In this guide we will walk you through Local SEO and getting your website ranking locally on Google. There are many aspects to this including Google My Business, reviews, NAP and more but don’t worry; we’ll talk about each area in detail so this guide will help both beginners and even the more experienced SERP optimisers.

Getting started with the basics of Local SEO:

This isn’t a quick task so you might need to dedicate a chunk of your morning or afternoon to ranking your local business on Google & other search engines. It’s better to take your time and get it right than rush through and miss out critical data which search engines use to display your website to potential visitors.

Let’s start your local SEO campaign with Google My Business, Local Reviews & NAP.

Google My Business (GMB) for Local SEO

We love rich information and you’ll often find Google catering to this love. One way Google do this is through GMB (Google My Business) which provides business or company specific data such as their name, address, phone number (NAP) and other various data such as reviews. GMB is essentially an overview of the most important company information.

You can see below an example of a GMB profile (which just happens to be ours).

A screenshot of The Website Marketing Group's Google My Business Profile, a Website Design & SEO company in North Wales.

When creating or claiming a GMB profile you need to make sure it includes as much information as possible:

  • Your website, business, charity or company name. (formal entity name)
  • Full business address
  • An accurate, lengthy description of the business
  • The categories your business is under
  • A local phone number
  • High quality, visually pleasing and relevant photos
  • Opening or operational times
  • Services you offer, these are generated based on your business primary category
  • The logo of the business and a cover photo

Local SEO & Local Reviews (GMB, Yelp, Trustpilot, Reviews.io)

Reviews are critical to every business, helping some to grow very fast and even causing some to fail.

Acquiring high quality, honest reviews will prove to be beneficial for your business as a whole. They have also been confirmed to have a direct impact on ranking your business for local search.

Google isn’t the only search engine in the world though. There are others including Microsoft Bing and Yahoo. So try to have reviews everywhere you can.

A good way to grow your organic reviews is to reach out to your existing or past customers and see if they would like to leave a review for your business. It helps to incentivise them for providing you with a review, this could be a discount, a free meal or something similar.

Make sure leaving a review is as easy as possible, the perfect process would be to send them a link via email, text message or instant messaging platform so they can easily access a web page and submit their review.

Collecting reviews is a whole other topic so if you’re wanting to dive deeper into it feel free to give us a call at 0800 254 5504.

NAP - Name, Address, Phone Number (Core information)

When ranking your business for local results, it really does help to be local.

Place your business name, full address and local phone number in the footer of your website. The information you place in the footer and on GMB must be consistent.

If you enter your phone number on GMB as 01234 567 890 then you must make sure this is the same on your website.

On-Page SEO for Local Results

SEO has evolved into a very complex area over the past few years but some components still remain the same, because sometimes less is more and simple is just, well, better.

A long time used tactic for SEO is on-page optimisation for location+keyphrase // keyword. This tactic caters to a high weighting factor in search result indexing so it’s very important this is thought through and implemented correctly; it’s not something you want to be re-doing again at a later date.

You need to place the target location and relevant keyword in strategic, prominent areas of your pages:

  • Meta Title
  • Meta Description
  • Page permalink (URL)
  • Page Title Element <title>
  • Page H1 Element <h1>
  • Image Alt attributes <img src="" alt="location+keyword here">
  • Body text

In addition to the location and keyword placement in the areas recommended above, you should also look at adding a Google Map to your website or even a Google Map with a business marker to show exactly where you’re located.

Website Responsiveness (Mobile Friendly)

Statista tells us that as of January 2021, 92.6 percent of all internet users accessed the internet via a mobile device. That’s a whopping 4.32 billion people. If that isn’t a reason to make sure your website is mobile friendly, we don’t know what is. Hire a developer to make your website mobile friendly.

Link Building from local, relevant businesses.

Link building is a high weighting factor in all aspects of SEO and SERP strategies so don’t miss this one out.

Take advantage of local directories and websites such as your local newspaper and informational businesses that can provide you with a link to your website. This will help in increasing your local SEO rankings, assuming you are gaining high quality links from reputable domains.

Click Through Rate (CTR) & Bounce Rate

You’re ranked on Google but not climbing the rankings as well as you’d like.

There’s a few reasons that come to mind when hearing this from some of our clients but the most common are CTR and Bounces. Search engines prefer websites that are engaging and pull more people in whilst retaining their attention.

Click Through Rate is the percentage of traffic that sees your website in search results and click it.

A higher CTR tells you people are likely to click on your link, if your CTR was 75% and your link on SERP’s was seen 100 times, this would mean 75 out of 100 people clicked on your link. From this it is relatively safe to say if 1,000 people saw your link; 750 people would click on it. The lower your CTR, the less people actually click on your page. A lower CTR is likely to negatively affect your SERP rankings.

Bounce Rate is the amount of people that click through to your site and instantly leave or stay on it.

A higher bounce rate implies that the content on your website is ‘bouncing’ people away from your website and back to the search results to find another website or web page that satisfies their intentions. A lower bounce rate is likely to positively affect your SERP rankings.

How to do social media marketing correctly

The success of a social media marketing campaign is heavily dependent on the content that is used for marketing. Good content can lead to a drastic increase in your consumers. However, you may need to study and understand a few specific aspects of social media marketing to ensure the success of your marketing strategy.

You need to make yourself aware of the social media marketing principles to effectively increase your online presence. Below are a few suggestions that might help you fare better in you social media marketing ventures.

Consumers’ Preferences and Interest

In order to effectively use social media and content marketing tools, to best serve your purpose, you need to make yourself aware about the preferences and interests of your consumers. This is essential for the success of your social media marketing strategy. You may be able to gain an insight into your target consumers’ interests and preferences by reading their online content and actively participating in discussions with them. This will enable you to compose and direct content that will successfully engage your target consumers, conveying your intended message and motivating them to avail your offered services or products.

Focused Content

You need to compose your content to focus on the requirements and interests of your target consumers. Specialised content will be able to engage your consumers more effectively. You need to identify your target consumers and focus your social media marketing strategy at delivering services that are able to cater to their needs. Adopting a specialised and focused approach for social media marketing have higher chances of success than a generalised approach.

Engaging Consumers

Assess the success of your social media marketing strategy through the number of consumer who you are able to actively engage into discussion and those who show more interest in interacting with you rather than the total sum of the attracted consumers, a part of whom may only visit your page for the one initial time only.

Commitment

You need to be extremely committed and patient when involved in social media marketing. Though, social media has extensive reach, but marketing campaigns on social media show results after quite some time. The results may take longer than expected and you need to be consistent and patient with your social media marketing activities.

Quality Content

Quality content can take you a long way in the field of social media marketing. Developing, composing and posting engaging and interesting content on social media, as a part of your marketing strategy, will not only hold the interest of your existing consumers, but it may also motivate them to share your content on their blogs and other social media platforms, eventually widening your consumer base.

Sharing of your content will lead to it being identified by the search engines during SEO inclined searches, ultimately increasing your online visibility and leading to increased consumer exposure for your online marketing content.

Amid the changing preferences of various consumer markets, social media today is considered an essential marketing tool, which if used wisely, can prove to be of considerable assistance, especially for small businesses.

Is investing in online video marketing worth it?

There is a growing trend of online video marketing. Recent years has seen a growing trend for online videos. A report by Cisco suggests that 69% of the people will rely on video marketing. The main idea is that more people would now opt for watching a video than reading an online article. Thus, this idea presents a unique opportunity to include online videos in your marketing mix. Including videos to your overall marketing pack increases the chances of you being seen online.

Experts are also calling ‘video marketing’ as the future of content marketing. Small businesses are now turning to online video marketing to showcase their products. It is predicted that about 64% of marketers expect videos to dominate as their main marketing strategy. Reports also suggest that nearly 66% of all purchases are made after watching the video of a product. In such circumstances, it presents a vital opportunity for small businesses to capitalise on.

Whilst, it can be argued that SEO and social media marketing can help gain websites significant attention, it can also be argued that online videos can help you gain the attention and prominence it deserves! If your video is well-planned and executed it may get all the eye-balls. Thus, it can not only help drive more traffic to your website but can also help your business become prominent name in a short span of time!

Although, video marketing has some costs associated to it but recently there have been significant reductions to this. It is becoming easier to make and upload videos on channels like YouTube. Videos are now becoming easier to make and disseminate. One such idea is to convert your article into a video through a power point presentation. Other examples can also include whiteboard doodles and short digital videos which can help captivate everyone’s attention. Marketing and graphic design companies are making sure that they add and provide video marketing to their clients with their other services.

Apart from this, it is important to note that online video marketing does not require you to spend hefty amounts of money as you would do on TV adverts. You can place videos on YouTube or disseminate via your Twitter or Facebook accounts and get more attention. YouTube receives more than one billion unique visitors every month! That is more than any other channel. This gives you a unique opportunity to be seen and noticed!

Whilst there are benefits of online video marketing but it should in no way overtake your social media and SEO campaigns. The whole idea is to make it work together with the strategies you may have for your website and business.

Whichever strategy you may choose it is important to remain creative and unique. Also remember that ‘content is king’! The video would only sell if you have a great story or an idea to sell. Although experts claim that 64% of marketers now think that videos will dominate their strategies in the future, it is important to make sure you can capitalise on it as well as work on other strategies for your business.

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      We do not & will not share your information with any third parties.