The majority of businesses aren’t looking to sell their wares and services all around the world. They are actually focused on consumers a lot closer to home. Developing local SEO and optimising your web pages so that people in your town or city can easily find you is vital if you want to succeed.
- More and more of us nowadays are turning to the internet to find local businesses, including using our mobile phones.
- Local search marketing can be highly targeted and achieve a good return on investment for a low cost.
- Many local SEO options are quick to implement.
- Local consumers tend to trust things like local reviews when they visit a listing or see it in their search results.
SEO – Succeeding on Local Searches
If you get your SEO right, more local people will be able to find your business. There are a number of options that you can consider, including:
Get the Basics Right
The standards of keyword and optimised pages (including meta tags and descriptions) on your website are important for local searches and can make a big difference. You can have a specific landing page, for example, for a certain location that means you appear on organic searches. You can also work with long tail keyword terms that have less likely to be input by a user but are a lot more focused and lead to higher conversion rates.
While competition in this area has increased in recent years, that doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore the basic requirements. Tweaks to your online content here and there can make significant differences.
Add Local Content
A blog still works as a good SEO tool especially if you concentrate on localised, interesting content such as reviewing landmarks, things to do in your area and upcoming events.
Claim Google My Business
Google is by far the most important search engine out there and the majority of people use it find what they want. You can create your own Google Business page, for free, and it will certainly give you more chance of turning up on local searches. Your listing will also turn up on applications such as Google Maps. Another option is to sign up for Bing for Business which performs a similar function. The key here is to include as much information as possible including your full contact details.
Online Directories
The other place to advertise yourself and increase visibility is an online directory. If you don’t do anything else, you need to take the time to sign up on these. There are a lot to choose from including Yelp, Citysearch, Foursquare and Merchantcircle to name just a few. If you have a trade, for example, there are options such as Checkatrade.com that can be used. Find the ones that work for your business and sign up – it’s usually free and takes just a few minutes.
Grow Your Reputation
Places like Google My Business and online directories allow users to leave ratings and these have become increasingly important for local businesses. The more 5 star ratings and good reviews you can achieve the better and good online rankings generally correlate with how many ratings you have. In particular, achieving this on Google My Business is important and can have far reaching consequences. Of course, the key here is to encourage customers to leave good reviews.
Good Backlinks
These are links from reputable sites to your website and they can still improve ranking on search engines like Google. While they can, be quite difficult to achieve that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Contact your local board of commerce or other local businesses to see if they’ll connect this way. Another option is to produce high quality blog content that people will want to link to.