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Get more customers with local SEO

April 19th 2022 / Local SEO

Author: LOUISE CRANSTONE

What is Local SEO and how can it help me find new customers?

If you are a business who has a predominantly local audience, you need to be investing in a Local Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Strategy.

You may have already embraced the concept of SEO and if so, you likely appreciate that investment in SEO can really help drive your business forward.

A successful SEO strategy will result in:

  • Increased brand visibility
  • Increased targeted traffic
  • Increased conversions
  • Increased sales
  • Increased market share

A Local SEO Strategy will focus on achieving all of the above, but specifically for customers in targeted locations.

Whether you have just one business location, or have multiple locations nationwide, or even Worldwide, a Local SEO Strategy can be rolled out across all locations, as long as you are adapting each one to be specific to each location.

How to create a successful Local SEO Strategy

One way a local mobile user may find your business is if it appears on Google maps.

To add your business to Google maps you will need to create a Google My Business listing.

1. Create and Optimise your Google My Business Profile

To optimise the profile, follow this checklist:

1. Populate all available fields accurately
2. Include keywords in your business description
3. Add information on services/products.
4. Add links to your contact page or local page on your website.
5. Add targeted locations
6. Find the most relevant business categories.
7. Add logo, cover image, team photos, videos.

And once you have ticked all the above, post into the profile regularly with news, offers, videos & photos!

Gaining positive reviews on your Google My Business profile is very much a ranking factor for local listings. You will need more than 10 x 5* reviews to really make a difference and ideally, you will need reviews coming through fairly regularly to help increase the rank of the listing.

2. Apply geo-targeting to your website

There are a few ways to achieve a good level of optimisation for the locations you are targeting.

Let’s assume that you have one place of business. This is your ‘bricks and mortar’ address. This is the address you advertise on your website. As a starting point, add Local Business Schema Markup into the code of the website. This html code helps searchbots identify your business location quickly. It contains your geo-coordinates (latitude & longitude) and information about your business. It is important to place this code in the correct place to maximise crawlability.

Another great way to increase your search visibility for a specific location is to add a Location page. This page should include the location (town and county) in the url, body text, images, meta title and description and page headlines. The content needs to be highly relevant to your business and the location.

Making reference to your business location throughout your website content will also help increase relevance to that location. This can include adding the town/county to body content, image file names, image ALT text, video schema, internal link text, blog content and meta data.

Add case studies or create portfolio entries that are location referenced. This helps build more relevance to your business at this location (town/county.

3. Linkbuilding

To help increase your brand visibility across the web for local users, add your business to as many local business directories as you can find. If you have multiple locations, add each one with a unique business description and add a backlink to the specific location page (rather than the homepage).

If you work with Local Authorities or other local businesses, try to negotiate a backlink from their website to yours.

On social media, use hashtags that incorporate the location of your business. Create content and links that are location specific, such as events.

Encourage more reviews from customers in your targeted location – on social channels, Google or a third party platform. If you are a member of Checkatrade, try to get more reviews in the areas you want more business, as you will rank higher in Checkatrade search results for searches on areas you have more positive feedback from.

4. Optimise for Mobile

People that search for local products and services are generally searching on a mobile device.

To ensure you present the best possible experience for mobile users, you need to ensure your website is fully optimised for mobile. This means making sure the mobile site speed is fast, its secure, its easy to navigate & you make it easy for customers to get in touch with you.

Are you ready to create and implement a successful Local SEO Strategy? If you need some support, please get in touch. Whizz offers great value SEO and marketing support to SMEs across the UK. Find out more at whizzmarketing.co.uk

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