As we learned last week in our look at a brief overview of local SEO, there are some ways that you can optimize your online content to help your website become more relevant for searches of local listings. Today I want to look at four quick and easy things that can be done to help you optimize content that is on your own website.
Your website is probably one of the best places to start when doing SEO work, as a lot of your efforts will link back to your website. This is also where you may be working with someone who offers web design solutions, who will be able to implement these suggestions for you. I’ve kept most of my suggestions simple enough that you’ll be able to do most of them yourself if you have access to your content management system, but if any of them seem beyond your comfort level, working with a web design professional will help.
So, without further ado, here are four areas where you can help improve the Local SEO on your website:
- Contact Information. This means that you want to include the full name of your business, the address of your physical location(s), and the phone number of your business, on your website. Not only is this great for search engines – but it’s great when a potential customer is looking to get in touch with you to purchase a product or service that you provide! When placing it on your website, remember that it should be placed on your website as actual text (instead of an image) so search engines can read it. Your contact information is extremely important as search engines will take this data into account for which results to show in geo-targeted searches.
- Page Titles. Search engines pay a lot of attention to page titles and headlines, so any time you service a specific area, you will want to include that area in your titles. This can include both the
titletag and the first heading on your page. For example, if you are a landscaper that services solely the Kitchener-Waterloo area, you might want to consider the main title on the home page for your website to be something similar to “Creating beautiful yards in Kitchener and Waterloo.” - Local Landing Pages. Landing pages are generally created as an entrance to your website, often by coming across it through search engines, social media, email campaigns, etc. Local landing pages are hyper-local to the area that you service. Local landing pages can best be used when you know what your target market is looking for and what sets you apart from other local businesses in the area. If you service multiple localities, your local landing pages should include information that is relevant information to the people in that particular local area and that can’t be accomplished through a generalized page – this means that creating local landing pages with the exact same information and only the city name changed isn’t going to be in your best interest.
- Use Schema To Help Search Engines Identify Important Information. Schema is the one item on this list where you may want to enlist the help of your website designer; schema refers to code that was created to communicate better with search engines. For example, if you hold weekly events, you can use the schema markup to let Google know that you’re posting about events, and Google will often treat the information differently.
In the upcoming week, I challenge you to make one positive change to your website that will help improve your local SEO efforts.
