If you’re a smaller business thinking about a new website or revamping an existing one, often your thoughts will turn to reach the local area. Let’s look at 5 key principles when seeking to target your website for the local area.
- It’s all about Keywords
The real shame is when people have something worthwhile to offer but don’t describe it the way other people do, making it nearly impossible to be found.
So you must think about your keywords – i.e. if I am writing a page I want people to find, how am I going to write it? So here’s a quick approach:
Brainstorm your keywords. Just write down what you do and where you can deliver it in as many combinations as possible. Always include your local area: city or county.
Go along to the Google Keyword Tool and copy and paste them in.
Using its results, choose 2 or 3 combinations that would make sense.
So here in Inverness, kilts are a part of national dress. So I came up with three keywords: Inverness kilts, buy kilts in Inverness, kilt Inverness. What Google tells us is that all the keywords have ‘medium’ competition, which means the keywords may not be ‘easy’ but are targetable. As the competition is the same we can just go for the biggest search markets. So some great ones may be: kilt Inverness, kilts Inverness, and kilt hire Inverness.
- Transfer this to your website
For successful Local SEO, you need to use your keywords in your web design and its content, but in a way that human visitors will read it and not think you’re shoe-horning them in. Thankfully, Google is intelligent enough to notice similar phrases regardless of which way round they are, so it would not be difficult to write: Welcome to the Amazing Inverness Kilt Shop for example. Ensure you get the keywords in a few times on your page. Other places you should try to get them in are:
Page TITLE tags
Image ALT Attributes
Links from other pages on your website
Bold/Italic Text
When you’ve dealt with your own website, you need to think ‘off-site’.
- Google Maps Listing
An absolute must for any successful Local SEO campaign is a Google Maps listing. Your physical geographical location makes a difference. Why? Because some local searches bring up a map, such as a search for “kilts Inverness”.
Google combines your Maps Listing detail with your website’s optimization and creates local results from that. If you don’t have a map listing, get one today so that you can be found locally.
In the second half of this article, we will be building on this foundation and adding some other important ingredients for local success.
If you can get these principles right and you have a good foundation to build on. Now we’re going to learn the importance of consistency and other people’s opinion of you!
- Be Consistent!
In order for your local search results and your maps listings to perform well you must be consistent in two ways:
Your Business Name
Your Business Address
This means not trying to fool the search engines. If your brand is ‘Genuine Kilts’ but then you try and call your business ‘Genuine Kilts Inverness’ because “that’s better for our SEO” then you’re not helping your cause.
If you are consistent then ‘Genuine Kilts’ will be known for being in Inverness and selling great Kilts. Think about it, is Microsoft going to be renamed ‘Computer Super Giant in America’ or Google ‘Hyper-intelligent Search Company’ just to hit keywords? No! Your brand may be new and maybe smaller than these guys, but if you can be known by your brand name and people know where you’re based, your local search results will begin to improve.
One tip on your address: on your own website you should mark up your address with Schema.org tags. Bing in particular is paying attention to these tags, which emphasize certain elements of your website information, of which your address is one. Adding these around an address (the same as your Google Maps address of course) reinforce to Search Engines where you are – which supports your local campaign.
- The Power of Opinion
Whether you care about other peoples’ opinions of you or not, Google does. And when it comes to a new customer looking for a company to serve them, they also care about the experiences others have had. The proof is that Google publishes reviews and star ratings for local businesses and this affects your Local SEO Results.
I want to take my wife out for a lovely meal. We haven’t lived long in Inverness so I don’t really know the local restaurant scene. So I go to search on-line for restaurants in Inverness and the top results have are The Mustard Seed and The Kitchen. The first has had 19 reviews and an average rating of 4.5 stars. The second has 8 reviews and an average of 3.5 stars. This is because people have gone onto their Google Maps listings and given them a review and a rating. And that will play a part in my decision-making.
The same principle applies to your website. Once you have a Google Maps listing, encourage people to review your business on it, and then you will start to get noticed more for local searches. During the web design process, you also should ensure that testimonials from happy customers are published as this helps those who visit your site to have confidence in your products or services, making them more likely to consider buying.
