If you own a small business website, you need to optimize it site for local search because local search brings more targetted traffic to your business. The following post contains some tips to help small business owners optimize for local search.
Tip 1
Find out what people are looking for. Check your Google analytics account to see what search terms users use to find your website. Local terminology consists of the town name, county name the services that are offered and the location of your business.
Tip 2
Target a local market. To optimize your webpage, use your title to include the town or city and the service that is provided. To display properly in Goolge page titles need to be 70 or less characters and descriptions 156 characters or less. On appropriate pages add contact specifics that include address, phone number and business name. You should have a map on your contact page (write out location details), use rich snippets and structured data. Use local terms to optimize your page do not stuff your keywords.
Tip 3
Get registered in local information banks. Besides having all the regular information, make sure that you write a great explanation which includes the key local search term. If you are able to, add photos and tags. Some people think it is important to keep local citations consistent so that where people find you they have the same information, your address and numbers should obviously all be the same.
Tip 4
More and more people are using their phones to be connected to the internet, do not forget them. Get socialized. Put an app on mobile devices so that customers can get the local search information that they want when they want it. Using Google+Local is a great way to do this.
Tip 5
Go social. List your business in Foursquare and let the users check in. this is a great way to influence the power of local search, you can give customers who find you via social media specials and discounts. Create a Linkedin account Facebook and G+ page for your business too, use Google publisher markup to link to G+ page.
Tip 6
Ask your customers for feedback. It does not matter how good or bad the feedback is but that they are talking to you, it is important to here the bad feedback and nip it in the bud before anyone does. If there are positive remarks then use them to their fullest, post testimonials on your website and social media accounts, ask happy customers to review your G+ page.
In conclusion: If you follow the above steps it will help you to optimize your business for local search. Optimizing your webpages is a good way to get search rankings and to get more traffic to your site. People want more personal information when they look up information on a business. Some of that information should be name, address, services offered. If you have more than one location for your business then your information should be consistent.
Be sure to embed a map on your page for people to use. Do not forget the mobile optimization of your website, more and more customers are using their mobiles to search for local businesses. A HTML 5 wordpress theme is probably is the easiest way a small business can create an easy to manage mobile friendly website. Make a social page with all your information. If you follow these tips you can increase your local traffic.
This post was supplied by Cody Bollerman, San Diego based SEO consultant