No matter how big or small, businesses need a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy that focuses on their geographical location. Local SEO helps them to reach out to prospective customers in their area. This way, any time someone types ‘plumber near me’, all the local plumbing companies with an online presence will pop up in the search results.
Here are five local SEO tips for growing your brand.
Links and Citations
Links and citations are online references to a brand. Whereas links point directly to a company’s website, the citation mentions its NAP (Name, address and phone number). It is essential that these details are the same everywhere on the web. Old and outdated contact information should be scrapped and replaced with new information to ensure NAP consistency. This is to build trust and credibility for the search engine bots. When search engines crawl the internet, they’ll notice even minor variations in a company NAP which will decrease the trust. An SEO expert can also help out budding businesses in improving their NAP consistency.
Reviews
People review the services they’ve used on the internet. Reviews are mostly left on social media channels including Facebook, Twitter and sometimes on Google Maps as well. Just like a happy customer brings more business when they tell other people about it, glowing reviews also improve a brand’s ranking in the search engine results. This will let the search engine know a business in a particular region is credible for certain services, and it’ll be more likely to direct customers to its business listing.
User Engagement
Now, once users have been directed to your website, they will need a great sales pitch. You can make this happen by designing a user-friendly website. It should not be bogged down with heavy plugins, and a slow server or that will compromise the loading speed on different devices. The website should have a personalised theme that is attractive but doesn’t become an eyesore. Moreover, the text should be readable and legible, so people don’t face difficulty in getting the information they visited your website for.
Data structure
Website content should be optimised for search engines. Relevant header tags and meta tags should be inserted to format the text and make it easier for search engines to crawl data. If a business serves more than one city, there can be local landing pages for different regions. Business citations also need to be structured. Contact information and names should be listed on different websites in a proper format. Otherwise, search engines may pick up an unstructured citation from any of the business’ social media pages.
Great content
It goes without saying that customers may be directed to a website from search engines, but they stay for the overall experience. The website content must be localised and answer their relevant queries. For example, if you are a furniture company and your target population is San Francisco, you need to create your content around their issues. If people in San Francisco are interested in lawn furniture, then a how-to guide to protect it from weather elements would be a great resource.
