Quite often for small businesses there are things that they will overlook or not even think about. In our experience one of the most frequent marketing aspects is SEO. What we have done is try to compile information to give you a general grounding in SEO which will help your business grow.
To start of with, let’s cover the first step. What is local SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimisation. This is the process of ranking better in search engines like google in relevant searches and being above your competitors. For example, if you were to be on the first page of google for Manchester Plumbing, this would require some level of local SEO because the business is put in front of the customer as and when they search and based upon the relevant location.
Now that you know what local SEO is in its simplest terms, we can start to discuss some basic methods that you can employ in order to start improving your rankings.
Content
This usually goes without saying but it is an absolute necessity for you to have good content on your website. All of your information needs to be relevant and informative. Search engines are getting a lot smarter which means that when they are crawling your website, they will know if it is a website that reads well and is relevant.
NAP (Number, Address and Phone Number)
You need to make sure that these three pieces of information; number, address and phone number, are all consistent across the web with your business. If these are inconsistent then search engines will pick up on this and view you as an unprofessional business and therefore put you further down the listings.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your business from other sources on the internet. Having these in place will make you a more trustworthy business in the eyes of search engines. These links could be from other local businesses, recommendation services like Yelp or business directories like Yell. When you are building these links make sure you remember about NAP in order to continue building the trust with search engines.
Google My Business
This is probably the easiest one to do with the most effective results. What this does is puts all of your business details such as: address, phone number, working hours and directions all onto Google Search and Google Maps. It also gives your business the chance to be in what is known as the “3-pack”. I’m sure that you recognise it from the image bellow.
What this does it put three local businesses into a box above all the other results so that you can instantly see there info. These three local businesses will instantly have a higher amount of traffic coming to their business.
Reviews
This is a factor what really can make or break you in search engines. You want to try and get as many good reviews as you can from your clients. Everybody on the internet is looking at reviews before they buy a product/service which means that you need to have a lot of good ones. A simple and effective way to get reviews from your customers is just to ask them. Whether it be in a follow up email of word of mouth asking them is proven to be the way to increase your reviews. Again local SEO is about getting the search engines to trust you and having a good amount of reviews with your business will certainly do that.
