Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband, I've got some SEO advice for you. But I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use today is part two of this, how to build your local rankings, how to hire local rankings last week was part one, and we focused on the things that you can control directly, yes, change information on your website, you can change information on your own Google Business Profile. This week, we're going to focus on the stuff outside of your site, okay. Commonly called off site SEO, or links, it comes down to links basically, comes down to links, and often does. And when we're talking about local links, there are there are two categories of links that you want to build to improve your your local ranking and search engines. Okay. The first category is the local citations we've talked about before, like white spark services like white Spark, you go out and you put your business information through a whole bunch of local and industry directories, yes, called local citations. That's one category. The other category is just kind of more what I would call normal backlinks just links from other websites. Okay. And additionally,

Meredith: 2:03

have you get those again? Well, I'm

Meredith's Husband: 2:05

gonna talk about that. Fabulous. Good to know. So both types of links, both categories are important. The local citations, and this the other links that we'll talk about,

Meredith: 2:16

are these stronger together than they are separate. So if you were to do okay,

Meredith's Husband: 2:22

yes. And if you I was going to say, if I had to guess which one were more important, I would probably say, the regular backlinks, not the local citations, if you were, and there's no reason you would have to choose one or the other. But if you were only going to do one, it would probably be just the regular link building. Okay, now, the local citations are easier to build, they're almost guaranteed you can go out and you can either pay a service like white Spark, or you can build them yourself, they're pretty much guaranteed, they probably per link don't have the value that other types of links have. But other types of links can be much harder to get. And they're not, they're not guaranteed, which I'll get into, like it's so many questions. And next week, I'm going to talk a little bit more about local citations. Because when we spoke about this the first time and we have another episode about this, I will link to that in the show notes. If you want to get some background on local citations I do, there are a couple of ways to do that. One is to pay us a service like white Spark, that's my favorite. There are others are many others. You can also do it manually, which I mentioned in that previous episode is very difficult and time consuming. It can be frustrating. However, in getting feedback from some of our students, our listeners, people are doing that they're they're doing the free method, they're trying to do it manually, which is fine. If you don't have a budget, that's fine. But I figured there are some things that you can do to make it less time or to I should say, less frustrating and save some time. So next week, we're gonna go over that stuff. So if you want to build those local listings manually and not pay us for a service to do it, I'll give you some tips. That'll be fantastic. But the bottom line is you need to get those you need to get those one way or another you need to get them. They're like putting your business in the phonebook. You just you have to do that. Remember those? So the other, so let's assume you you're good at one way or the other, you're going to take care of your local citations. Now we're worried about link building local link building right now. We've talked about link building a lot, right? Yes. And one of the most important things about link building is to get relevant links to your website, not just any old link. Yes. For example, if you're a wedding photographer in Seattle, a link from a golf course in Florida is not going to be very relevant through now. If you were a photographer in Florida, it would have some relevancy Florida,

Meredith: 4:51

golf photographer in Florida. Yeah, that's where the money is.

Meredith's Husband: 4:58

That said that. It's a very competitive industry, golf. Golf. Golf fans hear oh, yeah, I like golf.

Meredith: 5:07

You're great at golf.

Meredith's Husband: 5:08

You've never seen me golf. I would you know,

Meredith: 5:10

cuz you told me and everyone's told golf clubs.

Meredith's Husband: 5:15

I had golf clubs. It means I was great at golf. Yeah. Are you golf? Golf? Yeah, I don't go to Tony. Okay. So when we're building local links, we want them to be relevant, but we don't care about anything other than the local aspect. So for example, when you're building links, you URL A children's photographer in Brooklyn, you could get relevant links by focusing on the children aspect of that, or the photography aspect, or the Brooklyn aspect of all three. Now, in this case for our local, remember, our goal here is local rankings. So we're just worried about the local aspect, we want local links, because we want to send a signal to Google about our location. We kind of want to demonstrate to Google, hey, we are all about this neighborhood. In this community,

Meredith: 6:04

you're so convinced in part of the community, right?

Meredith's Husband: 6:09

So there are a few different types of links, you can build. With that in mind. I wish I knew what they were.

Meredith: 6:18

And thank you so much. Next week, we will be leading up to another important thing they will never cover.

Meredith's Husband: 6:25

Number one is local organizations. Okay. Now, I tend to think that no matter where you live, so if you're in this country, I don't know what other countries are like. But no matter what city or town or neighborhood you live in, there's going to be things like a chamber of commerce, yes. Okay, that's a local business organization, you can probably go to them and sign up and get a link from the local Chamber of Commerce. Now,

Meredith: 6:49

how does that work? Could you just refresh memories for those who may not be so great at focusing on things and just review what it means to get

Meredith's Husband: 7:01

a link? So let's say let's take the Chamber of Commerce example, if you were to sign up and put your business on the Chamber of Commerce, you would probably have a page that's all about medicine or photography, and somewhere on there would be a link to your website, okay, click this text or this button and go to Meredith Center's website, that's a link. Okay. So the problem with things like or the I should say, the potential problem with Chambers of Commerce is they usually cost money. Depending on where you live, they might be expensive, like we live in Brooklyn, I can tell you, if you want to join the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, it starts the most basic level at $500 a year, and goes up to like several 1000 per year like gods, so it's not a great solution for us. Now, if you live in a smaller city, they may be free or close to free. In which case, it's something to consider. But it's it's a it's an example of a local organization that probably you have, if you're listening to this in your in this country, again, other countries. I'm not sure what they have, but I would think they'd have some sort of equivalent. Okay, number two local publications. Most neighborhoods have some sort of local publication, like we have the Park Slope reader. And there are more for Brooklyn. And those things, those publications usually have an online version. And you can do the same thing, you can probably go and say, hey, I want to submit a listing here, or I want to do something, there will be different ways you could be listed on that website, you'll need to find them, find those websites and check them out. You might need to sponsor something,

Meredith: 8:37

what do you mean sponsor some,

Meredith's Husband: 8:39

you may need to sponsor an advert. Yeah, you may need to, like sponsor something like by an ad, exactly like by an ad. And again, that could be that could cost a little or it could cost a lot. I would encourage you in this, in doing this. Certainly aim for the cheaper or free options for

Meredith: 8:57

Yeah, this is not the place you need to invest. If you're going to invest your money, this may not be the best place,

Meredith's Husband: 9:03

it's usually not, it's usually not good. However, there are some links that are very valuable. You'd have to dig a little deeper and know how to research and analyze websites in terms of the value that they might bring. Are you going to help us with that? That will be a probably an episode on its own? Okay, maybe the week after next. But yes, certainly, very often, I get questions like this a lot from clients, and they say, Hey, should we buy a link here? It's x number of dollars. And rarely do I do the research and respond? Yes, it's worth it. Go ahead and do it.

Meredith: 9:37

Do the research. No,

Meredith's Husband: 9:39

I mean, rarely I do the research, but rarely do I respond. Yeah, that's worth it by that link. They're usually overpriced, if you if, if your goal is just the link for SEO purposes. Okay, now, if like let's say for us, another local publication would be Park Slope parents. Yeah. For them, there'd be a big benefit. If you were considering purchasing a link on that site, there'd be a benefit in addition to the SEO into the link, right? Because you get a lot of visibility. And it's very targeted to your target audience. Yes. So there can be it's not you know, if there's another reason that you wanted that a link would be valuable, then you have to consider that too. It's not always just the SEO.

Meredith: 10:24

That's so true. Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 10:27

Now, this is the big one, community engagement, and you can break this down into a few Different, a few different categories. There are usually, no matter where you live is going to be local events of some sort. As you can probably find places do sponsorships, you can sponsor local businesses or events or whatever. You can do scholarships or internships. This is something my clients do a lot of what does that mean? How do you do that? So you could say, you can post, like, let's say you're looking for an intern, yeah, you can say, hey, I have a position for an internship. And then you go post that internship on, maybe Park Slope reader has a section where you can say I have an internship here and use a link, and then link to your website. Now, if you do that, you kind of want to make sure that you keep that listing active. So what you might have to do is have is post to a new listing every six months or so, or same for scholarships, I have clients that do scholarships,

Meredith: 11:30

how would you do? How would I do? How would photographers do scholarships?

Meredith's Husband: 11:33

I don't think you would probably do that, that's you would need a budget, you're gonna need

Meredith: 11:37

to get voice over other photographers. Yeah. But if

Meredith's Husband: 11:41

you can, if you can do something, you know, maybe you can run a scholarship and give away some of your old equipment. You know, I don't know if you can figure that out. Because what happens is scholarship links often get placed on educational websites, which are great links to get, oh, that's why that's why I have clients, I have clients that give away $500 scholarships every six months. Oh, wow, just for a link. Or I should say just so they can put a link on several different university websites. Same thing with internships. But if you're looking for an intern, or if you needed an you know, maybe you have a new intern every year or something posted on local publications, you can probably do that for less than you can just, you know, buy a link, right? Because I have an internship, where can I post that? Where would you buy links? Well, like local publications, you might want to get a link and they say, well, it costs $100 a year to have a profile, that would be essentially buying a link paying for like, charities and volunteering. So this is something you've done, you've volunteered your services to local organizations, and you take photos in exchange for a link. Now the downside is, yeah, remember, we did that. Now? The most recent one you did, unfortunately, they said, Yeah, we'll give you a link. And then they didn't. And then the person who you were in communication with disappeared, which is this is not unusual, moved,

Meredith: 13:07

didn't disappear, move to go to Washington to fight even larger causes.

Meredith's Husband: 13:12

Right. Now, that's some time. This is why it's off site. So we don't have direct control. We're relying on other people. And sometimes it doesn't work out. Well. Yes. That's why when you do things like this, when you make an arrangement to take photos for somebody in exchange for a link, it's really good to get their approval beforehand that yes, they will give you a link. Yeah. And then double check on that. Because especially if you're volunteering for an organization, they may be a nonprofit. Yeah. And my experience nonprofits, that personnel shifts around a lot.

Meredith: 13:43

Yeah, yeah, that's true. We got a link for that summer camp that I photograph, a volunteer for.

Meredith's Husband: 13:50

Yeah. But you could also go to local businesses, you can do the same thing you can go to, you know, a local toy store, and you say, I can take some photos of your stuff, and I can feature you on my blog, it's for children's photography, can you link to me from your blog, you know, you can do things like that. Explore your community. Look around, if you can become more present in your community, I guarantee you that's going to help your local rankings. Interesting, even if you don't get links. Like if a website mentions merit center photography, and yet doesn't link to you Google still sees that they're mentioning, you know, there's some benefit and there's not much that that's, you know, not a lot of benefit or if maybe they will link to your Instagram or something or maybe they will share share your website or your Instagram on their Instagram, you know, all that thing. All those things help they're not as influential as a link from their website to your website for SEO. But Google still does see those things. Their social signals. What questions did you have you mentioned that you had questions? Did I cover them? Yes. Oh, super. Yes, you did. You know what that means? We're done. podcast is over. Hey,

Meredith: 15:05

now we just need to know if you have questions. And if you do, where did they go?

Meredith's Husband: 15:10

Can ask questions on Instagram.

Meredith: 15:13

Okay, thank you. We love you. See you next week. Bye.

Meredith's Husband: 15:18

podcast is over the podcast is over.

Meredith: 15:21

So podcast is over. No more podcasts for you right now. Normal podcast podcast called by by Hey,

Meredith's Husband: 15:29

wouldn't it be great if like I left us all in? Yes. It's like after I said like the podcast is over. There's like 10 minutes of

Meredith: 15:36

minutes of us wasting people's time. Yeah, that'd be great. Definitely. Yeah, keep time everyone has so much of it.

Meredith's Husband: 15:45

If you're finding these episodes helpful, I created something that I think you're going to find even more helpful. It explains the SEO process similar to these episodes in a way that I hope is new for you. But it also puts them in order so that you know what to do first and second, and third through the entire SEO process. And I hope saves you a lot of time by giving you an actionable step by step plan. It's called the SEO roadmap, and you can find it at Meritus husband.com/roadmap.