SEO is crucial for your website’s online visibility. Local SEO is as important as global search engine optimization and even though improving SEO is a process rather than a one-time effort, there are a few simple actions you need to stick to in order to improve your local SEO performance.
Claim Your Business Listings
There is a number of business directories where you can list your business and thus establish a presence on these sites. Depending on your location, these websites may vary and you need to make sure your business is listed on the ones relevant for your country. When working on a SEO project for a major manufacturer and supplier of a range of Thermoplastic Masterbatch, Liquid Colour Concentrates and Dispersions – Abbey Masterbatch, we listed them on the following websites and thus improved their local SEO and provided social proof, helping drive people to the company website:
• The Sun
• Mirror
• Touch Local
• Scoot
• Factual
• The Independent
• Yelp
• Google+
Encourage online reviews
Customer revives act as the best social proof so do not be shy and ask your customers (especially the happy ones) to review your business and service. As I said before, customer reviews improve your local SEO rankings, but they also help you stand out and be trusted by your potential customers.
Ensure NAP Consistency
Data consistency is very important, so make sure your business name, address and phone number (NAP) is consistent on all business directories. Otherwise, it will be detected by search engines and will negatively affect your website SEO. So, if at one point your business address gets changed, do not forget to update various business directories accordingly.
Keep your Google My Business up to date
Naturally, Google My Business page is the most important page for your local listing and it needs to have up to date information on your business. This is also a great page for customer reviews, but it is also a platform where you can share posts and the more active you are here, the better rankings you’ll get.
Title Tag Optimization
Research and identify the keywords with the highest search volume and lowest competition and use them in your title tags wisely. For example, you can use the following for your title tag “your service + location” which will result in search engines tying this page of your website to a certain location and will thus list your business in searches coming from your geographic location.
Add Location Pages
Search engines constantly crawl websites for various information and business location is one of them. As part of local SEO efforts, you need to include your full business address on your website and make sure it is consistent with the address on various business directories.
Link Building
Link building is something you need to work on constantly and it is crucial for your off-site SEO. There are several ways you can improve your off-site SEO. You can get backlinks from your partners, suppliers and sponsorships, which could be beneficial for all parties. Further activities that can help you increase the authority of your domain are blog articles containing links to your website.
Social Media
Be active on social media. It is good both for establishing a relationship with potential customers, nurturing the relationship with your existing customers and for your SEO efforts. You can go an extra mile and show your social media feed on your website. It will show both your visitors and search engine crawlers that your website is alive and active!
Hope this article provides some useful tips for improving your local SEO. If you have any questions or would like to chat with us, feel free to get in touch!
