Local SEO Solutions

Local business marketing has moved on from Yellow Pages ads

Why is local SEO important? A few years back marketing your business to the local area was a much simpler affair. An advert in the Yellow Pages, classifieds in the local newspapers and maybe a few adverts in trade publications is all it would take to start attracting local customers. Those days are very much in the past, I can not remember the last time I used the printed edition of the Yellow Pages to source a business, in fact I can not remember the last time I even saw a copy of the Yellow pages! These days more and more people are turning to the internet to find local products and services and, with the impact of tablets like the iPad and smart phones making accessing the internet quicker than ever, this is only likely to increase. This is why local SEO is becoming more and more important for small businesses.

Another key factor in why people are turning away from traditional business listing services to the internet is that a company website can grant the user far more information than a printed classified advertisement could ever do.

For these reasons any business that is not investing time and money into a local search optimisation strategy is very quickly going to get left behind by their competition. It is no good being the best plumbing service in town if nobody even knows you exist, and if you’re not on the first page of Google’s search results you might as well not exist in their eyes. Also if the service you provide is very much only offered in your local area than you need to be mindful of tailoring any local SEO marketing that you do to suit this factor. There is no point ranking on the first page of Google for a number of terms if 90% of the traffic you get is from outside of your local area.

What does our local SEO service entail?

Keyword Research

Everyday millions of people use search engines (predominantly Google, Bing and Yahoo) to seek out information on a massive variety of topics. The words or phrases that they use in the search box are known as keywords and these are of great importance for any SEO campaign, local or otherwise. As part of our service we will investigate what keywords your site should be targeting, what keywords your competition are targeting and what level of competition there are for each keyword.

On Page Optimisation

Our service breaks the on-page optimisation into 2 distinct categories. The first is optimising the website so that it has a better chance of ranking well in the search engines. This includes a number of things like making sure the code of the website is not bloated full of un-needed code, ensuring <title> tags are being used effectively an all pages, seeing that keywords are being properly used in headings and page content, that images are being optimised properly, that the pages within the site are all interlinking together effectively and using the right anchor text etc. All of these points, and more, will contribute to how effectively your site is set up for SEO.

The second category for on-page optimisation is how well the site is set up to convert visitors into customers or sales leads. There is no point in investing time and money into getting more visitors to your site if the site cannot convert them into sales. This could be due to a number of reasons like poor site navigation, poor sales copy, no distinct call to action, poor quality photographs etc.

As part of our service we will examine all aspects of your site and present you with a report on what needs to change. If you haven’t got a website yet then why not let us give you a price for a site that will be local SEO optimised right from the very beginning.

Google Places Optimisation

An example of Google's Places results

If you are not sure what Google Places is, here is a quick overview. Google Places are what are commonly called the “Maps” listings and very often appear at the top of the results page for local specific search term, it allows the business owner to present potential customers with a variety of information, photos and videos. It also allows customers to submit reviews of businesses for other customers to see.

As part of our service we will claim your business listing on your behalf, if you haven’t already done so, optimise the listing so that every bit of information is filled out, build citations to the listing to enable it to rank better and, depending on the package you choose, work with you to build genuine positive reviews from past customers. Please, if you take nothing else away from this page, do not rush out and starting posting up positive reviews yourself to your own page, it will not work out well!

Off-Page Optimisation

This involves primarily the building of links to your site in order to build up the domain authority and improve rankings. We will pro-actively seek out linking opportunities for your site, making sure to never do anything that will put your site in harm’s way.

We also offer, depending on the package you opt for, Facebook page and Twitter account management services.

Bespoke Solutions For Every Customer

We know that every company is different, every product or service is different and needs to be marketed differently and for that reason we will always tailor our local SEO solutions to suit your company and product/service. We do this by taking the time to learn as much as we can about your company, your products/services and the industry you operate in.

Please contact us to learn more.