Local SEO - Are start-up and small businesses missing out on opportunities by chasing the end of the rainbow?
We often speak to local businesses who don’t understand the ins and outs of SEO. Most businesses now understand that ranking on Google is very important to the growth of their company but they try to run before they can walk. This means they are trying to rank for top end keywords on Google rather than the more relevant local searches that will get them customers faster.
So what is Local SEO?
Local SEO is when we optimise your website to achieve a higher placement on Google for a local audience. If you are a new start-up business, let’s say for example you have opened up a shop in your town, your early focus should be spreading awareness to the people of that town that you are there. Once you have established yourself within your immediate local area in the rankings you may then pursue the next town, city or county to try and get a wider audience. This is the generic basis for local SEO.
How to rank for searches locally?
Post Content Using a Blog
Write and produce content with the use of a tool such as a Blog. This will help you to be able to talk about your service or product whilst mentioning local towns and cities. For example a plumber may produce a Blog post for how to check your water pressure is correct on your hot water system at home, he could then mention a recent job he has done locally to help rank for searches in that area in the future.
Google My Business
Google My Business is a free tool that allows you to tell Google about what kind of business you are and what products or services you provide and the times and days you are open. Google then takes this information and creates a section for your business in searches which collates all this information into one place.
On-page Optimisation
This is where we steer your content to include the locations of local towns and cities that you want to rank for. We include local image searches, text, and SEO techniques to get as high up Google as possible.
Citations
Citations are essentially local mentions of your business online and may possibly include a link back to your webpage. A good example of this would be pages like Facebook, Yell, Google, Bing, Yelp etc these are pages where you can add your business address and details which in turn helps your business to be found.
In-bound Links
This is where you get other business to link to your website. You may do some work for a company and ask if they will provide a link to your website from theirs and in return you would do the same.
Reviews
This is a big factor both locally and globally. This is where your clients will leave your business reviews online using websites such as Google, Yelp, Yell etc. These help rank you higher the most reviews you have and of course the more positive they are as Google will want to push a better more popular business higher up their rankings.
Need Help With Ranking Your Local Business
Obviously the above points are only an outline of the work that is required to rank your business higher on the search engines, it takes a lot of work and sometimes patience to get to the first page of Google, unless you have found a niche market all to your own. If you would like to know more information regarding this we would be more than happy to discuss the importance of Local SEO at any time. There are also some great resources out there on Google and Youtube where you can learn more, here are a few websites below.