How to improve your businesses local SEO in seven steps
Introduction
If you run a business you will know that most businesses now face fierce levels of competition.
That’s to say in the past some businesses may have got by investing in a bit of marketing.
Yet now that the level of competition has increased, well most businesses have to invest in digital marketing.
And this is where seo agencies like ours come in. Yet we are truly different from so many agencies out there, simply because we don’t over complicate things with tons of complicated marketing jargon.
We explain things clearly, so if your business is looking to improve its local seo, this blog post will help you.
Here’s a seven step plan to help you improve your businesses SEO
#1 Obtain your Google My Business account
One of the first things you have to do is obtain your Google My Business listing. This is really easy to do, and if you follow the link here you can start creating a Google My Business listing straightaway.
A GMB listing is essential if you want your business to be shown in the GMB results. And we would also recommend that you spend the time to make sure you complete your GMB listing and don’t miss out any important parts.
Make sure you get the following right:
· Ensure that the businesses name, address and phone number matches with your businesses website
· Write a detailed business description
· Make sure your businesses opening hours are listed
· Add pictures of your business, such as the store front
#2 Reviews on Google My Business
If you have loads of customers saying how good your business is, well, why not capitalise on this?
You could ask your customers if they would be willing to leave your business a review on your companies Google My business account, this can also help your companies SEO.
However, don’t write fake business reviews yourself, the reason being is Google’s algorithm is super clever, it will know that the business reviews are fake.
This means that your business stands a much lesser chance of being shown in the local business listings.
We also advise only to ever use white hat seo methods.
#3 Use structured data, such as Schema
Say for example your business is a car dealership, so your going to most probally
#4 Add quality content marketing
It’s essential if you want to improve your businesses local seo, that your business invests in quality content marketing.
Most businesses therefore pay an seo business to add content marketing to their website on a regular basis.
However, here’s a few words of advice, the content marketing must be quality. The work should be relevant to your business, and it should aim to help your customers.
For example, if you run a dental practice, well there’s no point in just banging-on about how brilliant your dental practice is. To see real seo benefits you have to offer quality work, so for example you may wish to write a piece of content marketing about how to relieve tooth pain, or what you should do if you have sensitive teeth.
#5 Technical SEO
Once you have your brand-new website back from the website designers, you may think that most of the technical seo work will already be done for you.
However, a lot of the time the website design agency will have focused just on design, that’s to say its then a process of the seo agency implementing seo from scratch.
This means we will often have to add:
· Meta titles and meta descriptions
· Alt tags
· Make sure that each page has sufficient word count and will not be deemed “content thin”
· Make sure that NAP information can be read
· Make sure that the website loads quickly
· The website optimised for mobile devices
· And loads more seo work is normally required
#6 (NAP) Business citations
Your SEO business should make sure that your website clearly displays your businesses NAP details.
NAP stands for name, address and phone number for the business. The NAP information should then be copied and used in the business’s citations.
All SEO work must be white hat, so if you are in any doubt do consultant with a white hat digital marketing agency.
#7 Make sure that you refresh your knowledge on regular basis
Some people learn a bit about SEO, but then let their knowledge stagnate. This can be the same story for some marketing agencies, that’s to say some businesses take the attitude that what works now, but work in the future.
This simply isn’t true, that’s because Google is constantly improving its algorithm, this means on a regular basis changes are made to how agencies should implement seo.
Simply put if you let your seo knowledge stagnate, then it’s entirely possible that you could be implementing seo which is now deemed low quality and could result in a penalty.
If your business requires help with its seo, then why not give us a ring?
