7 ways you can improve your businesses local SEO

Introduction

Most businesses now face more competition than ever. This means just one thing, that is businesses now need to stand out from the crowd using SEO.

However, most business owners get quickly confused which agency they should use, and which seo methods are best.

This confusion is often caused by one thing, that is marketing jargon.

We don’t like jargon here, instead we like to explain our marketing methods clearly.

And as our agency focuses on offering organic seo and local seo, we thought we would give you seven of our top tips of how to improve your businesses local seo.

#1 Google My Business

First things first, if you want to run a successful local seo marketing campaign you have to obtain a Google My Business listing.

Now, this shouldn’t be a five-minute job neither, instead you should dedicate much time to getting the following spot on:

·        Make sure the essential bits are right, so your businesses name, address and phone number (NAP)

·        Write a description of your business, but don’t just copy and paste a description from say another social profile. No, you must write your business description so that it is unique.

·        Opening hours of your business

·        Pictures of your business, so if you own a shop take a picture of the shop front.

https://www.google.com/business/

#2 Customer reviews

If you have a ton of customers telling you they are really happy with the service you offered them, well why not capitalise on this?

Why not ask your customers to leave you a review? We recommend that you ask them to leave you a review on your Google My Business listing.

This can help to improve your businesses seo, the reason being is that when people are looking for a local business, Google likes to display businesses that have a positive star rating.

However, a word to the wise, don’t be tempted to write a load of fake business reviews yourself.

The reason is Google’s algorithm is very clever, so the algorithm will be able to detect fake reviews and in all likelihood your business will not be displayed if it has fake reviews.

#3 Schema

Say you run a wedding cake business, and naturally you are passionate about blogging about wedding cakes.

Each week you diligently add an article that describes the yummy wedding cakes you have been working on.

And you may have a ton of followers on social media platforms that all want to know about your latest blog post.

Yet these blog posts will be written for us humans, which means there will normally be loads of written text. Which is all well and good, as this can help your businesses seo.

However, Googlebot, that’s the bot that crawls and indexes new work, well it wont be able to extract the meaning of everything you write.

So, when you start talking about the organic ingredients of the wedding cake, which has been styled to copy a celebrity wedding, well the meaning of that blog post may get confusing.

So, Google and the other search engines appreciate when you make things a bit easier for them, that’s to say the super important details, like where your business is located, its phone number the businesses name can be marked-up using schema.

Now let’s not get too technical here, but schema is a structured language, lets just say it’s a universally accepted way of marking-up parts of your businesses website that are important.

And you may be asking, well why bother? Well there’s an easy answer to that, and that is if the search engines, like Google have greater confidence in where your business is located, well you stand a better chance of your business being displayed in the local business results.

So, if your seo agency hasn’t implemented schema, well ask them why not?

https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data

https://schema.org/

#4 Business citations and NAP

Once you’ve set up your Google My Business account, then you should start to build citations.

It’s important that you build the citations in the correct way, i.e your businesses NAP information that’s written on your company’s website, well this should be the exact same NAP information you use on your business’s citations.

If you are in any doubt how to build business citations, you should consult with a respected digital marketing agency for help.

 #5 Technical SEO

You have invested in a rather expensive website for your business, that’s to say you may well be very happy with the design.

Yet, more often than not the website design agency will often neglect to add the important seo details.

So, whenever we have a new client, we always optimise the following:

·        Meta titles and meta descriptions

·        Alt tags

·        Make sure that each page on the website has a sufficient word count, and that the page is not “content thin”

·        Many other SEO factors need to be considered

#6 Don’t neglect your businesses blog

Sometimes some businesses go through phases of implementing seo, that’s to say they implement a bit, reap the rewards and then neglect updating the company website for sometime.

This often means that the website will go up and down the rankings, a bit like a yo-yo. Instead quality seo should be added on a regular basis.

One important part of the seo process is to update your company blog on a regular basis. This work should always be white hat.  

#7 Keep up to date

Some businesses, and even some seo agencies for that matter neglect to keep their seo knowledge up to date.

That’s to say they may have known all there is to know about seo a few years back, yet there knowledge has not been kept up to date.

The risk is unless a business keeps its knowledge up to date, well they could be implementing rubbish seo, which could result in a penalty.

If your business requires help with its seo, then why not give us a ring?