Stuck on Page Two of Google
We hear a lot of mixed opinions on whether or not online business listing directories backlinks are worth obtaining to boost your search engine ranking.
So business listing websites, also referred to as NAP(name, address, phone number), are like Google My Business in that you can list your business on their website with some basic information. If people are using that directory and they search for your industry they may see your listing pop up.
But more importantly, when entering your information most of these platforms let you place the URL to your website.
Boom you just created a backlink, and this is a method to getting backlinks that Google allows. Afterall you can’t just spam links anymore, you have to get them ethically.
Alright great, but here’s the problem, there are a lot of SEO pros out there saying that listings websites don’t hold any weight in whether Google ranks your website higher on their search engine or not.
After this experiment I have to say I disagree with the above statement.
So Here’s What We Did
Ok, so on to what happened.
I had an SEO client(a restaurant wanting to be visible on Google in their city) who was stuck on page two of Google for about six months. No matter what I did this website just wouldn’t budge from the middle of page two.
After I’d make adjustments I ran audit after audit and found that the website I was doing SEO on had better content, loaded faster, had all the necessary and appropriate headings and meta tags. All in all my customers site was technically better than the competition.
What the competition had on us: they were older by about six years on average which builds internet trust or domain authority(DA). They also had more backlinks.
Now what?
It’s time to get some backlinks and see how things go.
So I thought I would start with trying out business listings directories. Again, there have been a lot of mixed opinions on the matter of using them for SEO, but we were going to go for it.
Now to set the record straight the customer already had their restaurant listed on places like Google My Business, Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc.
But here was the trouble, most of those listings had the URL not pointing to the website but to their Facebook page! That won’t help the SEO effort at all…
So we started with the listings that already existed, updating the URL to the website, not Facebook. We also fixed a few sites where the business information had the wrong street address to the restaurant.
These things are important because when Google as well as actual visitors are looking for your restaurant the information provided is uniform in all places. Hence, why NAP is so important, especially when it comes to local SEO. If Google sees that the information is the same all over the place they will give your listings more credibility, and be more likely to show it to people searching.
Once the existing listings were fixed, we compiled a list of about sixty listing directories we wanted to use to get backlinks for.
Mind you there are hundreds of listing directories, but we went for the ones with the higher DA.
Now, we don’t pay a company to use their automated software to upload this information, we do it manually.
Why on earth do we do that you ask? Because that automated software is really expensive so it would cost our customers more and I’m not trusting a third party agency with my clients information.
So the first day I created about 20 of these listing directories, making sure the information was accurate and thorough. Naturally placing a link to the client’s website whenever a directory asked for it while making the profile.
PS: not all directories asked for a website when creating a profile, but most did. That’s Ok because having proper NAP across many platforms still can help with local SEO.
Guess what happened next?
About two weeks later I checked where the client’s website was ranked on Google and what do you know! We were on page one of Google!
Since then we continued to create backlinks using business listing directories from our list of sixty directories we created before, and now their website is the second restaurant on page one of Google when searching for their style restaurant in that city!
Not Quite Done Yet
We did it! Now we are done!
Not quite yet.
In fact there is still a lot of work to do. We can still work toward bumping up from spot two to one on page one.
Another important thing to realize is that once the desired rank on Google is achieved it’s far from guaranteed to stay there. In fact we wrote an article about that here.
Our plan for this client’s SEO is to continue to climb to the next rank up which is page one rank one, and update and refresh content as necessary. Doing this all while adding new backlinks every month from high DA websites, will help Google know that this website is an authority, is still very much relevant, and is deserving of that rank achieved on it’s search engine.
If you are struggling to get your website ranked higher on Google, we get it. SEO is a challenge to be sure.
Doing what we explained in this article is not only effective but also a relatively easy way to get backlinks to your site, and may very well be what you need to bump up to page one.
If you would like an SEO audit done on your website for free, or maybe you would like to start a conversation with us about doing SEO for your business please feel free to reach out!
