If you have a bricks and mortar business, in other words a physical business presence in an area and you have not optimized your website for local searches, you will be missing out.
Almost half of local business searches on Google are by customers wanting to find goods and services in their location or near to their location.
These are customers actively looking to buy locally.
Optimized Local SEO makes it easier for these customers to find you.
It is a powerful tool that helps businesses with a physical address get known.
It especially leads customers to suppliers.
To help you maximize your local power and potential we have put together a guide, made up of steps to take to ensure your business is relevant in your location.
1. Set up an Optimized Google Business Profile.
We can help you with this. Previously you may have seen the term Google My Business.
This has been renamed Google Business Profile to highlight the difference between a business with many locations and a sole business with one and is much easier to manage now.
Setting up a Google Business Profile costs nothing whilst adding value to your brand.
It gives you authenticity.
All of your vital information can be included: photos, location, opening times, contact details etc.
We can help you strengthen your Google Business presence so that it adds to and increases customer experience and connection.
The decision to set up a Google Business profile is a no-brainer really because you are given the opportunity to design the way a customer first sees your business.
You set the benchmark. Reviews and feedback are an excellent way to enhance a relationship.
We can optimize your business profile so that customers already searching for your products or services find you. We can audit your content to ensure it is geared towards reaching your customers.
2. A Google Business Profile and social media.
A Google Business Profile can ensure your information is consistent across all social media platforms and that it is mobile friendly too for customers on the go.
It is a win win for businesses.
3. A Google Business Profile and Mobiles.
Ensuring your local business website and information is mobile friendly is a must nowadays.
Mobile phones are rarely out of sight and most people use them to run their lives nowadays.
We are able to help you create a website that works seamlessly with mobiles.
It is vitally important that local customers can access all the information they need on their phone.
Google Maps, Uber and Taxi information, Public Transport timetables, Directions, Reviews, phone numbers and opening hours must be correct and available for a local audience.
4. Ensure you are easy to contact and locate.
Your Name, Address and Phone number (NAP) need to be added as text in order to be locatable by search engines.
If you only have your NAP featured on a banner or business image they cannot be found.
Search engine bots or, crawlers as they are also known, can only locate and communicate actual text.
5. Optimizing your data for maximum online effect
Companies that gather important business data in order to make it widely available to others are called data aggregators or data providers.
Yelp is a popular online directory for discovering local businesses. It is also a data aggregator.
Yelp is not permitted to sell personal information, but it does allow people to access local content and reviews and does this for millions of people around the world.
An example of this happening would be Apple or Google Maps. Both need to able to access key data that will help their users contact or evaluate businesses.
Yelp might, for example, provide data to Apple.
We will optimize your important content for data providers so that they can submit it to other sources on your behalf.
Bing Local, Yellow Pages, Apple Maps and (Siri) and specialty directories, like local listings, would be among the types of sources they would approach.
Your business information must be easy to find and be accurate.
Emails that bounce back and discontinued phone numbers are not a good look, and it would be almost impossible to update new business information – changed opening hours, misspelt words, and location – across all of the sites it is held on nowadays.
Information is now streamlined, and we can maximize the benefits of this on behalf of your business.
This information sharing is also invaluable for opening up a multitude of backlinks to your site.
Backlinks from local and city pages are important to SEO statistics.
Imagine if you had to contact every influential and useful page yourself, there would potentially be hundreds. It would be an incredibly cumbersome exercise.
We will do an SEO Audit for you !
SEO is more than creating a list of keywords. It involves expertise in a range of activities that look at the way your whole business and website are aligned.
Do they work together to achieve your goals.
How does the content on your website and social media presence perform?
A local SEO Audit will be checking that Bots can easily find your key messages and will ensure that they are being communicated across your sphere of influence.
It will update your SEO elements to match the most current customer search trends.
It will make sure the correct information local and online directories is maintained. It will also investigate your placing among you competitors and evaluate performance.
6. We will improve your internal link structures.
Simply put internal link structures connect pages within your own website.
They may have complimentary or explanatory information that is relevant to the topic of the page.
Benefits include:
· Linking these pages on a site keeps visitors on it for longer.
· They can add value in terms of site activity and participation.
· They can make navigating site pages easier.
· They can potentially even out the profiling of higher and lesser authority page rankings on the site.
We will optimize your headings, links, tags, and essential meta descriptions.
The coding behind the scenes of your content needs to be optimized.
The titles, images, headings, and a wealth of descriptions.
We will fine tune these so that they are search engine friendly.
Every new page or blog post needs to align with the SEO content vision to attract Google or other search engine attention.
SEO experts find the latest high-volume keywords in topical analytics and add these to the page descriptors.
Adding specifications to pages is important for a local business.
Getting the “near me” searches to see your product is very important.
We will help you define your location.
Location is more than just an address.
It also includes parking availability and sometimes directions if parking is tricky where you are.
Adding public transport options might also be appropriate.
Adding extra details to a location page is another way of attracting local visitors e.g. store hours and regular promotions.
It is not advisable to add this information to every page.
An About Us page is useful and adding a Google Maps link is an effective way of making navigation easy for mobile phone users.
Involvement in your community is important for a business.
7. Local content Attracts local people.
Obviously including local content will be easier for some businesses than others.
Promoting local events, meetings or training exercises is a good idea.
Products and resources that compliment your own would work.
If you are joining with other local businesses to support a local cause a post on this could create a lot of links and back links.
A calendar would also be effective.
A map of complimentary local businesses might also be valuable.
At SEO Company Pro we want you to achieve the best possible return on your investment that you can.
This means:
· Optimizing your content so that it is fine tuned to suit the search trends of your customers.
· Attract search engine attention so that your pages are indexed and ranking high.
· Utilizing every technique in our armory to make sure more customers are attracted to your business.
· Ensuring your business is not just visible to local customers but that every level of interaction you have with them is seamless.
Please make contact to discuss how we can achieve great things for your business.
Our team of experts are available to you at any time of the night and day.
