Excellent guides for small business directors Canada today from Tayyab Shaikh ? NAP Citations: As you can see from the above image, citation signals account for 13% of the ranking factors. For anyone unfamiliar with citations, they are online references of your business in relevant directories around the web. And NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone Number. The more consistent NAP citations you have for your business, the more are the local SEO benefits. But, keep in mind that inaccurate or inconsistent citations are likely to negatively affect your local SEO. If you have done citations in the past that may seem to be inconsistent, get a citation audit done through a professional to fix the NAP variations.

Are affordable SEO services important? Tayyab Shaikh thinks yes, and here is why : What a typical cheap SEO package advertisement looks like. Found on Craigslist. This one promises #1 spot on Google in an hour! SEO is not a transparent process, therefore most unknowing business owners are too often fooled and taken advantage of by these types of cheap search engine optimization companies.Every small business owner is looking to save money, especially when it comes to marketing. Unfortunately, this may lead small business owners to seek the services of cheap SEO “experts”. While there are literally hundreds of shady firms that will quote you a very low price, while guaranteeing you first page results, it is wise to be careful and do some research before hiring them or even talking to them.

Tayyab Shaikh about SEO for small business: The only thing worse than not having local business citations is having inaccurate information disseminated across the internet. While blatant errors are an obvious thing to avoid, subtle differences actually confuse the search engines resulting in less confidence. So while a human can discern your street address whether it’s abbreviated or spelled out, Google and Bing need to see the exact same name, address, and phone number across all the directories.

Analyzing competitors not only helps you set competitive prices but also enables you to respond to rival marketing campaigns. Apart from this, identifying your competitors lets you communicate with your target audience, improve your business processes, and distinct your business from others. Again, you can use the Google Keyword Planner tool to know more about your competitors. This tool will help you identify which keywords are the most and least effective for you.

Tayyab Shaikh on marketing for small business: I often come across websites that aren’t set up correctly. Are the goals defined? Is organic traffic getting credit for leads and sales? Google Tag Manager lets you understand how often your organic traffic led to PDF downloads or how many times organic search visitors followed website links to email addresses like info@ and sales@. Google Search Console indicates whether Google has reached your key pages (and details other technical data). If Google isn’t getting to your pages, revisit your internal link strategy. You also should find ways to link to those undiscovered pages or sections from popular website pages. Too often, marketers crank out pages, “optimize” them, and never return. While you probably can’t do it for every page, make time to optimize essential pages and any pages close to ranking on the first page of Google search results. Discover additional details on Tayyab Shaikh.