Do you have a business with a physical address? Or are you a tradie with a local focus? If your organisation is geared toward a specific region, your search engine optimisation strategies will need a more local approach. Bloggers and wholly online business operations don’t necessarily need to focus on local SEO. Their purposes may be to attract web traffic (or potential buyers) who are scattered all across the globe. But tangible, brick and mortar businesses that provide physical products and services in a regional area? In that case, the importance of local SEO can’t be ignored. And Nowra Web Designer knows just how to handle it.
An Age of Immediacy
Have you ever been on the go and needed to find a specific type of business? Chances are, you picked up your smartphone and performed a simple search. With fast results, you probably had an immediate answer to your query. That same process is one which is repeated thousands of times daily by residents in your area and others. Today’s society is increasingly more mobile and users are seeking out businesses based primarily on the results of Google searches and similar methods.
What this means for you as a business owner is that local SEO is a massive factor in letting potential customers know you exist, and thus needs to be attended to. If your site is top ranking in search engines, consumers with an immediate need are much more likely to choose you. They don’t have time to dig through the options, so your goal is to be on top.
Think Local
The key to local SEO is to optimise everything for the local market. Your content keywords can help with this, but on an even more basic level, there are a few easy steps you can take to give you a much-needed local boost.
First, be sure to register your business with all location-focused sites. We don’t mean the yellow pages; get yourself listed on Bing, Foursquare, and Yelp, among others. These sites have high relevance and authority, and will help your business to better show up in searches. You will also need to claim your Google My Business page.
Across your website, you want to be sure to list your NAP: your business name, address, and phone number. This should be found on each and every page and in an identical format. Many web designers manage this by incorporating your full details directly in your footer. In other listings, as well, you should maintain the same structure for your NAP. Using the Schema.org markup on your NAP is a smart way to ensure consistency and accuracy, as this will to give search engines the data required to display company information correctly across the board.
Get Out the Good Word
Another significant contributor to local SEO is via customer reviews. Reviews from your customers on a range of sites can be very useful and beneficial for improving your local rankings. Apple Maps, for instance, utilises Yelp reviews in search. Google Reviews are perhaps most important to focus on. If you don’t have any current reviews online, reach out to current customers and ask them for a review. You can offer an incentive in return for their time.
Content is Still King
One of the top ways of achieving successful local SEO is with on-page optimisation, as this still weighs heavily in the ranking factors. An experienced web marketing agency can assist you to generate the appropriate content that will make your site fly up the rankings. Need a hand? Our team at Nowra Web Designer would love to help you out. Give us a call today.
