If you found this blog post you are probably interested in small business local SEO techniques. Congratulations, you have come to the right place to find a quick list of key Local SEO tips that will help in any small business online marketing efforts.
Without a consistent and well-established footprint, your business will not be found online. This means new customers are not finding you and you are not creating new business opportunities. This is NOT GOOD since you cannot grow a business without new customers.
Here is a list of SEO tips that you should make sure are covered by you or your web designer / seo expert as you optimize your web site.
- Google Analytics (Track Everything)
- Google Webmaster Tools (How Google Views Your Site)
- Title Tag (How to Optimize)
- H1 Tag (How to Optimize)
- Meta Description Tag (What is important)
- Internal Links (Guide Visitors/Bots To Your Own Content)
- SEO Footer (Understand Why NAP is Important)
- Increase Phone Calls From Your Website
- Increase Emails From Your Website
- Avoiding An Over Optimizing
Google Analytics (Track Everything)
The first step is to make sure that you track everything that happens on your website. There are many website analytics tools that can track your visitors. The top web analytics platforms are: Google Analytics, Spring Metrics, WebTrends & Adobe SiteCatalyst. Google Analytics is a first choice for small business owners. It’s free and fairly simple to implement. Here’s how:
- Step 1 – Sign up for a Google Account (or sign in if you already have one)
- Step 2 – Next visit the Google Analytics website
- Step 3 – Click “Sign Up”, enter your Website name, URL, category & time zone. Click “Get Tracking ID” to finish up
- Step 4 – Place the tracking code on every page of your website.
- Step 5 – Check your Analytics account weekly. If you are not sure what to check please contact us today.
Google Webmaster Tools (Find Out How Google Views Your Site)
Before you start worrying about optimizing your site the next item you should set up is Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is another wonderful free tool from Google that provides you excellent data about Google’s visibility of your website. You can see how many impressions and clicks you site gets, and there are tools for checking page load times and page errors. It is easy to setup! Just follow these simple instructions:
- Step 1 – Visit Google Webmaster Tools on the web
- Step 2 – Sign into your Google account, enter your website URL and click “Add A Site”
- Step 3 – Select the “HTML File Upload” verification method. Follow the on-screen instructions for verifying
- Step 4 – Review your crawl stats, crawl errors and impression data. Need help interpreting Google Webmaster Tools for a small business site? Contact us for help today!
Title Tags (How to Optimize)
After setting up your analytics and webmaster tools you are now ready to start optimizing your website. But where do you start first? <Title> tags! The title tag is the most important SEO element of a web page, even more important than the URL of the page.
A title tag is your chance to tell the search engines what your page is about. Title tag best practices: Keep them under 70 characters, include your city & state, include 1-2 keywords, and include your business name. If you have a auto body shop in Wylie, Texas, your idea optimized title tag would be: Wylie, TX Auto Body Shop – Bob’s Auto Shop. What makes this a great title tag? It include your city, state, 2 keywords, and the name of your business in less than 70 characters.
The title tag should be implemented within the <head> section of your HTML code. A great place to start with title tag optimization is your home page, which is the most important page of your website. After you’ve implemented an optimized title tag on the home page, you can begin to move onto other top landing pages.
H1 Tag (How To Optimize)
After the title tag, one of the most important on-page SEO elements of a page is the header, or, <H1> tag. The H1 tag provides you with another opportunity to tell search engines and site visitors what your page is about. H1 tags can be much longer than title tags if necessary, and in many cases they can be the full name of the page or blog post they’re describing. You should have only one H1 tag on each page of your website.
You always want to make sure there are keywords in your H1 tag. Sticking with the concept of Bob’s Auto Shop, let’s look at how you would create an appropriate H1 tag that can reinforce the already optimized title tag. That H1 tag would be: Auto Body Shop in Wylie, TX – Bob’s Auto Shop.
What you’ll notice is that the same elements from the title tag are used, they are just in a new order. In this case, our Auto Shop’s home page is now optimized for people searching both: “City Keyword” (Wylie Auto Body Shop) and “Keyword in City” (Auto Body Shop in Wylie) variations.
Meta Description Tag
The meta description tag should be the next on-page element to optimize after the title tag and the h1 tag. Google and Bing search engines will return the title of your page along with a small snippet underneath describing what your page is about. They often will use the contents of the description tag for this snippet.
The meta description probably will not affect your organic rankings. It’s main use is to entice searchers to click on your result in the SERPs. How do you use the meta description to improve your small business SEO. You make sure there is a Call to Action in your description. You should invite a potential customer to try your services, call your business, or get something for visiting your website. If you are not doing this you are probably missing out on clicks to your website.
Internal Links (Guide Visitors/Bots To Your Own Content)
“Internal Links” are hyperlinks within your own content that help both search engine bots and site visitors find their way around your website. Here Is an example of an internal link pointing to our Online Marketing page. Internal links like this can help visitors find relevant content on your website and they let Google associate keywords (Online Marketing) with landing pages. You will see improved SERP results once you complete your on-page SEO optimization.
You might be wondering: How do I decide what content to link to internally? There is no hard and fast rule for every website. For the most part, after you develop a SEO keyword strategy you will have 2-3 keyword terms per page that you are optimizing for. These 2-3 terms are what you use to develop your internal linking strategy. Every page that you create should have at least 2 links to other relevant pages on your website.
SEO Footer (Understand that NAP is important)
A key part of your on-page optimization is also directly related to your local optimization efforts. First and foremost if you are a local business you must be on Google+ Local. You cannot rank on the front page of Google without being locally optimized. If you are a local business that is not optimized on Google+ and the other top directories then please contact us, we can help you.
A key part of local optimization for Google+, Bing, Yahoo and Yelp is to have a consistent Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP), and making sure that the directory bots can find your NAP.
One way to make sure the directory bots can find you NAP is to put it in the footer of every page on your website.
You’ll also want to make sure your NAP is marked up with Schema code. This helps Google, Yahoo & Bing understand that your business name, address and phone number is actually associated with a business. To do that:
- Step 1 – Visit the Schema Creator
- Step 2 – Select “Local Business” under the “Type” drop down
- Step 3 – Fill out all of your business information. Note: Make sure this exactly matches your Google+ Local NAP
- Step 4 – Take the generated code and put it in the footer of every page on your website.
To preview how your content might look in search results, or if you’ve added additional code you’d like to test, use Google’s rich snippets testing tool.
Finally, make sure that your NAP is consistent everywhere. That includes other directories, blogs, or anywhere for that matter.
Increase Phone Calls From Your Website
Did you know that according to research by BIA Kelsey 60% of local business websites don’t have their phone number on their site. (BIA Kelsey, 2012) . Make sure that you are not one of these local businesses. A potential customer cannot call you if they cannot find your phone number. If a customer can’t find your phone number within 10 seconds of browsing your website, you have a problem! Add your phone number to your header, sidebar and footer. You’re already putting in a big effort to get visitors to come to your site, so once they get there you should work to convert them and turn those visitors into customers!
Increase the Emails That You Get From Your Website
Just like phone numbers are missing from most small business websites, contact forms are missing as well. A contact form makes it easy for potential customers to talk to you. It completely eliminates the step of forcing a potential customer to launch their email program, find your email address and type out an email. Make it easy for your visitors to communicate with you!
Your local business website should be ready to convert a visitor at any given time. Think about areas of your website that are likely conversion points and create contact forms to make it easy for potential customers to communicate with you.
Avoid Over Optimization
Do no over optimize your website. Google might hit you with an over optimization penalty. This happens when Google believes you are keyword stuffing or attempting to manipulate the search engine results pages in a bad way. Your website and all pages it contains should be created for site visitors first, then search engine bots. Your goal should be to make a great user experience while implementing SEO best practices for local business websites along the way.