Local SEO - Does Your Business Need It and What Can You Do To Get Started?

Local SEO - Does Your Business Need It and What Can You Do To Get Started

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If you have not heard of SEO before, it stands for, Search Engine Optimisation, and it is the process of engineering certain website factors so that search engines such as Google, displays your website at the top of their search results for certain keyword phrases.

Currently SEO for local businesses that service a town or city is one of the fastest growing marketing channels. Its growth can be contributed to the fantastic return on investment (ROI) and the ability to track effectiveness. Long gone are the days of not knowing where you are wasting half of your marketing budget.

Does your local business need SEO?

If you own or run a business the chances are you will need local SEO services. Even if you don't have a website, now is the time to start planning. If you don't make a start, you will be falling further behind your competitors that are using the internet and SEO as a local marketing channel. Research figures have shown that some 60 to 70 percent of purchases made in store have started with research online. If you are not intercepting that research traffic for your local business you are missing a large portion of sales to you competition.

Yes, your business does need local SEO.

What Can You Do To Get Started?

I am going to assume you already own your domain, e.g. yourbusinessname.com and have a website.

1 - Research - To get the most out of your SEO you need to know how consumers search for your business services. For example, if you are an electrician they might search for, electrician [your city]. To get a better understanding of how they search and the most popular search terms you can use the Google AdWords keyword tool. It is a free tool that anyone can use. To find it go to Google and type in - Google keyword tool. A good tip is to change the match type to exact; this will give you a closer indication of the actual search volume.

2 - Know you know how your target market searches you should review your page content, page titles, meta descriptions and on page header tags (H1 etc) to see if you have included the search terms your target market use in these factors. Depending on your website this may require some technical knowledge and skills to change these.

For some local businesses you may only need to focus on your home page. It is important not to include all the terms on every page of your site or mix unrelated terms on the same page. For example, if you are an electrician you may want to include these terms on your home page text. Remember it is important to make sure your text reads for site visitors, not search engines.

a. Electrician [your city]

b. Electricians [your city]

c. [your city] electricians

d. [your city] electrician

e. Electricians in [your city]

If you happen to mention these term on other pages, link the term back to your home page. This helps increase your internal link profile and helps the search engines know what the main focus of the home page is.

3 - Next you should sign up to Google Places and verify your business listing. It is important to completely fill out your profile with all the information that Google requires. A handy tip is to make sure you include the geographical location that you are targeting in your address and description. For example, most people will just include the suburb of their location in their address, but if you are targeting the entire city make sure you include both. In the description include your main keyword phrase with location, eg; We are a [your city] electrician etc.

Another handy tip to help your Google Place listing jump you to the top of the search results is to get reviews. You can ask your customers to review you on your Google Place listing as well as other review sites that Google will pull into their results. To find out where Google is pulling other reviews from, simply do a few searches for your keyword phrases and see what reviews your competition has and were they came from.

The search engines should now have an idea of what your website is about and you should start to rank for those keyword phrases you are targeting. The next step is the one that will make the difference from ranking at the top of page one or at the bottom of page 10.

4 - Link building - there are many ways to build links, for example, directory submissions (Dmoz, BOTW and local business directories), article marketing via sites like EzineArticles, press releases, guest blogging, blog commenting and bookmarking to name a few. The most important thing is to find a technique that gets you the results you will need with the time you have. A good option is to perform all of them, this will help spread your link network, but not may be possible with the time you have available.

If you are short on time, try article marketing and blog commenting. Blog commenting will allow you to build up links from other blogs, however it is important not to be a spammer, make sure you are adding value to the conversation. It is also difficult to get specific keyword phrases to link to your site with this method.

Article marketing is a great opportunity to build highly targeted links using the keyword phrases that you want to rank for. For example, if you provide business education courses on the Gold Coast, you may want to link to your site with the text, business course Gold Coast.

You should also consider building links to your Google Place page, this will also help get your listing to the top of Google.

Hope the above information gives you the understanding why local SEO is important for small business and a few things you can do to get started.

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