Fix This One Line to Rank Higher on Google

you can improve your SEO rankings, generally improve your website's SEO all together. One line, two-minute fix. I'm going to take you through different steps of how to do this from like the easiest, the simplest, most basic way to more complex ways, but ways that Google likes and then you never have to change it again until you move or change your website. Where you are located should be on every single page of your website, name, address, phone.

That's called the nav. And that is an indicator that Google uses to align your website with your Google's business listing. If Google doesn't know where you are, then the people who are looking for you aren't going to be able to find you. That's a problem I see so frequently, especially in the photography industry and the wedding photographers. They don't want to put where they're located on their website.

And I think a lot of that comes from a position of fear. Wedding photographers want every lead that comes their way and they don't want to limit themselves to a specific area. Okay? So the impact of a nap, the name, address, phone number, is that it signals to Google that you're a real legitimate business. Not just Google, but other search engines, Bing, Duck.Go, other crawlers that are out there searching your site and also will help with your AI optimization.

And the biggest problem is inconsistent nap across different directories. So your name, address, and phone number. If any of those has changed, you'll want to make sure that it's updated everywhere. Okay.

So, the first thing that you really want to do is you want to make sure we have a Google business listing for your business. That includes your name, your website, your address, and your phone number. So, what you're going to do, just go to Google and type in Google business profile. What's going to come up is a URL that says get listed on Google. If you're already listed on Google, that's great. If you're not, just go through the process and get your business listed there.

I'm not going to go through the whole process now. And then what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to go to bingp places.com and that's going to bring up your ability to create or manage your Bing business listing. A lot of people still use Bing. It's a default on many browsers on many corporate computers, but also I know a number of people who use Bing through secondary websites such as Eosia, which is a search engine that works on Bing, but the money it makes goes to helping to plant trees. and you can log into Bing Places with your Google account or your Facebook account or your Microsoft account.

But one of the first things that you're going to see is you'll be able to create a business listing and then there is a sync with Google business profile button that you can click and click sync now. And what it's going to do is connect your accounts and then it's always going to keep your Bing Places listing updated with your Google business profile. All right.

The next thing you're going to want to do is make sure that in the footer of your website, you have your name, your address, and your phone number. That's it. Maybe you have a dedicated contact page and you have that information on your contact page. That's great. Also, put it in your footer. If you put it in your site footer, then it's on every single page on your website. Make it look exactly like your Google business profile looks.

For your phone number, include the the country code, then your area code, then your exchange, and then the suffix of the phone number. Format it very simply. + 1 416 55512 34. Keep it simple. Don't use periods to separate your phone number because that's not consistent with how most other websites do it. You might want to do it because it's stylized that way or that's how you do it personally and you like it personally, but don't do it because that's not how directory websites list phone numbers.

They list them with dashes. So use dashes.

So now you have your Google business profile, you have your nap on your contact page, and you have your nap in the footer of your website. That's going to be a massive improvement.

It's been a few months since I recorded this video.

It's been a few months since I uploaded a video, but I wanted to step in here for a quick moment and let you know that uh in the example you're seeing, the reason that I do not have my phone number on my website personally or my Google listing personally is because I have had viewers of this channel use my phone number to call me. And that's just not okay. It's something that I use for my business and to have people calling me.

Takes away from my ability to conduct business and takes away from my time to be able to uh actually run my business because I am a full-time working photographer. This obviously is not a full-time job for me doing YouTube. But I just wanted to step in here and clarify that for you in case you're wondering while his phone number isn't on his website. That's the reason. Please don't call me.

So the next step is to add structured data to your nap. Structured data is a coding that allows computers such as Google's web crawler to understand the information better so that it doesn't have to guess and try to figure it out. We've come a long way. An AI can look at your page and and determine all that information. But if you can just say this is a local business, this is the name. This is the description.

This is the street address. This is the city. This is the province or state. This is the postal code. This is the phone number. You give it all that information. It knows exactly what that is. I'm going to show you two ways to do this. The first way is we're going to take just that simple little line that we're adding to the footer and we're going to include the structured data in that line. So, I don't expect you to know how to code.

So what I've done is I've created a prompt that you can give to an LLM, a large language model such as Chad GPT or Claude or Google Gemini to give you exactly the structured data that you need to put into that single line in your website. And I put that prompt in the description in full so you can just copy and paste it into chat GPT and then chat GPT will give you a result that you can copy and paste into your website right into the footer.

So, here's the prompt as I have it. From name, street address, city, region, postal code, country code, and phone. Output exactly one single line HTML address element with schema.org local business micro data. No CSS, no emojis, no extra tags. That's going to give you exactly the code that you need to drop right into your website. If you use Squarespace, you're just going to grab a code block, erase the hello world text that's in the code block, and just copy that text right into the code block. put it on your website and you're done.

That's it. You're done.

The next thing we're going to do is we're going to verify the structured data that we just inputed. Sometimes it's called micro data. We're going to verify it with Google's rich results test tool. So, we're going to go to search.google.com/test/rich-ress. We're going to type in the URL of your website. Make sure that you've saved that code into your website and published your website. Make sure that it's saved and showing and live.

And then you're just going to type the URL of your website in and get back a test result. We can expand the data to take a look and confirm that all the information is correct. Now, my results are showing some errors because of the way that Squarespace actually formats the structured data that you put in to the business information page under selling. That's a problem I think Squarespace needs to fix, but we are correcting that by including the proper information in our rich text snippet.

So, you should get back a result that shows that everything is great. And that's great. That's it. You can stop there if you want to. But we can even go a little bit further and use JSON linking data in the header of your website to further give Google that uh structured data.

Now the the benefits of the JSON linked data in your the header of your website is that it is the preferred format for Google's knowledge graph and that is where they do rich snippets and map cards. And so if you want to show up in those sections of Google's search pages, then you're really going to want to make sure that you have the JSON code block in the header of your website. And again, if you don't know how to code, that's fine.

I use chat GPT for this as well. And I have the prompt that I'm going to give you here. I'm going to show you this on the screen. So this is the prompt that I use to generate the JSON LD code snippet for the name, address, phone number for my website. So again, the process will be use the prompt from the description below for this part. Put that into chat GPT. Give it the information uh about your business.

It will generate the code for you. Copy the code from chat GPT directly into the Google rich results test page under the code snippet. Verify that it's correct. If it needs any adjustments, make the adjustments. Then you can copy it into your website. Save it. Publish your website. Then come back and test the results again. You want to make sure that you're validating every time. Verify the live results to make sure that your website is accurately displaying the correct structured data.

Now, it's going to take some time for Google to incorporate this data into its rankings, but it is a set it and forget it. Now that you've done it, you're not going to have to do it again. That that's what's so great about this aspect of of local SEO. Once you've done it, you've done it. You don't have to worry about it again until until you move or update your website. So, once that's live, that data is going to make your nap very crystal clear to search engines.

If you make changes, make sure you're updating them in the footer and the contact page and the code block in the header. If you go that far, you can always come back to this video and go through the process again. Improve your SEO, especially your local SEO. And not only improving your SEO, but helping visitors. When someone like me is visiting your site and wants to know where you are located and I'm looking for someone local, I can instantly go to the bottom and see that, oh, you're in my city.

Make sure that you are helping people by helping the robots know more about your business. Having a consistent name, address, and phone number is one of the easiest, highest impact SEO ranking factors that you can implement on your website.

And look, if you want to know more, grab a copy of the ultimate SEO guide for photographers. You can get a link right here. You can click this or or use the QR code on the screen. Get yourself a copy and go through the process of using the techniques that I've outlined in that ebook. It's 130 plus pages. Grab a copy of that book and make sure you stay up to date on your SEO. Go kick ass.