Local SEO
Local SEO will help you become more visible in search engines within your local area, or for multiple individual office locations.
Local SEO is a service for companies/brands who wish to optimise their website for location based search terms.
For example, rather than targeting a national keyword such as ‘Local SEO’ (which would take longer and be much more competitive), they may wish to target ‘Local SEO Liverpool’ which still gets a good number of searches per month and will be achievable in a much shorter space of time than the equivalent national search term. As a specialist Local SEO agency we can get you ranking on Google Maps or in the organic results in only a few months.
In 2018, local search terms are given more prominence than ever before on Google, with many national search terms also now bring up a mixture of local results with the following positions available to rank in in the SERPs:
Standard organic presence
Google Map results
Structured Data/Rich Snippets
Organic Presence
The normal organic rankings for local terms work in the same way as national keyword terms; fundamentally it comes down to the authority of your website (gained through a high-quality, targeted link building campaign) as well as content and on-page technical SEO elements. There are, however, a few other factors that need to be incorporated into an SEO campaign to have the best chance of ranking locally, including an address and phone number that is local to the area that you wish to rank in. For example, if you are looking to rank for a Liverpool based search term then it always helps to have an ‘0151’ number as well as ‘Liverpool’ in your address.
Google Map Results
More people than ever before are clicking on Google Map results, so ensuring you are in the ‘3-pack’ (the top 3 results shown to everyone when performing a search) will get you the most possible clicks to your website and therefore lead to more direct enquiries. In fact, optimisation in Google Maps can be so effective that people will often enquire directly by clicking on your phone number without having even visited your website at all. Optimising your site correctly for map results can be a long, tedious process (depending upon the competition level) but is very rewarding. If you are ranking at the top of the map results then you are appearing above all of the organic rankings and therefore there is an argument to say it is better than ranking at number 1 organically in the normal search results.
Structured Data/Rich Snippets
Structured Data is an area that has been around for some time now but is still largely underused by many websites, businesses and even SEO agencies. If you’ve ever performed a search on Google and then had a box appear with a series of questions and an answer underneath or been shown cinema times, a recipe, a menu etc…then you’ve seen what structured data is. Below is an example…
Rich snippets are a great way of getting people to click through to your website before they scroll further down the page. By enlarge, people like convenience and they like to get their answer as quickly as possible. They are beneficial in the same way that Google Map results are, by generating clicks before a user has even had a chance to scroll down the results page.
Rich snippets can be complicated to setup and optimise for depending on how your website is built.
If you need any assistance with your local SEO, please fill out the contact form or call us on 07486 898508 and we’ll be happy to discuss your options with you.
