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Hey everybody, Joe Burnich with Big West Marketing, bringing you another video that simplifies marketing for your business. And what I want to talk about today is an SEO conference for 2019 out in Denver, Colorado. Basically, I had Jess on our SEO team go out to Denver and attend this conference and get all of the notes, all of the latest and greatest stuff when it comes to SEO and ranking a local service business up on Google. Okay?

So what I did is condense the whole conference down in the top five things that I think you need to know about the new things that are really going to help your business. So let’s get started with that right now.

Okay. So I made this little slide show here and the first slide, I just want to show you a couple of pictures of Jess with Big West Marketing. And she’s taken pictures with some of the big people in the SEO world. We’ve got Mike Blumenthal here and Joy Hawkins. If you know anything about the local SEO world, you know that these are the top people. They’re so respected in the SEO community that sometimes even Google will hire them as consultants to get feedback on what exactly is going on and what kind of changes Google should make. So it’s a really big deal for her to be hanging out with this level of people.

And so what I want to do real quick is just give you a rundown of what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about number one service area pages. This has been a big debate for years now. So I want to talk about some new developments with that. I want to talk about using real photos in your Google My Business listing and on your website.

I want to talk about maxing out your Google My Business info. We’re going to talk about website speed, we’re going to talk about bad Google reviews and how they can actually help you. And then, as a little bonus, I wanted to talk about a new backlink strategy that I think is really going to be helpful for you guys and it’s very easy. So stay till the end to get that bonus strategy.

All right, so let’s talk about number one. Service area pages. What do I mean by this exactly? So in the past, Google has always said “Don’t put a bunch of different areas to target different cities for your service area business.”

Well, when Jess went to the conference, a Google rep was actually, there and of course, like I said, the top dogs in SEO were there and they were saying that this is actually an okay strategy now. Okay? But it has to be done in a specific way. You can’t just put up a bunch of pages and just change the city name on there and expect to start getting rankings.

What you need to do is three things. Number one, you need to have unique content. All the words on that page need to be completely unique. No copy and pasting pages, no duplicating pages. You need to have unique content, okay? Number two is you need to have geotag pictures. What is a geotag picture? It’s basically a picture taken with your smartphone and when you take a picture with your smartphone, Google will actually pinpoint where that picture was taken.

We’ve talked about this before but I want to mention it again that when you take a picture with your cell phone, Google knows where that picture was taken and it will actually help you with your Google rankings if you put those pictures on your Google My Business account and on the specific city pages that you’re trying to rank on. Okay.

Another thing they were talking about, which I’ve never thought about, is to mention specific jobs that you do in that city. Okay, so if you’re a plumber you want to mention, “Hey, we did a leak repair job for John and Melissa in Escondido, California,” if it’s on the Escondido California service area page.

So we’re going to start doing this for our SEO clients and if you’re interested in that, if you want to start getting ranked in the organic section, keep in mind this is just for the organic, not the map section, the map section is still restricted to the address, the physical address where you have your business registered with Google. But for the organic stuff below the map, that’s where we want to start getting into the other cities. Get on the first page for multiple cities.

This has been a huge deal with service area businesses. And Google’s starting to loosen up the guidelines. This is good news for us, guys. So we’re going to start adding pages. Give us a call and talk to Jake if you want to talk about the pricing and what’s all involved in getting these different service area pages set up for your business.

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