SEO or search engine optimisation is a way of marketing your business on the search engines such as Google, Bing, Duck Duck go and many more of the smaller search engines.
SEO comes under a few different branches and connecting them all will help potential customers find your business. If you are a local business and have a website that doesn't generate leads for your business then chances are your website's SEO is poor.
In this blog post, we will look at some of the ways you can improve your website's SEO so you can generate more sales for your business. So let's get started.
Technical SEO
The problems with websites is that none of them are created equally and some developers are better than others at certain coding practices. If your website was coded in a way that makes your website non SEO friendly you are going to have a tough time showing up when someone searches for your business.
To find out if there is anything wrong with your website which is stopping it from ranking you could hire a technical SEO consultant but that could be costly and depending on where your business is right now it may not be an option.
A cheaper method would be to use a tool such as Screaming Frog or Deep Crawl to run a crawl on your website and then pass these issues on to a freelance developer. You could use a website such as Upwork to find a freelancer to help you with your problem.
If you can't afford a freelancer you could also take the time to learn what the most common SEO issues are from a technical point of view and then learn how to fix them yourself.
Technical SEO is in my opinion the most boring part, but it needs to be done so that it can lay a strong foundation for the rest of your marketing efforts. Without laying a strong foundation the rest of your SEO marketing isn't going to have anywhere near the same effect.
On-Page SEO
On-page, SEO covers everything you put on your website so that the search engines can find it. This can be anything from doing local keyword research to optimising your title and heading tags.
When doing on-page SEO you need to optimise your website not only to have the right keywords on your site in the right quantities but you also need to make sure the user experience is good and that you are writing for humans and not robots such as the search engines.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is everything that needs to be done off of your website so that it can be found. Off-page SEO mainly involves getting backlinks to your website which means getting other websites to link to yours. For local businesses, you need to go a step further and also get something called citations which list your phone number, address and business name too.
Google has something called the map pack when you search for a local keyword such as "Plumbers in New York." For a local business, it's vital to show up in this map pack as you can generate more calls and website visits by being here.
To show up in the map pack you are going to need to be mentioned on other websites as well as having citations in relevant business directory websites.
Getting links and citations to your website is going to improve your search engine position when combined with good content that you would have created in the last section with your on-page SEO.
Tracking Your Local SEO Rankings
As a local business owner, it's vital to track your local keyword rankings as Google and the other search engines update their algorithm often and one week you could be at the top of the search results page and another you could be at the bottom.
Using a local rank tracking software tool will allow you to see when any ranking fluctuations have taken place and you can then reverse engineer why this took place and what you can do about it.
If you weren't to monitor this ranking fluctuation you would never have known it happened and also what you could do to change it.
Conclusion
With social media networks clamping down on organic reach it's very important to look at additional ways of marketing your local business and local SEO is a great way of doing that if you are prepared to put the time and effort into doing so.
