How can my business start to improve its local SEO?

Introduction

 

In this article we will talk about the following:

–        How to create a Google My Business account

–        How to fill in your Google My Business account

–        Business citations and why their important to local SEO

–        What does NAP even mean?

–        Onsite SEO, meta titles, descriptions, content marketing, internal links

–        Content marketing

–        Backlinks

A lot of companies that are based here in the city of Bristol, will undoubtedly want to work on improving both their “organic” and also their local search engine optimisation, also known as SEO.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of talk about when it comes to SEO ( we could literally write a 10,000 word article on the matter), so with this article we are going to give you a quick overview into some of the ways that a business can improve its local SEO.

This article is therefore intended to give you an idea of some of the things you can do, yet there are many other ways a business can improve its SEO as well. This is just to give you an idea of some of the things we do at our agency to help a company to improve its search engine optimisation.

When a business therefore wants to improve its local SEO in Bristol, what the business owner sometimes means is that they want to rank higher organically and also in the Google My Business results.

Our agency can help you to do both, however its worth bearing in mind that the algorithm works slightly different for these different set of business results. Regardless of that, whatever SEO work you are doing, you need to follow “Google’s WebMaster Guidelines” or find a well-respected, reputable white hat agency that knows what they are doing, like Pack Digital.

Improving a business’s local SEO often involves a lot of hard work, and a huge amount of hours, it is therefore not something that can be completed overnight, that’s for sure.

Instead, quality work is needed every single month of the year, that’s delivered by an experienced SEO consultant. If you don’t pay for SEO each month, then its easy to quickly get overtaken by the competition.

This is why when you get on the phone to various digital marketing agencies which are based in The South West of England, to get quotes to improve the businesses SEO, they don’t often state a one-off fee to do the work, instead what is often needed is monthly work for an ongoing price.

Therefore, monthly prices are often set, in order for the agency to complete their tasks every single month, this is why completing SEO work is like “entering a marathon rather than a sprint”.

What we mean by that is, the business must be committed to paying for their digital marketing every single month, as the work needs to be continuous. Now this is no guarantee that the work you purchase will be quality, some agencies offer superb quality work, others not so much, so you need a real high-quality agency that’s doing the work.

The reason the work needs to be continuous is simple, soon as a business stocks investing, they are allowing other businesses to beat that standard of SEO and therefore be overtaken.

Therefore, businesses are only ranked according to how strong their SEO is at that moment in time, if other businesses gain stronger SEO then they will quite simply rank higher on Google, this is why it is a continuous effort to improve the Bristol companies SEO.

This is why you need to find an agency that you are happy to work with the long-term basis, SEO is definitely not something that can be completed in a matter of days, it needs a sustained period of time.

 

Google My Business

Right, one of the first things you can do, is to create what is called a Google My Business account.

This is not complicated at all to do, that’s to say somebody with no SEO knowledge at all, can start to setup such an account with Google in a matter of minutes.

However, with that said, we wouldn’t leave this task to the end of the day for it to be rushed, that’s because you want to beat the traffic on your drive home from work, no, it’s too important for that.

Having a Google My Business account is important to your company, as it can provide the following valuable information to your customers:

Address

Phone number

Opening hours

Business description

Customer reviews

Picture of the products you sell

Instead, what you need to do is spend a good amount of time filling in your account and making sure all the details are accurate.

Wait for your code

For some businesses, you might have to wait for a code to be popped through the post, this is just for the verification purposes, it shouldn’t take long at all to receive this.

Therefore you will need to log back into your account, and add the code then is often attached to a postcard.

Make sure on your Google My Business account that you fill in all the important details

There are a huge number of Google My Business accounts, where the business owner has incorrectly filled the details in, for example they might get the URL wrong, or they might abbreviate the address, and this then means it doesn’t match the business citations.

Another common mistake is to use a phone number, that might not match the business citations.

Remember the point that we made earlier, in that the business citations must all match, so the NAP information must all be the same.

URL

You will therefore need to add your company URL  

Address

You should add your current business address, and if this changes you should keep it updated.

 

Phone number

You should then add your phone number, we would recommend using the main business phone number, rather than using a mobile number.

Description of the business

You might want to write a short description about the business, this should be unique, so for example don’t copy and paste from another place, write the text so that it is unique. We shall explain later on why it’s important to have unique text and not to copy.  

Business Reviews on your Google My Business account

Another very important part of local SEO, is to gain genuine business reviews, now it doesn’t matter if you sell coffee or you sell high-value cars, if you have real reviews, that are left on your Google My Business account, then this can also help to improve your SEO

Follow Google’s WebMaster Guidelines

we would highly recommend that you always follow “Google’s WebMaster Guidelines”

Build quality “Business Citations” (NAP)

At our digital marketing agency, which works for companies based in Clifton, through to Bath, has many local SEO expert’s that work for us, and one of the ways we improve our client’s local SEO, is by building business citations.

Each business citation doesn’t take very long to build, however what is more important is the accuracy, that means the NAP details must all match with each other and also be kept up-to-date.

So for example, problems  can occur, if the business in Bristol, and then changes its address,  and updates the website, but doesn’t keep its business citations updated.

If the business citations (NAP) are not kept updated, this can cause “conflicting business citations” to occur, which means it can be sometimes confusing to Google’s algorithm, where the business is actually based.

So, all of your business citations (NAP) should be kept up-to-date.

The reason for that is it’s like asking someone in Bristol for directions to a place, and the first person says to go one way, and the other person says the other, of course you’re going to be very confused who to believe, and which direction you should be taking.

So all of your NAP information, from the NAP details on your company website, right through to your Google My Business account and all citations should be kept up-to-date

Onsite SEO

A really important part of local SEO is on-site SEO, is because you can do a huge amount of off-site SEO, building quality links and so forth, but if the on-site SEO is not up to scratch then it could be deemed as a complete and total waste of time.

For example somebody might concentrate on building backlinks, for hundreds of hours, but if the on-site SEO is very poorly done, this can mean that all of the SEO can fall down completely

Meta titles and meta descriptions

you should write the meta title and also a meta description for each page and blog post.

This doesn’t take very long at all, however connectors a summary as what that page or indeed that post is about.

If you use a CMS, such as WordPress, then there are plug-ins that can help you to easily add a meta title or a description to each page

Have you described all of the services you offer?

This may sound like a really silly question at first, that is have you described all the services that your business offers on your website-yet let us explain what we mean.

As any good digital marketing agency will tell you, it’s important to have on each main page the different services the company offers.

So for example, if you run a plumbing business and you serve the whole of Bristol, then you should have each service set out on each individual page. This means it might want one page for boiler repair, another for servicing boilers, boiler replacement and so on.

Unique

it’s really crucial, that the text that is added to your website is unique, should not therefore be copied from another source.

If the work is copied, then this can sometimes severely damage your SEO.