If you have a small business that is on the internet and targets local customers or if your business focuses on certain customers within a specific geo-location you should consider implementing some local optimization techniques. Correctly optimizing your site can give you an edge over competitors in local search.
This post will provide some ideas on optimizing your website for local search, give tips and suggestions for local businesses social media profiles.
Keyword research is a must when optimizing your site, you should look at targeting specific Geo-exact terms but also industry precise terms. The first thing to do is to research the competitiveness and search volume of terms you think your website should be optimized for, compare your site to other businesses that offer the same services as yours.
Looking at competitors websites will give you some additional search terms to consider, try doing a search on Google and look at the related terms at the bottom of the page this will give you additional keyword and search term ideas.
You can also go use a tools like SEM rush and Open Site Explorer to get additional keyword ideas and compare the sites of competitor’s with your own.
When optimizing your site for local search, you need to let search engines know what locations you are targeting one way to do this is by including Geo-specific areas, phrases and keywords.
Title tags are one of the most important on-site SEO factors, you need to include you target terms in your page title tags. You can locally optimize your title tags by including location information in them, make sure the title tags read naturally and try to keep them within 70 characters so they display well in the search results.
Your Meta description can also be optimized for local search. The meta description can contain your businesses phone number, town or city information and services you offer, try to make the meta description read naturally and keep it to within 16o characters. You might want to include is a local street address. Your address and phone number should be on all pages of your website. Add your address in rich snippets markup, Google has a free tool you can use to do this.
Embed a local map on your website. If you go to Google Maps and insert your address, you will get an HTML code, add this code and you will put a map on your web page. To absolutely make sure that Google knows where your location is then create a Geo site-map and KML file for your website.
Once your website is optimized for local search then you should optimize for off-site. This is done by looking at local search directories. Some of the top search directories are Google, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Merchant Circle, Yellow Pages, and Superpages.
Also try to get reviews from your customers. This information could be very important. It will let you know what keywords they used for searching, and if it was helpful to find your business location.
In conclusion: It does pay to optimize your website for local search. It will help you get more traffic to your website which in turn will give you more revenue and more customers. It is rather easy to optimize. You can get free help online or you can buy courses on how to optimize your website for local serch.
This post was supplied by Cody Bollerman, Cody is a San Diego based SEO consultant his website is www.codybollerman.com