. Last but not least, is Apple maps. Apple maps is not Google maps. Most iPhone users who use the map app that comes in the factory settings of the phone are using apple maps. So if you want to show up in mobile searches, I highly recommend setting up a profile here. These listings will grab data from Yelp for photos and reviews. So this is where having a completed yelp profile helps. But you want to make sure that you claim and own your apple listing so that if your business does move, the proper address and contact information is still available. Toe iPhone users, once you've set your business up on these five listings. You'll want to take one last step before building out of business listing anywhere else. You'll want to do a search for your business on axiom dot com. Axiom is the largest data aggregation service available on the Web. They automatically such business data once it's available on the Internet, and we'll add it into their system. I'll give you the link to this specific website in the notes section of this class. Let's do an example of this search. I put in the phone number of one of my clients, or you can also do a search with your business name, but for this purpose will do it with a phone number, then press search. As you can see, this is my client's correct information. However, the listing isn't claimed, so what I would want to do next is go through the process of cleaning this listing. If for some reason the business was not listed, I would want to log in to my account or create an account with Axiom to be able to have a business listing with them. If the information here was incorrect, when I go through the claim this listing process, I would want to update the listing information so that it's as accurate and current as possible. Over all, you want to make sure that you have a listing with Axiom and that it's as accurate as possible because this is one of the biggest data aggregators on the Web. So any information that they house on their website will surely show up on other business listings across the Web. If your business listing appears in the search, make sure to claim it and update it. Should any of the information be outdated? If it doesn't appear, go ahead and set up a new listing.
6. Conclusion: As you can see, managing your not profile is something that's very important for helping your business rank locally and show up online. The sooner you take care of this process of claiming, managing and updating your listings, the better your chances are of having a strong local presence. As you can see, managing your businesses online presence via you're not profile is really important for ranking locally. Setting up you're not profile is a process that should be done for your business sooner rather than later. Any information that is on the Web that goes against what you have on your website or Google, my business listing is hurting your local rankings. Take control of your businesses online presence. Now, by setting up these listings yourself and managing them for accuracy and consistency across the board, I've put together a quick project to help you get started on this process. To complete build your nap profile. Do a search for your businesses current, not profile. Using the MAS local search and screenshot your results, showcase your results in a word document with your plan of action. To ensure consistency, make sure to include your not profile listings for the five main places where you need to have not consistency and upload your results to the class project so that all of the other students can see how you're dominating your local ranging. That's all for this class In the second part of our series will discuss how to manage reviews online. Thanks for joining, and I'll see you in the next class.
Audrey Salazar, Founder, Let's Bee Social
