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January 20th 2020 / Local SEO

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Local SEO – Make It Easy For Local Customers To Find Your Business

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO will help your brand achieve higher rank and greater visibility for searches conducted by smartphone users who are either ‘near by’ your bricks and mortar location at the time of searching, or users (either on desktop or mobile) who have typed in a search query that specifies a geographic location, for example, ‘plumber in Fleet’.

Did you know, 97% of people go online to learn about a business, as opposed to going anywhere else?

Did you know, ‘near me’ or ‘close by’ searches grew by 900% over two years?

Did you know, local searches result in purchases 28% of the time?

Your potential customers are local, and online. If your business wants to attract local customers, then you absolutely need to invest in a Local SEO Strategy.

Considerations when planning a Local SEO Strategy

  • What is your core objective?
  • Who is your target audience?
  • What channels are you going to focus on to reach this audience?
  • What resources do you have available to implement, manage and measure?
  • What is your budget?
  • How much time are you allowing to achieve your objective?
  • How are you going to measure the results?

Start driving local, targeted traffic to your site

  1. Google My Business Profile
    When creating a Local SEO Strategy, a good place to start is your Google My Business Profile. This used to be called ‘Google Places’ – and will give your brand a presence in the local ‘snack pack’ listing box – this profile listing will put your business on the Google map.

    Check out our blog ‘How to Increase Your Local Search Prominence’ which explains how to set up a profile and optimise it. Since this blog was written, Google have launched some additional features:

    GMB App – this enables you to manage your business profile on the go and update it and respond to messages and reviews very easily. The app provides additional features such as creating a Welcome Offer and a customised Welcome Message, an automatic greeting for customers who message you. The app also makes it easy to build your customer reviews on Google by sharing your profile link with your Facebook & Twitter followers and your Email contacts.
    Short Name – Your short name generates an https://g-page url that you can use for marketing purposes and to request reviews. This is best to contain your brand name, but could contain keywords as well as long as you don’t make it spammy.
    Changes to Location Targeting – in 2019 Google announced that for more accurate location targeting, it is recommended to list the towns your business serves as opposed to counties or countries.

    This screenshot below shows the top 3 local ‘snack pack’ results for ‘plumbers in Guildford’. You can work to increase the rank and visibility of your local listing with regular content uploads, displaying accurate contact information and building your positive customer reviews.

    Local SEO Snack Pack
  2. Local Directory Business Listings – Backlinks and Citations

    Building quality backlinks is key to outranking your competition as it will help to increase overall domain trust, rank and authority.

    Focusing on building backlinks to enhance your LOCAL SEO will help to increase competitive edge against your local competitors by increasing brand visibility, which will result in increased local traffic.

    Building a quality backlink profile to enhance your Local SEO means building backlinks from sites who already have rank and visibility for local searches relevant to your business, as it is these that will help to enhance your brand visibility in search results.

    There are hundreds of online directories, but choosing those that have good authority, generate a lot of traffic, and which are relevant to your business location or the product/services you offer, are the ones to focus your efforts on.

    The best place to start is by typing in a location search for the service and/or products that you sell. For example, ‘Plumber in Guildford’. This screenshot below shows the results at the top organic results.

    Local SEO - plumbers in guildford
    You can see that these are not plumbing companies, but directories.
    Top performing directories will send referral traffic to your site.

    There are many directories which offer free listings, but others offer enhanced listings and extra coverage for an additional charge.

    A more advanced search parameter could be “Guildford” inurl:directory. This will give a list all the directories that show businesses in Guildford. As a Guildford business, these directory sites will be a great place to start building your business profiles.

    You may like to read this blog from Linkio which gives further tips on how to find relevant niche directories.

    Once you have compiled your ‘hit list’, start building your directory profiles. To enhance your local SEO further, add relevance to your location in the profile description as well.

    The Importance of NAP

    NAP is name, address and phone consistency. This is VERY IMPORTANT to implement and get right. If you have changed your company name, moved location, changed your phone number or have migrated your site to an HTTPS server, you need to ensure consistency of all listings and update all your directory backlinks whenever you make changes to your business contact details or service offering.

  3. On-site Local SEO

    The third area of focus should be on optimising your website for Local SEO.

    If you are a business wishing to attract local customers, then adding location targeting through your website content is particularly important.

    Local SEO Best Practice

    Creating lists of the towns and counties you serve isn’t going to have much impact on your Local SEO. Creating Location Pages that are highly relevant to your business, the location you serve, and providing content that is of interest to users, is going to be much more effective.

    The key to writing good Location pages is to make them:

    Relevant to your business
    Relevant to your website visitors
    Relevant to the location you want to optimise for

    Adding a Google map showing your bricks and mortar location will also help, as will adding location references through headlines, image titles and descriptions, internal link text and page urls. All combined will help to strengthen your Local SEO.

    Whizz Marketing is a leading SEO and Marketing Agency in Fleet Hampshire. If you are interested in Local SEO for 2020, please get in touch, we will be delighted to provide support and guidance to help you achieve your goals. Call 01252 622129 or visit https://whizzmarketing.co.uk

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    Summary
    SEO
    Service Type
    SEO
    Provider Name
    Whizz Marketing Services,
    31 Elizabeth Drive,Fleet,Hampshire-GU52 6HW,
    Telephone No.01252 622129
    Area
    UK
    Description
    Local SEO. Make It Easy For Local Customers To Find Your Business. If a business wants to attract local customers, then invest in a Local SEO Strategy.
    DEDICATED SEO CONSULTANCY SERVICES IN YOUR LOCAL AREA

    SEO Berkshire SEO Hampshire SEO Surrey SEO Hook SEO Basingstoke SEO Southampton Marketing Hampshire Marketing Basingstoke

    We have been dealing with Louise at Whizz Marketing Services along with the web designer that she kindly recommended we use, we have had nothing but a great experience with Louise from her copywriting to SEO marketing strategies. We are grateful that Louise has been patient with us, ALWAYS delivered what we have asked of her and very quickly too, I am not always the fastest at getting back as I have to check in with two directors before I can make final decisions but again, very patient. I feel Louise completely understood the image we like to portray and the content that she wrote up for our website reflects this. Very happy, will be using Louise for many years to come and will recommend to anybody looking for similar services. Also, recommend the web designer that is recommended by Louise as they work hand in hand with each other perfectly. Brilliant communication, friendly and reliable and local too, so glad we found Whizz!
    Jones Moves
    Jones Moves
    18:03 15 Jun 23
    Louise used her expert SEO skills on our agency website and has increased the traffic and leads that are coming into the business for keywords that we were nowhere to be seen. I also refer Louise to my clients as finally i’ve found someone who not only talks the talk, but walks it too!Highly recommended!
    Nav Singh
    Nav Singh
    08:41 11 Nov 22
    Louise has a friendly, professional and efficient approach and is easy to work with. I don’t have time to manage the marketing of the business, so it’s great to have an agency I can rely on to do what is needed to keep the brand visibility high in Google and manage the social profiles.  The stronger online brand presence we now have has definitely contributed to the growth and success of my business. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Whizz Marketing.
    Chris King
    Chris King
    16:20 03 Aug 20
    Whizz Marketing was recommended to us by our graphic designer back in 2016. Louise very quickly understood what we wanted to achieve with the rebranding and new website, and worked well with the web developer and graphic designer to help produce a site that not only looked great and clearly defined our brand and ethos, but using her SEO knowledge, she made sure the site worked to attract the right audience, increasing our brand visibility in Google and driving targeted traffic.Louise has continued to provide dedicated support over the years as and when we have needed it. She has been very flexible in her approach and is very easy to work with. She has done a fantastic job for us and I would not hesitate in recommending Whizz Marketing.
    Matt Cobden
    Matt Cobden
    09:46 22 Jul 20
    Louise has been great with helping to build my new website. Her knowledge is fantastic. Louise is very quick to respond to your emails and phone calls. Highly recommend :)
    Ryan Kaye
    Ryan Kaye
    12:35 05 Jul 18
    Louise at Whizz Marketing has been a great help to us in the re-design of our website and launch of a new marketing and social media strategy. Louise co-ordinated the website design, build and content on our behalf ensuring everything hit the latest SEO requirements. This provided the launch pad for a new blog and social media strategy, which Louise also managed on our behalf. We’re very happy with the new design and our website performance and traffic KPIs are moving in a very positive direction within a matter of weeks
    Adam Bland
    Adam Bland
    08:02 05 Jul 18
    Whizz Marketing have more than met my expectations. I was struggling to get my website to a consistently prominent position on internet searches. They have put that right. They are not pushey, they are fairly priced, get results, and ideal for small local businesses. I run Yoga Mind and Body which is based in Camberley but I want to get good results in each of the three areas in which I teach: Deepcut, Hook and Hartley Wintney. I am now going to get Whizz to work with me on more generic local marketing in anticipation that it will yield more people coming to my yoga classes.Many thanks Louise and your team.Namaste, JohnstonJohnston Lowry Founder / Teacher / Yoga Mind and Body
    Johnston Lowry
    Johnston Lowry
    08:32 09 Nov 17
    We've been delighted with the service Whizz Marketing provided us at The Homemade Brownie Company. Louise brought great technical expertise to the business and was pro-active with her ideas and suggestions. She was always readily available to support and delivered very impressive results in terms of website performance, website traffic and sales conversions. We would not hesitate to recommend her.
    Adam Bland
    Adam Bland
    12:42 04 Aug 17
    Louise at Whizz Marketing has been a god send! Having someone who is honest, trust worthy, efficient and knowledgeable handling all of our SEO requirements has enabled us to concentrate on other aspects of our business. I would highly recommend Whizz Marketing to anyone who wants to see their business thrive online.
    Emma Henderson
    Emma Henderson
    14:51 23 May 17
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