Local SEO Guide: How to Optimise Your Business’ Website

If your business operates locally, one of the best ways to improve your website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) is through local SEO. In this guide, we’ll be exploring what local SEO is, how it can benefit your business, and some tips for optimising your website – to ultimately drive and increase revenue

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the process of optimising a business’ website for local search results. This involves improving the website’s visibility and ranking in SERPs for relevant keywords and phrases that are used by people in your area who are looking for a local business like yours.

Why Is Local SEO Important?

Optimising your website for local searches is extremely powerful in boosting the performance of your business on the web. 46% of Google searches are seeking local information, which means that if you haven’t optimised your business’ website for local searches, then you could be missing out on potential customers. Local SEO is crucial for your business if you are striving to improve performance in your area

Optimising Your Website for Local SEO

Now that we’ve established what local SEO is and why it’s so important for your website – let’s dive into the local SEO process:

Perform A Local SEO Audit

The best place to start your local SEO journey is by auditing how your website performs locally, but how do you perform a local SEO audit? Knowing how your business is currently performing online informs you of the areas that need improvement

• Google My Business Audit – Understand how your Google My Business appears in the SERPs and ensure accuracy.
• Google Search Console Audit – Search console is a powerful free to use tool which gives you access to performance data as well as insight to any potential technical issues your site may have. A technical foundation is essential for performance.
• On-Page SEO Audit – How well does your site accommodate the content elements needed to rank?
• Citation Audit – Is all of your business information listed correctly in the top directories?
• Competitor Analysis – Before optimising your website for local SEO, it’s important to compare your site to your competitors’ in order to identify which areas need improvement

“A high quality Local SEO strategy is crucial to your business performing organically in the local area”

Contact Details

It’s imperative that your contact details are consistent across your Google My Business and website. To make it easy for people and search engines to find you, make sure your NAP is included as crawlable HTML text on your site. Your NAP includes name, address, and phone number(s).

Improve Your Internal Linking Structure

External links directed towards your site are great for improving performance as they illustrate to search engines that other websites view the information that you have as authoritative and trustworthy, supplementing this with a strong internal linking strategy ensures pages share the equity.

Add Location Pages To Your Website

If you have multiple brick-and-mortar locations, we recommend creating a page for each specific branch. A separate page is beneficial because it provides readers with specific information about the store, including name, address, phone number, store hours, unique descriptions for that specific branch and information on nearby transit/parking. They can also be used to promote special offers and serve as an opportunity to provide testimonials from happy customers for that specific location.

Also, you should ensure that your pages don’t contain duplicate content. For each location, create a unique About Us page that is descriptive and includes a Google Map on the respective location page.

Create Local Content

In order to best optimise your business for local search, it’s important to understand the ways in which you can attract consumers who are searching within their own geographic location. Promoting industry events, news, and other educational content on your blog will help establish you as a local authority within your industry. This is beneficial because it helps direct potential customers to your business at the top of the funnel and creates interest in what you are doing.

So there you have it, everything you need to know to get your website ranking locally. It’s important to remember that, if you have competitors in your area, it can be very competitive online. At Onelink, we have experience in helping a number of different websites in a variety of industries jump up the search engine rankings. So if you’re in need of some local SEO help, please get in touch with our experts today.