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Optimising your site for a local audience (Local SEO) is one of the best ways to increase your local visibility and market share in the search engines creating more of a chance of gaining more leads and conversions.
In this article, we will highlight 5 key factors of optimising your website for local SEO from a experienced local SEO agency.
TITLE TAGS AND DESCRIPTIONS
In the search engine results, you only have a brief space to get your message across, the higher you rank the more predominant your website will look to searchers.
Make sure your title and description promote both your brand and its location. Avoid generic terms and aim to use the key selling point of your business.
Ensure all your titles and descriptions are filled out for every page on your website, it is very unappealing for potential customers if they just see “home” then a generic description pulled from the copy of the webpage.
Tip: A good title tag should just be the service you offer, the location you are based and your business name. Example: “Window Cleaners Nottingham | Wayne’s Windows”. This can then be expanded on to different service pages “Commercial Window Cleaners Nottingham | Wayne’s Windows”.
CITATIONS – NAP CONSISTENCY (NAME, ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER)
To gain a higher ranking in the Google search results, your business needs to get its name known across the internet. One of the best ways to do this is citations. Citations are listings of your business name, address and phone number referred to as the NAP.
A search of your business name should bring up all the citations it has on different websites, it is important to make sure these are all identical and consistent.
Make sure you add the NAP to the pages on your website, these can be added to the footer of webpages or in the contact us box. It is important these are consistent across your website. This includes using so if you use St. instead of Street make sure you do this across your citations and website.
REGIONAL KEYWORDS
If you are trying to attract new potential customers from a specific town, city or region it is important you optimise your site for regional keywords.
This includes adding the name of the place you are trying to gain customers from to your sites; copy, description, titles and image alt tags. If you are a plumber who mainly wants to operate in the Nottingham area it is crucial your content mentions “Plumber and Nottingham” somewhere in the title, description and webpage text.
One key tip to rank quicker is to niche down either the location or service as a keyword. The plumber in Nottingham example can be changed to “Emergency plumber in West Bridgford” this may not have anywhere near the same search volume, but it is a lot better to rank in the top 3 for a low searched term than 3rd pages for one with higher searches. Over time you can make changes to the site and as SEO improves you can rank for the higher search volume terms.
LOCATION PAGES
Create location-specific landing pages, this is essential if your business does have more than one location or you are planning to expand your business into new areas in the future. Creating landing pages for each location your business has will improve its chances of ranking in the areas.
Make sure the pages have unique contents and include the NAP of each location to ensure the location pages don’t get flagged as having duplicate content.
LOCAL BACKLINKS
Backlinks are one of Google’s key ranking factors. Gaining backlinks from local websites will help your local rankings thus making your business more visible to potential local customers.
These backlinks can come from businesses you partner with such as suppliers, charities or community causes you support or even businesses that have done work for you.
Pro tip: Offering testimonials for businesses you worked with and including a link to your site in the testimonial (or asking them to add one) is a great way to get a local business to link to your website and boost your local search results.
