Improve Local Rankings with Whitespark
What is Whitespark and What Does It Do?
I mentioned in the podcast Whitespark and how Whitespark can help build your local listing so you have a better chance of appearing in the Google Local Pack on search results.This is a step to take after you have claimed your Google My Business listing. Make sure you do that after you have put links to your website from all your social media profiles or other profiles on other websites.The next step you’re going to want to do is this, and this is going to help lay the foundation for your presence on Google as a local business. Now there is a cost involved here. But the alternative is to do this yourself and like I explained in the podcast, that can take a very long time. So if you have any budget at all, this is what I recommend rather than doing it yourself. And of course, the other alternative would be using a service like Yext, which is actually going to be more expensive. And it’s going to you’re going to end up spending a lot more over time. Whitespark is just a one-time fee, and then you’ll be done with this step.
Whitespark.ca Discount Code: meredithshusband
How to Use Whitespark to Build Links for Local SEO
Video Transcript
Follow this link to Whitespark. Once you get here, you can scroll over the top navigation in this first section called Tools. There are some pretty cool tools here. We’re not going to use any of these right now, but what we are going to use is something under the Services section, so scroll over that and look for this link called Listings Service right here.If you are coming from Yext, meaning that you’ve been using Yext to manage your local listings, which I did mention in the podcast, you can use this as an alternative. It’s not necessary because there’s a lot of overlap between these two, and I’m going to show you how to customize your listings order to get the max SEO value from it.So go ahead and click on that and you should see a page that looks roughly like this. And if you click to Get Started, you’ll see three different plans and then an option to create a Custom Order.So we’re going to want to do the Custom Order because we want to create the most advantageous mix to the types of listings that we can. So by that, I mean, between these general listings you see here at the bottom and the industry/regional listings, those are different types depending on where you live. There will be either more or less more or fewer industry or regional listings available. So like I live in Brooklyn, I can probably find more industry and regional listings or more regional listings than somebody who lives in a smaller city, for example. So that’s what we want to do. We want to maximize our higher-value listings.So go ahead – click on the Custom Order now. And you should see a page that looks like this. Just make sure that you have the custom option selected and go ahead and click the next step. Now here it’s going to give you an option to add however many general listings and regional listings that you want under the regional. We want to maximize those so we want to choose the most, which is 15. If there are not 15 regional listings available where you live, they will write back to you after you place this order and tell you how many are available and whether you want to get a refund. So, so let’s say in your city or town, there are only 10 of these available. They’ll say, Hey, there are only 10. Do you want to take the money from that extra five and reallocate it towards the general listings? Or you just want a refund and you can do either. It doesn’t really matter under the General Listings tab, I like to do 25 here. I just think that’s a good number. There are more. Either way, that’s where I this is how I like to start and this option followup reports, I always like to do that because that’s going to tell you. And they’ll usually send three follow-up reports 30 days apart. So 30 days after you place the order, they’ll send you a report and then 30 days later and then 30 days after that.And that’s because this process does take time. Like I explained in the podcast, if you were to do this yourself manually, it would take months and months to complete it. And so they have to do the same thing. There’s quite a long lag time between when they submit your order to these local directories and when they get information back. So what this does is it lets you know over those first three months, how are they because they won’t all become active right away? How quickly are they becoming active? And then the second section in the audit and cleanup section, this one I like to do the comprehensive all the time. I recommend you do that one. If budget is a real issue, you could you can do the premium. I like to do this. And so the total for this is going to come out to be $444. I get a small discount. If you do need to bring the budget down. I would recommend let’s see… I’d probably recommend doing this first. If we were to take the general listings and move them all the way down to zero, that would be $350. I don’t recommend going any lower than this. And if you can, I would go ahead and do the 25, you don’t need the rush order fee that adds that can add up quite a bit, that can that increases the total cost by 50% or 25%.And you don’t need that and you don’t need the white label service. The white label would be, like for me, when I do this for clients, I get that and it comes without any white spark branding on it. But you don’t need that.Once you have that all setup, you can go ahead to the next step. I’m already logged in. If you’re not logged in, they’ll probably prompt you to create an account here. After that, go ahead, enter your billing info and you can place this order. And then, like I said, they will follow up with you. They’ll probably follow up in a, you know, a couple of business days and say, Hey, we got your order. Either we can do all of these regional industry listings or we can’t. And they’ll ask you what you want to do at that point moving forward.Remember…This will lay a pretty strong foundation for your presence on Google as a local business.This by itself probably will not get your website into that local pack and get you onto that first page of Google, rarely. So I wouldn’t expect that. But if you don’t do this step, the chances of that happening are very small.
For Budget Conscious…
If budget is truly an issue, you can always start with the Basic Plan. It won’t provide as much value as the other plans but can be used as a starting point.