Small businesses depend highly on local residents, but there is no guarantee that those living two blocks away from you visit your store. Chances are that they don’t even know you exist. The reason why this is the case is that when people need to gain information regarding anything, they typically go online. If you’re not there, you’re bound to be ignored by a vast majority of those who might indeed live close to you and need your product as well. Therefore, the rule of thumb here is that your product should be seen as often as possible and this is where local SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimisation, comes into play.
If you need a local SEO agency, Team-X could be your best choice. Team-X provides quality SEO services to local businesses in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Wellington, Perth, Auckland, and Darwin. So, if you have a local business in Melbourne, or any other part of Australia and you need to be visible by your local clients, Team-X can help you reach your goal.
Simply put, SEO is a process whereby your website traffic increases via search engine results. It tells search engines to direct people to your website whenever they search the web for certain products which you offer. Local SEO, on the other hand, refers to increasing your rank in searches that are done by people living near the region where your business presides, prioritising them over highly related searches that take place far away. Here are top 9 tips for you to dominate local searches.
Create a Google My Business account
As a local business owner, you need to have a Google My Business account and optimise it by telling google everything about your business including your business category, the domain of your activity, the area within which you want to be recognised, etc. Remember, the more detailed you are, the better. Since the information you give google about your business appears in google searches. Perhaps the most important issue to remember here is that you should provide Google with an easy-to-remember business name, address, and phone number, typically Known as NAP. It should also be consistent, which means that if you want to cite your business in other blogs, you should use the same NAP as the one in your Google My Business account.
Choose local-based content and keywords
For many, time is more valuable than money. This entails that people normally look not for the best but the nearest, especially when it comes to purchasing stuff such as a comb or a handbag which are not supposed to be used for a long period of time. Therefore, people usually attach phrases such as “near me” or “near…. street” to the end of what they are searching so that they are directed to web pages that tell them about the nearest business, company, or whatever they are looking for.
When defining keywords for google, you should provide it with various local-related keywords to make sure you will be among Google’s first suggestions to users, you can also ask Google to provide you with the highly repeated keywords searched in the area of your business and use them as keywords for your website. Also, you need to relate your product or business to local issues and events. A carpenter who expresses his grief over a recent nearby forest fire and writes about its effects on carpentry or compares the amount of damage brought upon wooden and brick houses due to a closeby earthquake is likely to be seen more often than the one who writes only about wooden furniture and their price.
Optimise it for mobile and voice chat
Not even digging into the statistics, one can safely say that a greater number of searches are done using mobile phones compared to laptops. The reason for this might be that mobiles are much easier to carry around. This enables people to go online almost everywhere. Thus, you need to create a mobile-friendly website if you don’t want to miss any potential users. In doing so, make sure your website loads in less than five seconds and the font is appropriate. You should also remember that people prefer voice messaging to typing as it takes less time and planning. Therefore, when designing a website, you need to make sure that it allows users to voice chat with you when they have a question to ask or a comment to leave.
Invest in local litations
Apart from updating your Google My Business account, you can also search for local websites which provide users with NAP of all local businesses, also called local business directories. Just find the correct category and add your business NAP keeping in mind that it should be exactly the same as the one you have used in your Google My Business account.
Ask for customer review
Ask your customers to leave their comments regarding your services on your website and reply to those comments. It has several advantages. First of all, it tells your customers that their opinion matters to you and that you are not only after their money, secondly, it improves your website’s rank in Google, thirdly, potential customers get a clearer picture of your business and its quality and last but not least, it allows you to track down your customers whenever you wish to.
Get backlinks from related businesses
Whatever your business is, you certainly have some local partners who either give you services or receive services from you. Try to reach out to them and convince them to include your link in their web content. Tell them that you are willing to do the same for them or return the favor in a different way.
Create specific pages for specific locations
Your website can have one main page typically called homepage and several pages with each having an optimised URL to tell search engines what “exactly” that page is about. Each page can be just about your services in a certain neighbourhood, district, or city. This way, for each part of the area within which you are working, you can use totally local-based keywords on each page. This will certainly improve your chances of being among the first suggested pages in Google.
Take advantage of social media sites
More and more people are using social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There is no doubt that many of your potential customers are among constant viewers of these sites. So, making a presence for yourself there won’t hurt. In fact, it can be a means of directing or inviting viewers to your website.
Trace the latest changes in local search rankings
This is one of the most important measures that you can take in order to improve your website. You need to trace the latest changes in local searches and figure out what factors have been involved in those changes. You can find out about the problems that your website might have, and come up with solutions to tackle those problems. You should be hunting for search volumes, result types, devices, and similar information. This way you can copy from the higher-ranking sites, copying their keywords, learning from their web design, etc., and avoid making the mistakes that might lower your website ranking. The good news is that if you are not much into the internet or do not have the time to go through these stages, we at Team-X can improve your local business site. We will certainly do more than you expect.
Recent Comments