WHAT IS LOCAL SEO?
If you’re a local business who wants to sell your products or services to a local audience, you want to be ranking as high as possible on your local areas search results.
Simply put, local SEO is the process of optimising your website, local profiles and online reviews to ensure that you rank higher when searches are made geographically near your business.
How is Local SEO useful?
Approximately more than half the searches on Google are made by people looking for local products or services when they search for something.
If you don’t get your local SEO right, you’re losing out on earning more customers for your business.
SEO has improved drastically ever since Google started rolling out its Panda and Penguin updates. It’s now more difficult for users to hack their way and rank well on searches without providing rich, accurate and relevant content.
In other words, you’ll need to put in an effort to optimise and get your profiles and websites ranking for local searches.
The bad news is that there is no shortcut and a digital agency like CLIX4U has the tools to assist and make this process so much easier for you.
How do you optimise your Local SEO?
The main things to focus on are website optimisation, managing your Google profile and online business citations to cover the basics of local SEO.
WEBSITE OPTIMISATION
Title Tags
These are really important in any SEO strategy.
Not only are title tags used for search engine results to highlight exactly what your page is about, but they are also used by users to understand the content of the page in a nutshell.
It’s the “cover of the book,” but in this case, the book is actually judged by its cover.
A title tag needs to accurately represent what the page’s content contains. And more importantly, it needs to be concise, because search engines will only capture about the first 50-60 characters of a title tag.
A good format for title tags is to focus on your primary and secondary keywords, followed by your brand name, such as, “Pizza in Carlton | Stuzzichino’s Pizzeria.”
Tips:
- Title tags should be between 50-60 characters.-Priority keywords should be placed in the title
- Priority keywords should be placed in the title, preferably in the front.
- If you have a recognizable brand, use that in the title tag.
Create title tags that are easy to read and evoke emotions that make people want to click on them.
While your HTML may tell Google exactly what you want your title tag to say, there are instances when Google will display a different title based on Google’s understanding of your brand.
Keep Clean
A clean URL is one that is clear and comprehensible to the human eye, with no complicated parameters.
For example, “example.com/shop/prodid=282&cmp=518451274 is a dirty URL. A better version of the same URL would be example.com/hop/ men’s-shirts/white-satin-shirt
This is important because it gives the user a direct message about the product, and gives search engines a better understanding of what the page is about as well.
Tips:
– URLs shouldn’t be longer than 2048 characters; older browsers can’t process pages that are over this length.
-Hyphens should be used to separate words so that they’re easily read by both users and search engines. (don’t overdo hyphens as they could be picked up as spam)
Duplicated Content
Search engines aspire for diversity in their results. The same page, referenced multiple times, makes a weak user experience.
If I’m searching for lions, I want to read different articles on lions, not three identical pieces. Therefore, duplicate content is also frowned upon by search engines and you could be penalized by Google.
Duplicate content can be crawled by search engines or removed entirely. You can use a robots.txt to hide duplicate content from the search engines.
Tips:
-800-1500 words are ideal for content.
-Make the content easy to read and add keyword rich headings (H1 and H2 tag) to break up sections.
-The main keyword should be used 2-5 times throughout the copy.
-Use variations of the keywords to make it more readable to your visitors (and appeal to other search phrases).
Indexable menus:
All the content on your website needs to be visible to search engines to achieve rankings that reflect the content phrases.
This means that the content, including menus, should be in HTML text format. Menus that are in flash, Java applets, images, or anything else will be disregarded by search engines.
NAP:
Make sure the NAP (name, address, and phone number) of your business displayed on your website is consistent with your Google My Business page.
Consistency is key if you want to be found and ranked high against your competition. Any type of inconsistency can affect your overall rankings.
Your NAP should be consistent throughout the Internet, whether on your site or on a service provider recommendation site or on any citation sites that you have.
GOOGLE PROFILE
Your Google My Business profile is what shows up in the local search results of Google, alongside search results. Completing and optimizing your Google My Business profile will ensure that your business appears when consumers are searching for keywords with a location intent.
Google My Business listings also appear across desktop, mobile and tablet searches and are prominently displayed – making it one of the most important focus areas if you are a local business.
Get your business verified and listed:
1 – Start by going to Google My Business Console and searching for your business.
2 – If you see multiple listings for your business, that’s fine! Just select the one that’s closest to your accurate business information in the dropdown
3 – Once you click on the most appropriate listing for your business if you see a message that says “Someone else has already verified this listing”, this means that your business listing has already been claimed.
4 – If your listing is unclaimed you’ll be asked to either verify by post or by phone or text. Once you’re done receiving the postcard or phone call, you should receive the instructions to claim/verify your Google My Business listing!
ONLINE BUSINESS CITATIONS
Citations are references to your business that can be found on online directories, association pages or government websites.
More structured citations, like listings, include your NAP and may even link back to your website.
In order to be ranked well on any search engine, you need to make sure that the data on your listings are consistent across the internet.
It improves your credibility and also makes it easy for customers to find you and contact you for any queries they may have about your products/services.
Another form of citations comes from mentions in news articles, blogs, and any memberships your business may have in a city or country business index.
Search engines place a degree of trust in the information supplied by established and well-indexed sites such as YellowPages or Yelp.
This means they will use information from these sites to corroborate your business’ information as well as category.
It’s even more important to work hard on your listings if you work in an industry where service providers generally don’t have websites.
The top citation sites:
Google, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and Bing, for starters.
Your local Chamber of Commerce, YellowPages, Whitepages and industry-specific directories for extra support
With all the data being pushed out there, it is essential that you keep track of your listings. You can use a product like Synup to get a free business listing scan report to see how your business is listed on the internet.
Inconsistent NAP data can lead to lower rankings on search engines as well as provide the wrong information to customers seeking out your services. This can really hurt your overall digital presence.
By monitoring all your listings, you can identify and fix any incorrect information you find. If you need assistance, CLIX4u offers a full management solution.