How is your business doing?
Are you generating high returns?
Are customers lining up your front door?
If you are hesitant to answer these questions because of disappointment over your enterprise’s current performance, then you need cheering up.
How?
You have to know that you can achieve great results through local SEO.
What is that?
Simply put, it involves targeting your optimisation strategies to a particular audience, i.e. a community or certain location.
Is your search engine marketing campaign directed at a specific group?
Is it providing you high sales and revenues?
If your business has not been doing well, this means that your existing techniques may not be effective at all. Since you are targeting local customers, you can use the following SEO ideas.
1. Change your domain extension
Is your website URL like this—www.mysite.com?
If it is, then you have to replace the .com with an extension of your country. For instance, you can use .au if you are trading in Australia. Likewise, you can put in .co.uk if your company is in United Kingdom, while .za is for South Africa.
How does this help?
Your site will appear in SERPs for queries that contain your target location.
2. Focus on locally relevant content
What does this mean?
Create a page that targets a particular place.
Let us say that you have a bed and breakfast in London. You can come up with content that tackles travel destinations in a particular borough, maybe Islington or Camden. Then, on another webpage, you can talk about tourist activities. This way, your site will rank in search results related to London and its districts.
3. Use locally targeted keywords
There isn’t much difference with this strategy and the one you are using now, except that the former involves the addition of places and other modifiers.
For instance, you can use the key phrase “bed and breakfast London” or “London bed and breakfast” to appear in search results for such queries.
Not only this, you have to know that some countries have their own word and spelling preferences. For example, the term small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. is small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK. You need to remember this, especially when writing text content.
4. Submit to local directories
If you want your target customers to spot you immediately, send website info to credible and established directories.
How do you know if a domain is indeed reliable or not?
One sign is its number of subscribers. If it has a lot, this means that plenty of users trust it. If it doesn’t, then you need to find other options.
Second, its web pages must not contain too many links or adverts.
Third, it provides relevant and useful insights.
As a note, never depend solely on ranking because this is not proof enough of a directory’s reliability. Finally, make sure you provide complete and accurate data to all portals.
How to submit your blog to web directory after Post-Penguin
5. Create a Google Plus Local page
Are you familiar with Google Places?
In general, this service helps your business rank in local searches even if you don’t have a website. All you have to do is claim a listing and optimise it.
You can obtain in-depth information about it on this page.
6. Take advantage of Google Analytics
Are you using GA?
If you are not, this is one reason your efforts have not paid off.
Why?
You have no way of knowing whether your search engine marketing campaign is effective or not. What is more, you cannot determine whether you have to change or improve your strategies.
With that said, always look into your website’s analytics data, especially after you have applied the methods I have mentioned.
How to install Google Analytics to measure your blog traffic
Final Thoughts
So does your small trade benefit from local SEO?
There goes this question again. If you have been thorough with your optimisation methods this time, your answer would be a big YES.
If you are still in the process of optimising your site, don’t forget the ideas on this page. And if you have strategies, which you want to share with the readers, then don’t hesitate to tell us about these.
About the Author: Emma Tomlinson is the Head of Retail at Smart Traffic, a private SEO company Bristol that provides search engine marketing solutions to SMEs and big companies.
This post is full of information. I learned a lot of new things from here. This really helps a lot. These techniques are important and needed because these are the things that helps your website be visible in search engines.
Thanks Mike! Glad I’m giving you something new and useful in terms of optimising your website to become more visible in SERPs. 🙂
A small trade or a big trade can only get online presence when promotion is done in the related market and according to the target audience where the business has to setup.Having local SEO keywords will surely make some difference but they should be adapted after a research on the competition and searches that particular keyword is getting.
Aditya recently posted..ERP Software Development
Great insight Aditya! We should really focus on effective and honest promotion, whether our business is small or large scale. Most importantly, keywords make all the difference in SEO. 🙂
Google places is very important for local businesses.
Listing is local classified sites helps lot to rank higher in Google places
~@khajamoin1
Khaja moin recently posted..Is there Any Alternatives to Google Search Engine?
Thanks Khaja! I agree that Google Places is important for local SEO. This is why we must also focus on being listed here. 😉
Hey Emma
We have been doing local SEO for our clients and the points you have mentioned in this post are the key to it. Local SEO can really help your business get good leads and can take it to the next level. Google places listings have proved to be very helpful in this regard.
Hi Richa. Yes, indeed it helps.
Thanks for dropping by to leave a reply! 🙂
Right now I am beginning to feel the effects on local SEO in my business.
Hayley Wilson recently posted..What exactly does SEO mean, and what are ‘white hat/black hat’ strategies?