SEO best practice
The use of SEO best practices is something that more and more businesses are starting to put into action within their online presence and this is especially true for local SEO. Nowadays, more and more of us are turning to search engines to find the answers we need and businesses are constantly fighting for the top spot on the first page of Google. For small businesses in particular, dominating your local rankings is a must and while companies such as Absolute Digital can help put an effective SEO campaign into action, here is exactly what your business needs in order to storm your local rankings using SEO.
Google my business
Google My Business is a much overlooked tool that any sized business should be using. When you search for a particular business or service, Google will often provide the listing for a business as part of the results. Every business qualifies for having one and all you have to do is claim yours and ensure that you’re optimising it to its fullest. Your GMB listing should contain the following:
· Your Business Name
· A Contact Number
· Your Social Profiles
· Your Address
· Your Logo
· Your Opening Hours
· Plenty Of Photos Of Your Business And Products
· Reviews
By including all of this, customers will be able to access your business information more easily, and your business has a better chance at being included as one of the three locations that appear at the top of the results when a customer searches “___ near me.” People can also use your Google My Business to contact you directly, cutting out the need for them to navigate your entire website to find your contact details. Ultimately, an optimised Google My Business profile can provide you with more opportunities to attract your audience and generate leads.
Mobile optimisation
The introduction of Google’s mobile-first index has increased the need for a mobile-friendly website more than ever before. This indexing method essentially means that if your site doesn’t have a fully optimised version for mobile use, you’re unlikely to reach the first page of results on mobile or desktop. Optimising your site includes ensuring a loading speed of 2-3 seconds, ensure that the design of your site is user-friendly through no popups, no flash and less opportunity for ‘accidental clicks’ and more concise content, titles and meta descriptions. Mobile optimisation can be a difficult task, but it is one of the most important in this new age of smartphones. While businesses can still rank on desktop, Google will essentially favour a site with an excellent mobile version above a site with an inadequate mobile version.
On page SEO
On Page SEO is essentially the process of optimising the content on your webpages for relevance, quality and keywords. Keywords are perhaps the most basic, but most essential forms of on-page SEO optimisation. In essence, this means that your content will be rich with keywords so Google’s crawlers will pick up that your site is relevant for certain search queries. However, while this technique has been around for as long as SEO has been a focus for businesses, it’s becoming much more temperamental. You’ll have to be careful not to oversaturate your content with keywords, but too few could see your site overtaken by your competitors.
What’s more, while keyword optimisation is a must, it’s also not likely to have your page ranking on its own so it’s important to consider the other points on this list too. Take into account the Google Hummingbird algorithm update, and be sure to craft high quality, valuable content which provides information to your readers, while remaining naturally optimised for the target search term. Natural content is what your audience, and what Google crawlers, are looking for. Spammy keyword-saturated content could result in your site being hit with a penalty.
Local links
Link building is a must for any site looking for increased domain authority and trust flow, but it’s important that you make sure that the links are valuable. This essentially means that your backlinks have to be legitimate, relevant and have value to the reader as opposed to just being put into content for the sake of being there. When it comes to local SEO, you need to aim for not only the usual high-authority backlinks, but you also need to aim for links from local businesses. This won’t necessarily help with your trust flow or domain authority levels to any great extent, but these links will help Google to realise and understand how important your business could be locally.
Local SEO is a must for any business no matter the size, but it can also be a tricky path to navigate. However, with the above points and other SEO best practices, your site could be sitting at the top of the first page of Google in no time at all.
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