Organic search traffic is the best traffic to generate as once it is established it doesn’t cost you anything.  If you run ads traffic will stop as soon as you stop paying.  It can take longer to establish,  but organic seo has a bigger longterm payoff for your business.

Below are 7 essential keywords you should be monitoring for your business. These are the keywords that are most important for your business that you should be ranking as high as possible for.

For keywords with your business name, phone number or website you should have the top ranking and probably occupy most positions on the first page.

When monitoring these keywords you should monitor the keywords as if they were searched from as close to your location as possible, or where your customers would search from.

1. Your business name

Keyword example:  XYZ Plumbing.

People searching for your business name are looking for you in particular.

They either:

• Are an existing customer looking to find additional information on your business
• Have seen your business somewhere else and are searching for you
• Your business has been recommended to them

Your business should dominate the first page of results for your business name.  The first result should be your own website and your Google Business Profile should appear in the Knowledge Panel to the right.

2. Your business name and location

Keyword examples:  XYZ Plumbing annerley, Salon XYZ balmain.

This keyword is similar to your business name but the searcher thought it was important to specify a location to make it more likely they find your business.

3. Your business type and location

Keyword examples: plumber in chadstone, plumber chadstone, plumbers in chadstone, plumbers chadstone

These are your opportunity for new business, you should rank as high as possible for these keywords.  It is also very important to compete for these keywords because they generate business for your competitors when they don’t choose you.

These keywords are also likely to include a lot of pages on other websites like Yelp, Facebook, Tripadvisor and many others. You should ensure your business is listed on these services as people will click through to these services and are most likely to choose a business that is listed on the first page of results on those services.

See our blog post on Barnacle SEO for more information.

4. Your phone number

Keyword example:  555 4555

Searching for a phone number can be a great way to find a business online as there is less ambiguity.

When people search for your phone number they are very likely to be about to interact with your business.  Make sure the results they find are as compelling as possible to get them to decide to become a customer.

5. Business type near me

Keyword examples:  salon near me, salons near me

This is a very important keyword for your business.

People using these keywords are looking for local businesses like yours and if they are searching on a mobile device they are probably very likely to be ready to purchase.

6. Your major services\products and your location

Keyword examples:  fix leak doncaster, korean food ascot, tax return kensington,  car service 3108

Think about the major keywords that your customers use to search for you and then add your location or postcode.  Monitor as many of these as you can as these keywords are about bringing you new business.

7. Your website

Keyword examples: www.mypresences.com, mypresences.com

It might sound counterintuitive to search for a website on a search engine rather than typing it into the address bar but many people do this.

For these people you want to ensure you rank well for when people use a search engine to do directly to your website.  The google homepage will automatically redirect to your website, but other search engines may not.

You should always rank number 1 for your own website but monitor this keyword to be sure.

myPresences makes it super easy to track these keywords for your business.  It couldn’t be simpler, when you add your business to myPresences we automatically monitor all these keywords for your business as if they were performed from your location.

We are also the only search tool that can monitor how your listings and profiles rank in addition to your website.

Try our 14 day free trial and be sure to check out the search page to see how your business ranks for these terms.

It’s been on your todo list for years. Online is becoming more and more important to your business.  You keep hearing how important it is to have good reviews and ratings.

It’s time to do something.

You decide to start by logging into your existing profiles and listings so you can see where you stand.

But, if you are like many business owners you don’t have access to your accounts, profiles and listings.

Who created the listings?

Where are the usernames and passwords?

Which email address was used to create the account?

In many businesses the accounts may have been created by someone who is no longer with the business.

They may have left and not recorded the account details centrally or recorded it on their own computer using a spreadsheet that is now long lost.

Many businesses give up at this point, it’s all too hard. They lose that amazing momentum and enthusiasm they had and the business’s online presence remains stagnant.

This is often the biggest roadblock in managing the online presence and reputation of businesses.

What are the causes of lost login credentials?

It is so easy to do.  You want to create a profile for your business on an online service, you are excited to get started and see how the service works and how it can benefit your business.

You create an account with an email address for the business.  Quite often this is your personal email address at the business or even just a personal email.

You quickly create a password, maybe one you use all the time or something using a pattern you often use.

The credentials are stored in your browser and you continue to use the service while you get setup.

Maybe you go to a personal passwords spreadsheet and update it there.

Quite often the person may have left the business and the login credentials are gone with them.

If your business is not using business wide password management  or a centrally agreed place and procedure to manage accounts then chances are the business will never know the credentials for this new account.

Why is it difficult to get access to your lost accounts?

The main problem with regaining access to your accounts is there are a lot of online services and each one has a different process to claim access to accounts on their platform.

Some of them will be quick and easy and others may require a protracted process to prove ownership.

In some cases there will be no way to gain access and the best approach is to remove the old profile and create a new one you control.

If the email address used to create the original account is on your business domain it may help.

Best Practices in managing your login credentials

You don’t want to face this situation again, if you go to the trouble of regaining access to your lost accounts your want to put a process in place so that business accounts are created and managed using policies and procedures that are centrally managed and understood

Some things that need to be defined are:

• Who needs to have access.
• Where are the credentials stored.
• Which services are credentials stored for.
• How do people access the business wide credentials.
• How do I update the credentials.
• How do I add credentials for a new service.
• What is the process when people leave the business.

If you are a local business you need to have this! You want to make it as easy as possible for consumers to find you and get to you.

In addition to your website your business is also on tens or even hundreds of other maps on online services, blogs, apps and more.

Have you taken the time to check these for accuracy?

Map Location Audit

A wrong map location can be a big problem for your business.  Especially if it is on a major services where is likely to be seen and used by lots of your potential customers.

One of the first things I check in myPresences when I add a new business is the Geolocation variations in their profile.  This shows the map point for every service where a business has a presence and allows you to see exactly which services have an incorrect map location for your business.

This can often be surprising, more often that not there is one or more services where the map point is not even close to the location of the business.

The above image shows all map positions for a business on a single map.  Most of the map positions are clustered around the correct location but two services are not even close to the correct location.

These should be fixed, people who find this business on these services may either:

1. Not consider the business because it appears to be too far away.
2. Use the directions and go to the location and find that your business is not there. You are very likely to lose their business in this case.

The above example is a lot better but some improvements can be made, this shows how much variation exists from service to service.

How Incorrect Map Locations affect your Business

Having an incorrect map location on an online service can lead to a loss of business for you depending on how incorrect the location is and how the service uses this information. Some ways this may affect your business are:

• Consumers may go to an incorrect location and not find your business.
• Your business may not appear when consumers search for businesses based on location or near them.
• Your business may not rank as well for proximity searches performed near your business.
• The directions feature may direct consumers to the wrong place.
• Local consumers looking at your map may get the wrong impression about where you are actually located.
• An incorrect map location on a major service may feed through to other services as they share data, this may lead to an incorrect location on many other services.

Fixing Incorrect Map Locations

To fix this problem or even determine whether you have a problem can be complicated and time consuming.  Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Make a list of all the services where your business has a profile.
2. Prioritise them so you are concentrating on the most important services first.
3. Check them in order and find the map in the profile.
4. Check the map location for your business (there might be competitors on the same map) and make sure you are happy with the location.
5. If you think the map location is not accurate enough you should be able to edit your information on the service to update your map location.
6. If you are not able to update the map location yourself then try contacting the service and letting them know your map location is incorrect.

While you are checking your map locations why not do an audit of your business information and make sure it is accurate, consistent and complete. This will help people find you and may also help your business rank better in local search.

You can do this automatically in myPresences for free and see exactly where the map markers sit for all of your profiles in less than 10 minutes.

Create a free account at https://app.mypresences.com/signup/ and then add your business. After a few minutes click on profile in the left menu and then choose Geolocation. You will see a map like above for your business showing all your map pins in one place.

Managing your business’s online presence can be a big job, and it is complicated when you are inheriting a mess of existing accounts with forgotten passwords and incorrect information.  One of the biggest reasons businesses don’t manage their online presence well is that they have no process and their online presence has been created by different staff members in the past who may have left and regaining control of their lost profiles becomes too hard. Don’t let this happen to your business!

Here are a few tips to make it easier, and once you have everything setup managing your online presence going forward will be quick and simple.

1. Create a single email address for all online profiles

You should use a single email account for all of your online profiles and accounts. Ideally this email address will be on your corporate domain and you should be able to give people access to this email account as needed.

Something like online@yourdomain.com.

A problem a lot of businesses face is employees may create new accounts associated with their own email address or a corporate address that is not appropriate. When they leave the business nobody knows how to access the accounts and recovering them can be time consuming.

If your business has many locations (eg. a restaurant chain) then create a seperate email address for each location. You can use this for services that do not allow more than one business to have the same email address.

Having a single email address also ensures that all correspondence from your online accounts will be recorded in one place and is not being sent to addresses that are not being monitored.

2. Prefer creating an account via email when possible

Many online services allow you to signup with social media accounts which in many cases will be associated with a personal account.  When you have a choice you should signup via the email address you use for the business so that you have full control of the account.

3. Use Google Chrome’s profiles

Google Chrome has an awesome feature where you can use it as a particular user that is seperate from other accounts. This means that when you need to work on the business’s profiles you can switch to your business profile and have much easier access to your business accounts with auto login and other features.

If you try to use your main account you are likely to have conflicting logins, cookies and settings for your personal accounts which will make managing your profiles more difficult.

If you are managing multiple business locations you can setup a seperate profile for each location and switch between them when working on each business.

This article tells you how to setup profiles and switch between them.

If you are not using Google Chrome as your browser it can be installed here.

4. Use your email address for user names

When asked for a username just use your business email.  This makes it much easier to manage all of your accounts without having to remember different usernames. It also helps to improve your chances of having a consistent username across all the online services that you use as it is unlikely that your email address will already be taken.

5. Use a password manager

Use a password manager like LastPass or 1Password with a business account.  This allows you to create strong passwords for all of your accounts and then provide your team members with access to your accounts without them getting access to the passwords.  When they leave the role or the company they can be removed from the password manager and all accounts with one action.

6. Create a single point of truth

When you are creating profiles and listings for your business you want to be sure the profiles created are an accurate, complete and consistent representation of your business.   If you create profiles that contain information that is not optimal then you will be hurting your overall online presence and giving a potentially bad experience to your customers. You may also hurt you rankings in search engines by not sending a consistent message.

You should create a simple list of information for each business you manage that includes things like below and keep them up to date:

• Business Name
• Address
• Phone Number
• Web URL
• Logo
• Tagline
• Descriptions
• Social Media profiles
• Map Location
• Photo and Video links
• Business Categories
• and anything else that may appear on your online profiles

This is also especially important when your team members are creating and updating your online profiles for your business and do not know what they should add to your profiles. When your team can go to a central repository they do not have to find the information themselves or spend time verifying information with other staff members and can be far more accurate and efficient.

With the above measures in place you can:

1. Make it much easier to manage any of your listings in the future.
2. Manage staff transition by not having any of your online accounts associated with an individual.
3. Make it easy for future staff to manage your online presence.
4. Easily remove exiting staff from access to your online accounts.
5. Define a process for the management of future online accounts.

myPresences helps you manage and grow your online presence & reputation, try a free 14 day trial.

At myPresences we have created a platform that allows you to keep track of everywhere your business is listed online in one place so that you can easily manage what you are telling the world about your business.

When you first add your business to myPresences we run a process called discovery.  This is based on the initial information you told us about your business and it is this process that initially populates myPresences with some presences for your business.

We use the following information to find your presences across the internet:

• Business Name
• Business Address
• Phone Number
• Geo Location (Map Position)
• Business Type
• Social Profiles

Our ability to find all the presences for your business will be reduced if any of this information is incorrect or missing or your information online is not consistent or correct and  you should take into account the following:

• Different names for the same business.  If your business is referred to using different names then profiles associated with that different name may be missed during discovery. For example, a restaurant called alchemy might be called “alchemy” or “alchemy restaurant”.  A company called “Total Performance Management” might sometimes use the acronym “TPM”.
• Change of business name. If a business has totally changed it’s name then only the name provided will be searched for. myPresences may find presences associated with the new name based on the same address or phone number but this is not guaranteed.
• Change of address.  When a business has the same name but is listed at different addresses we may miss that business when searching on location.
• Change of Phone Number.  When a business has different phone numbers listed we may miss presences associated with other numbers when searching on phone number.

If you do not think myPresences has found all the presences for your business you can manually add them so that you can track every presence online that is relevant to your business (including old presences for different locations or names that you need to either remove or fix).

Please note: before using the following feature to find more presences for your business please go to your base profile and make sure that you have the most relevant values for your Business Name, Locality, Region, Abbreviated Region, City, Country and ZIP/Postcode.  These values are used to perform searches for your business on online services and if they are not accurate we may not find your business.

Its very easy to find untracked Presences

One way to find all the presences for your business is to use the Services List and filter on all the services where you have no presence by clicking on No Presence at the top of the list.  When myPresences says you have No Presence this does not mean you have no presence on the service, it only means we are not aware of a presence for your business on that service.

You can work your way down the list starting at the most important and decide whether you want to have a presence or may already have a presence on each service.

For each service we make it very easy to find your presences and we provide the following options on each service tile when you don’t have a presence that you can use to discover and add presences that myPresences is not currently aware of.

These options are:

Find Me

Find me is a very powerful feature that performs a direct search on the service for a business with your details. This may be your business name, your city or state or a combination of any of these.  If your business has a presence on the service it is likely to appear or you can modify the search if you want to try a slightly different name or location.

For the above example this takes you to a search page on Yahoo Local with the business listed .. you can see that we have specified the business search terms at the top automatically.

If the service does not allow us to search them directly then the Find Me option will take you to the most relevant page on the service so you can begin searching manually, usually this is the homepage.

Search (Google)

Sometimes it is not possible to perform a search on a service and also a google search in many cases can be more effective in finding presences for your business.

If you press the Search button on the service tile myPresences will perform a google search for your business showing results only on that service.  If your business has a presence on the service then it should appear on the first page of results in most cases.

Adding existing presences

If you find a presence that is not already tracked in myPresences then you can easily add it.

The simplest way is to install the myPresences Agent which which will allow you to submit a presence directly from the webpage you are browsing in chrome.

If you do not have the Agent installed you can copy the URL from the address bar of your browser and add it to myPresences by clicking on the + icon in the header and choosing the location icon in the dropdown which will take you to the page where you can add a presence, paste the URL and click Submit Presence to add it to myPresences.

Add Me

If you cannot find you business on a service then use the Add Me button to link to the page on the service where you can add your business.  This will in most cases be the page where you enter your business details but in some cases it will simply take you to the homepage where there may be information on how to add your business.

Using this process you should be able to either identify all of your presences or create new presences on services where you have no current presence.  Now that myPresences is aware of all your presences we will be able to tell you much more about your online presence and alert you to anything you should be aware of and how your online presence compares to your competitors.

Please note: You do not have to create presences everywhere, you may decide that you do not need a twitter account for your business or that it is not worth listing at a particular service.

Metadata is simply ‘data about data’ it helps to formally describe some information in a way that makes it easy for a computer program such as a Search Engine to know exactly what a document or page is saying or is about.  You may have seen it referred to by other names such as Structured Data, Microdata, Markup or Rich Snippets and there are many different forms of metadata such as schema.org and the meta tags you include on your website to tell Facebook or Twitter what to say when people share your page.

In the last few years Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex have started to support metadata that allows you to tell them exactly what the most important data points for your business are. This includes things like your Business Name, address and phone number but depending on your business type you might also be able to specify things like menu links, maps, cuisine, price information and opening hours.

Using schema on your website is a no brainer but the reality is that only 0.3% of domains use schema.org metadata as of april 2014 so adding this information to your website will give you a real advantage online.  One of the reasons raised for such a low adoption, especially among small businesses, is that most small businesses do not have the technical chops to be able to properly incorporate metadata so it tends to be the larger sites that use it at the moment …. we are changing that!

There are some other advantages to using metadata including the potential for some of your metadata to appear directly in search results  as Rich Snippets which will help your business stand out, this might include things like menu links appearing directly in search results for restaurants.

You can check whether your website has any schema.org metadata that will affect rich snippets right now at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets … just enter your webpage and click Fetch & Validate.  You should see your business information such as name, phone, address and more on the right side if your webpage has at least basic metadata about your business.

Managed Metadata

myPresences now has a world’s first new feature that provides automated metadata management for your business, making it possible for a small business to use cutting edge metadata without requiring expensive consultants or extensive knowledge and ongoing review.

The Managed Metadata feature provides the following:

• Automatically generated metadata based on your base profile.
• The most specific and complete metadata for your business based on your business type.
• Support for new metadata as it is supported by the search engines so you can take advantage of every opportunity as it becomes available.
• Watch changes in your data to let you know when metadata needs to be updated.
• Monitor metadata on your website to let you know which metadata is currently missing.

The metadata generated by myPresences can be copied and placed onto your website and we suggest placing it on as many pages as possible where displaying the data makes sense.  You can either add the code yourself or get your web developer to make the changes for you.

The Managed Metadata feature will generate two versions of your metadata, one for mixing with your display information and one that can be embedded directly onto your page with no changes to the layout of your page, these are labeled Visible Markup and Hidden Markup.

The hidden markup for mypresences looks this and is accessible from your Website Presence on the Presences page.

myPresences – Hidden Schema screenshot

We recommend you use the Hidden Markup version on your website unless you have a need to use the Visible markup and you have a web developer who can make the changes.  If you choose to add the Hidden markup you can copy and paste the code provided by myPresences and paste it directly into your webpage before the end of the body tag.

With this in place and published after a period of a few days you should see the rich snippet section in your Google Webmaster Account change from:

To:

Google Webmaster Tools – Structured Data – Populated

Including this rich information about your business will increase your chances of having rich search results like below for your business and help to make the information accurate and complete, notice that this restaurant has very rich information such as links to the menu, reservations page and more.

knowledge graph example – restaurant

Remember, you can check the metadata on your page using the google structured data testing tool at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets or myPresences will tell you when your metadata differs from the ideal.

The Managed Metadata feature is now available in myPresences on the Aware and Involved plans.  If you are unable to update your metadata either yourself or via your website developer we can help you out, please contact us at help@mypresences.com and we will get back to you with more information.

Our goal is to be that place for small business owners.

When a small business owner goes online for the first time each day we want them to want to come to us first because we are the site that is analogous to opening their doors and getting started for the day but for their online world.  A site where they can see everything that is happening relating to their business online and everything that needs their attention.

If we can achieve this goal then we have built an amazing service with users who love what we do and are receiving value on every visit.

I see this as a very hard goal to achieve, but it certainly inspires us to create better software and provide better service to our customers. This goal is at the heart of everything we do.

At mypresences we help small businesses take control of their entire online world and give them tools so they can be as in command of their presence and reputation online as they are of their physical location.  Most small businesses can no longer ignore that their online storefront is becoming more important than their physical one, yet most pay little attention and allow their online presence & reputation to fall out of their control.  We intend to change that.

We are now in private beta, invites can be found on our homepage at mypresences.com.

To find some great places to promote your business online now,  try our Online Services Explorer at mypresences.com/services/.

In a future post I will elaborate further on how we help small businesses take control of their online world.

Once you are accepted to the translation team for a particular language you will be given access to the translation interface where you will be able to directly translate the myPresences interface.

If you have multiple team members translating please let us know their email addresses so they can also access the translation process.

Each translator must have a myPresences login, add them as users on your account.

Translating

Once you have access you will be able to access the translation interface at:

https://app.mypresences.com/rosetta/

If you receive an access denied message this means your mypresences account does not have access. Please contact support to have it added.

The dashboard will show you how much of myPresences has been translated.

Select the file you want to translate.

This interface will allow you to translate each string into your language and track translation progress.

Use the filter options at the top to work on untranslated content only.

As soon as you make changes they will be saved.

However, the changes won’t be visible until we clear the translation cache, this should happen at least once per day.  Please let us know if you have made translations and we will clear the cache for you.

Translation Advice

1. If a msgid is multiline you can translate this into one long line if that is easier.
2. Variable placeholders are not translated, leave them as they appear in the msgstr field.  These fields start with a %. Eg. %(business_name)s
3. Variable placeholders can be moved around in the string, but they must exist in the translated string. If there is more than one variable they all must exist and the order can be changed.
4. Some strings will contain html tags (eg. <a> <p></p>).  Do not translate anything inside square braces <> and </>.
5. When verifying the translation have the same page open in 2 seperate browsers or browser windows to compare the 2.  You can change the language used by one of the browsers in the settings for the browser.
6. After changing the language of the browser doing a page refresh should update the page to use the chosen language.

Page Authority (commonly referred to as PA) is a measure of how well a single url will rank in search results (SERP’s) and is developed by Moz, one of the major SEO platforms. Page Authority is a logorithmic scale from 0 to 100 with a higher number indicating that the page should rank better in general than lower PA urls.

How does myPresences work with Page Authority?

myPresences tracks the page authority of your homepage so you can see how it changes over time and you are alerted when it changes.

Domain Authority (commonly referred to as DA) is a measure of how well a domain or website will rank in search results (SERP’s) and is developed by Moz, one of the major SEO platforms. Domain Authority is a logorithmic scale from 0 to 100 with a higher number indicating that links on your domain should rank better in general than links on lower DA domains.

How does myPresences work with Domain Authority?

myPresences uses domain authority as one measure to help you:
Determine generally how your website compares to your competitors
Track changes in DA over time and know when your domain authority changes
See which online services you should list on by focusing on high DA services first