Local SEO is the process of improving a small business website to increase it’s visibility for a given geographic location. If someone is searching for a local business service they will include their own town or city which why you need to include your location in your website title.
If you’re a plumber in Southampton then that’s what you include in your website title. You might think that having Joe’s Plumbing in the title is enough if you have Southampton in the address at the bottom of the page but it really isn’t.
An example to consider is <title>Plumber Salisbury – Joe’s Plumbing : Emergency Callout</title> although opinions vary.
Another important thing that you can do to improve the visibility of your small business is to claim your local listing with Google my business. You can add your name, address and phone number (NAP) along with your website address and a brief description of the services that you offer.
Local SEO and my small business website
I run a small business and look after the PCs and laptops for a number of clients in and around the City. I designed a simple website for my business when I first started up. But quickly became frustrated when it failed to show up in the Google search engine results pages or SERPs.
Update – I’m now retired
It’s not a lot of good having a website if it doesn’t get found online. It was time to do some research to find out what was wrong otherwise my business would suffer.
It didn’t take too much research to discover that I’d made some major mistakes when constructing my website. The written content seemed to be OK but, the most obvious mistake was that the title was ‘Homepage’. By now I’d read a little about SEO and discover that there were ‘on-page ranking factors’ that needed attention.
I changed the title tag and used an appropriate H1 header on my site. After that, I set out to discover what other improvements I could make to improve the the ranking. I was pleased to discover that my local search optimisation methods were paying off and I was turning into a bit of an SEO enthusiast.
SEO Success : Get Found Online
The success of any local SEO campaign depends on many factors, including, the competion from other local business websites. For example, if you run a search for waitress hire Salisbury, the results will show one company in the area. On the other hand, run a search for web design Salisbury and you’ll see that it’s going to be a lot harder to rank well for those search terms.
Content writing
Writing SEO friendly high-quality content can increase the ranking of your website within the search engine results pages. Search engines love SEO friendly high-quality content and so will your visitors. Make sure that you include the important keywords in the content without making it look spammy.
The meta description tag is also an important element although not a direct ranking factor. What it does do is give the search engines a good idea of what’s contained within that particular web page.
The content of the description tag is displayed under the title and URL of your entry in the search engine results pages, often known as Rich snippets. A good description is your chance to get someone to click on the page so make it look interesting.
So there you go, this is how local SEO can improve the ranking of a small business website.
Andy – Local SEO : Get you business found online