How Local SEO can help your business
We can help your local business to grow
With a whopping 95% of mobile users their smartphones phones to find local businesses, investing in quality Local SEO is essential for most businesses. It doesn’t matter, if your business is a one-man band, you have a payroll, with over 1000 staff on it, often you need Local SEO, for your business to grow.
Local SEO: The Unsung Hero
So, what’s local SEO, you ask? Imagine regular SEO but with a cuppa and a biscuit. It’s all about making sure your website pops up when someone nearby is searching for what you offer. Whether your a solicitor, a dentist or perhaps you sell bikes, if your business isn’t on the first page, then you could be missing out on thousands, potentially millions of sales. There are some marketing agencies, which cut the mustard, which can get your business on the first page, and keeping therefore a long time.
However good marketing agencies, such as ours, don’t come cheap so you do have to keep this in mind if you are thinking of investing in this form of marketing. Since Google’s Pigeon update in 2014 – not the bird, mind you – nailing local SEO became even more crucial.
There are now so many, algorithm updates, which means that your businesses Local SEO has to be good-quality, if it’s not good quality, then it could damage your businesses SEO.
So, everything from building backlinks, building business citations, adding blog posts, writing your businesses meta titles and meta descriptions, through to even writing the page titles, it all has to be done in a white hat way, and the work must be top quality.
The benefits of investing in SEO
Getting Noticed: Businesses that get the local SEO game right can gain more customers, sometimes a business might be less than 1 mile away, from where the customer lives, but they may have never noticed your business, so this is why it’s so important, to appear on the first page, because often the shopper just clicks on the business, and then ask for directions to get straight to that business.
So if your business is not on the first page, then shoppers could be asking for directions to your competitors rather than your company.
If thousands, of people do that every year you could be missing out on a lot of business. This is why you need an experienced, a quality marketing company that quite literally put your business on the map, and helps potentially thousands of people find your company every single year.
Google My Business: Think of it as the Yellow Pages’. Your business, needs to set up a account with Google My Business, it’s an absolute piece of cake to do, yet it can really help to improve your businesses SEO. Make sure that you add your company’s URL, as your company address and phone number, make sure you add your opening hours, and if a customer walks out your business and says, thank you very much, that was a great service-why not ask them to leave a review on your businesses Google My Business account.
Local Pack: If you’ve seen a ‘3 Pack’ of businesses when searching, that’s it you could be obtaining thousands more shoppers to your company website every single year. The better you’re optimised, the better the chance you pop up there.
Reviews: Like your Nan always says, word of mouth is priceless. More reviews, especially the good ones, can bump you up in rankings.
On-site tweaks: Make your website scream where you are. So, make sure that your web designers, add your businesses NAP information onto your company website, we would recommend adding NAP information, onto the contact us page and also within the footer so that it appears on every main page and blog post on your website.
Blog Content:
Regular posts about local news, events, or let’s say a business award that you have just one.
For example, you might run a solicitor’s practice, and one of your solicitors, has just won solicitor of the year within Cardiff. Why not write a blog post about this, this will help to raise awareness that your business has won this award, yet because you also mentioned in Cardiff, within the blog post, then this could help to improve your businesses local SEO.
FAQs:
What’s Local SEO?
It’s just like the usual organic SEO but focusing on local customers. So, for example, a marketing agency will focus on building many business citations, a lot of backlinks and writing content marketing to help your customers. For example, if you own a bike shop, you might write a blog post about the bike repairs that you offer in Cardiff.
Then, when someone has a punctured tyre, on their bike, they may therefore read the blog post and then go to your business.
Why is it important now?
With mobile searches booming, more and more people, are looking to find local businesses on their smartphones, whether that be an android phone or an iPhone. Whether they’re looking for a local dentist, or a local barber, our marketing agency, can help your business gain more customers. If you want to grow your business, then we are most definitely the business to call.
How do reviews impact my rankings?
A lot, Good reviews can push you up, and help to improve your businesses while bad ones, if addressed right, can show you care, but, negative business reviews can obviously pull off customers. However it’s always a good idea to reply to negative business reviews and positive ones, so for example, if somebody was to complain about their food, then you should reply to the review, for example you might have recently changed chefs or ingredients, therefore you should communicate that, that you acknowledge the problem and you’ve rectified it.
Is Google My Business really free?
As free as a walk in the park. Yes, it’s free, totally free, and it can really help to improve your businesses SEO.
How often should I update my content marketing for local SEO?
Regular content keeps things fresh. However, quality must always come first, so if it’s between writing every single week, but the quality is not that good, or writing less frequently, let’s say once a month, the quality is superb, then we would recommend writing and publishing once a month, that’s to say you should always choose quality over quantity.
What’s the Google Pigeon update?
A big Google update from 2014 that made local search results more accurate.
Any tips for Local SEO success?
Always Keep your business citations updated, engage with customer reviews, publish blog posts on a regular basis.
