Apr 15 2016
Okay, so you’ve set up a comprehensive strategy to search engine optimise (SEO) your website. You’ve invested time, money and valuable resources into ensuring that your businesses’ voice is heard over the cacophony of the online world.
And in fact, before long you’re receiving email queries left right and centre! The only problem is that the queries are from customers in Killara, Bondi and Vaucluse … and well, you’re an electrician that services the Parramatta area.
Why not try local SEO?
The good news is that it’s actually easier to optimise your business for local areas than it is to optimise for the whole of Sydney. Optimising for the whole of Sydney is highly competitive and becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. Meanwhile, optimising for your local area, such as Penrith, Blacktown, Parramatta etc, is easier, less competitive and has a far superior return on investment. And some more good news is that you won’t have to travel as far to service the clients you get from your local SEO efforts!
To get the most effective result, ensure that your website has being optimised for the relevant keywords and suburbs that you wish to target. If it has not, we can help you in this area.
To show that localising your SEO isn’t a difficult or a complex endeavour, we’ve collected some simple ways that you can effectively contribute to your local Search Engine Optimisation. This in conjuction with good on-page SEO will help you reach page 1 in no time.
1. Register your business as a Google Place
If you’re looking for local customers, you’ll need to be recognised as a local business. This is where Google Places fits in. If you haven’t yet read our article on why registering your business as a Google Place will help boost your marketing, you should check it out.
In a nut shell, Google Places will help your business appear to your local audience and provide customers with an opportunity to share, review and recommend your services to their friends and family.
2. Acquire free backlinks
Online directories allow you to list your company details, including name, address and phone number and most importantly, a backlink to your website. Google gives preference to sites with credible backlinks. Examples of these include TrueLocal, Hotfrog and Home Improvement pages. If you’re submitting your business details manually to these sites, make sure that you describe your business address and details the same way each and every time.
You may get a call from the sales team at one of these sites trying to sell you an upgrade of your plan, but you’re not obliged to take them up on their offer. The free listing is a good opportunity to create a backlink to your website.
If you’re looking for other ways to get backlinks you can try guest blogging and including your business details in your author bio.
Tip: A word of warning! Never buy or pay anyone to submit your URL to a service that automates this process. Too many too quickly will ring alarm bells to Google and could potentially get your website de-listed.
3. Get reviews
In the card game of local SEO, reviews outmaneuver citations every time. Of course, they’ll need to be positive reviews but with a fabulous business such as yours, how could they not be? The key is to have quality, positive reviews and lots of them.
You can encourage your existing customers to post reviews online by putting up ‘review us’ stickers onsite at your business location and also on any promotional material. You can also include your social media links in all of your email communications. Sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp are great ways to encourage reviews as well. Lastly, do not buy reviews. Ever. They are too much of a risk to both your reputation and your online profile.
4. Ensure your social media is up to scratch
The truth is that businesses that don’t invest in social media efforts are at a significant disadvantage these days. Many businesses have a dedicated social media strategy and some even entire teams devoted just to social media efforts.
Even though you may not be a big company (yet) it’s still really important for you to access your customers via these platforms. Sites that are particularly useful for local SEO rankings are Facebook and Twitter, both of which give you an opportunity to list website address (hello, backlinks!).
If you don’t have much time to tweet, like, poke or post, why not dedicate an hour or two one afternoon to set up your social media posts for the next few weeks? Facebook has a great ‘schedule post’ feature that allows you to pre-plan your content. Take advantage not only of the social media tools available, but the features within those tools.
5. See the experts
If you’re like most people, the last thing you have time for is developing and maintaining ways to increase your SEO, local or otherwise. Which is why many businesses choose to outsource their SEO tactics to an agency. Hiring an agency ensures that you benefit from all of the tricks of the trade, without having to waste valuable time researching and implementing strategies. The right agency will be able to point you in the best direction and like any expert should, discover to the best ways attract customers quickly and easily.
While these are all great things that you can do yourself to help boost your local SEO rankings, there are also some expert tips and tricks that FX Design Studio can employ to help too, such as developing effective on-page optimisation.
To find out more, give FX Design Studio a call to learn how we can help you develop a unique SEO strategy for your local customers?
