Almost everyone who uses their smartphone or computer to search for an emergency plumber, wedding caterer, or children’s dance teacher will definitely be looking for one in their area, or in a geographical location that is convenient for them. This is one of the most important reasons why local SEO is so important, as it helps people to easily find goods and services in their area. If you want to increase the amount of people who pop in to your store, or make an enquiry, you need to make local SEO a priority.
Here are a few steps you can follow to do just that.
Register your Business with Google’s My Business Page
The first step is to register on Google’s My Business page. Registering lets you verify your business’ contact details and address, as well as provide other important details customers might need to know, like your operating hours, and even how to get to your store. A Google My Business page can also provide extra, but very important info about your business at a glance. For example, if someone has heard about your business and would like to buy your products or services, but can’t remember anything but your business’ name, a quick search will bring up your listing, which will tell them everything they need to know.
Remember if you have multiple office locations, you can to add these in as well, so you get their sweet sweet local search results.
Make sure your information is up to date across your platforms
This might seem like a minor change, but it’s very important to ensure that your business’s name, number, address, and branding is the same across your website, social media platforms, and any other online profiles you might have. If you’re unconvinced, think about a potential customer who finds your business in a search, and is presented with two different retail locations. It’s more than likely that the browser will move on to the next search result.
The art of back-linking with quality local citations & directory listings
The oftentimes overlooked part of local SEO work, you need to get other well recognised non- spammy relevant directories to display your information.
Go for ones relevant to your business and clientele. You wouldn’t go bothered with a restaurant review site if your an electrician, your time and effort would be better used finding another suitable directory to display on.
Here are 15 free sites I would make sure your business is listed on:
- Google.com.au
- Facebook Business Page
- You Tube
- Foursquares
- Yellow Pages
- White Pages
- Sensis
- True Local
- Hot Frog
- Yelp
- here.com
- 2findlocal
- factual.com
I suggest you carbon copy your business name, address, and phone number from you google listing. Then sign up for as many of these as you can.
There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these out there, your local SEO specialist will be able to help you in submitting your business to only high value/ authority listings.
Woops did I forget to mention Bing places… yes people still use Bing.
Reviews, Reviews, Reviews.
Reviews help local SEO a lot, so make it easy for your clients to gift you a review on Google, Facebook, or any other directory or site. Never hurts to ask your clients to leave a review, there are also plugins for CMS like WordPress and other platforms where your clients can review directly from your website.
Pay attention to your on-page SEO
Did you know that your on-page SEO and local SEO work together? The synergy becomes clear if you look at your website’s schema markup and your keywords. Your schema markup is a section of website code that should have your up to date contact details embedded, while your website content should feature location-specific keywords. Ensuring that these two align, will help boost your local SEO tremendously.
Local SEO is incredibly important, and the steps listed above are just a few that you can take to make sure you’re showing up on online searches for potential customers who may just live a stone’s throw away from your business. Of course, the best SEO efforts involve combining off and on-page SEO as well as local SEO. To manage this, you can always get an agency like iOnline to take over the heavy lifting on your behalf!
Contact iOnline for SEO in Brisbane.
