Local search engine optimisation (SEO), unlike regular SEO, is all about getting your website to rank as high as possible for your local audience. While your website gives you the ability to target all of the online world, if your audience is actually located around, near, or in your city, you are going to want to do some local SEO too. You will want to be sure and optimise your website for your particular city name, as well as all of your address details. Basically, you want local people to know exactly where to find your business. Let’s optimise your website for local SEO!
Why Local SEO?
If you have an offline business such as a shop or office that people are going to be visiting, when you optimise your website, you are essentially just guaranteeing that people are going to be able to find you. As long as you are targeting some type of audience that is located within the same area you are, you want to optimise for that particular area. This is exactly what local
search engine optimisation (SEO) is.
While it is much easier to optimise when you actually have an address in a certain city or region, you can also optimise for a certain area that you may offer services for. Either way, your biggest ally is going to be high-quality content. Simply write a lot as it pertains to that certain area. While it may not necessarily pertain to your business, it will help boost your local SEO rankings for that area.
Mention All Areas
A good game plan for optimising your website is to mention all of the surrounding areas as well. With smaller towns, there is usually less competition. This means that people looking for your services are more than likely to travel further for what they want. While this tactic works great if you are based in a smaller town with neighbouring towns nearby, for bigger cities this won’t really work as well. Bigger cities are typically broken up into smaller ‘sub-cities’ and will normally have much more competition. This increased competition normally keeps people within the areas in which they live.
It’s Not Just About Search Engines
There are many different things you can do to optimise your website for local SEO. If you do have a local business, however, there are other forms of local SEO that you should be utilising as well.
For example, word-of-mouth is by far the best form of local SEO. Nothing is more powerful than a referral from a friend or family member. Another example would be a printed brochure with all of the information about your business.
Another local SEO method, and one that Google will love and help boost your website rankings, is to use your social media accounts. By posting on your social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, then linking back to your website, you will not just be interacting with potential clients, but you will also be creating backlinks for your website as well.
Just remember that local SEO isn’t just about your website and social media, but about all of the factors mentioned above combined.