Your brick and mortar business can be highly profitable, but it won’t be the best without local SEO. With nearly 46% of Google searches searching for local information and 72% of them visiting the store(s) that they found, local SEO becomes a solid marketing tool that can create great results.
But how? Even if you have a website, it may not be getting enough local traffic, despite your efforts.
In this article, we try to correct that. Here are three local SEO tips that can quickly boost your business’s rankings in the local search engine. So, buckle up and read on.
1. Analysing Traffic & Updating Existing Content Accordingly
Monitoring the traffic on your website is crucial for many reasons.
First of all, this helps you identify the top-performing keywords for your website. By simply using Google Analytics, you can find out the keywords that are getting you the most amount of local traffic.
And how will that help?
Google Analytics will also show you keywords that your website is ranking for but not on the top positions. This means that these keywords may not be getting traffic to you but hold the potential to do so. Similarly, this also means that your web pages are good enough to rank for these keywords but aren’t ranking for some reason.
If you can find out the reason and fix it, your website’s search visibility may quickly boost up. In most cases, this can be solved by adding more content around the keyword you want to rank for.
You can also use Ahrefs keyword research tool to find keywords that your website is ranking for but not on the top positions.
2. Improving Page Speed
To understand the importance of page speed, let’s take an example.
You run a woodshop in the Chelmsey complex in Birmingham. Now, as the monopoly is a rare concept, your competitor may also have a similar shop right next to yours. Let us assume you got a website built for your business, and so did your competitor.
Both of you have functional websites with all the essential details a buyer may need. But, your competitor’s site loads quicker than yours.
Now, even if you are placed at the top of the search engine for a good keyword, and your competitor is placed second to you, a large chunk of your prospects will pogo stick from your website to his/her.
Doesn’t sound good, right?
It’s best to improve page speed on priority. You can look for qualified SEO services in Birmingham to improve this situation and fulfil your other SEO requirements.
Otherwise, you can also visit GTMetrix.com or Google Pagespeed Insights tool. These tools will tell you about how quick your local business website is, how long it takes to load, and how light it is. Apart from that, these tools give in-depth data about the website’s loading speed, along with the issues that you can resolve to speed up your loading times.
For example, if you use Google Pagespeed Insights, you’ll come across the following steps:
Step 1: Visit Google Pagespeed Insights Tool
Step 2: Paste your website URL and hit enter
Step 3: The tool will take you to a results page, which will look like this:
Step 4: You start resolving these and other errors one-by-one, and you’ll notice a significant increase in your website’s loading speed.
Important note: If you aren’t well versed with the technical functionality of your website, leave this job to a professional web developer.
Also, page speed is important as over 50% of mobile web users leave a website that doesn’t load in three seconds, and search engines prioritise websites that load quickly.
3. Resolving Technical Errors like Sitemaps, HTTPS security etc
There’s a number of technical factors affecting your website’s SEO. In this section, we’ll discuss the following three of them:
HTTPS: HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. When you add it to your website, you are adding a layer of security preventing tampering by third parties and encrypting all information from URL to all transactions.
Websites running with HTTPS are more secure for users and are preferred more by various search engines.
XML Sitemaps: XML sitemaps allow search engines to crawl & index a website’s data significantly, so it can be easily found and ranked higher where suitable.
Robots.txt: This is a file in the database of your website. Its purpose is to help search crawlers identify which pages to crawl on your website.
Canonical Tags: Canonical tags indicate to search engines that a certain URL is a master copy or another page. By using canonical tags, you prevent the search engine from confusing two pages with the identical content for plagiarism. This resolves the problem of duplicate content (present on the same website) being flagged by the search engines.
If you lack technical knowledge about how websites work, it’d be best for you to connect with a qualified SEO and web development professional. This will keep you from making irreversible mistakes.
Wrapping up
Local SEO is one of the most important marketing tools that can help your business reach more local customers than ever. However, the process requires air-tight implementation of the right techniques.
In this article, we discussed three top local SEO techniques that can quickly improve your website’s search rankings in your locality.
Hopefully, this was helpful.
