A Local SEO Guide on Growing your Business with Search

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website for your local area on the search engine. Search Engine Optimization is becoming more popular and ranking for keywords online is becoming more competitive, so with local SEO you are only competing with similar businesses in your area.

Local SEO can be great for doctors, dentists, restaurants, or even Car insurance brokers.

How does Local SEO Work?

Let’s say if you are looking for a hairdresser near you in Carlow and you search for this on Google. You will find two types of local SEO results. Google My Business listings and the Organic Search Results. Let’s go into detail about both types of SEO listings.

Google My Business Local SEO

Often when you search for terms locally, the first thing that will show up before the organic search results is the Google My Business Listings.
Creating your account and optimizing your listing can be important to get in the top 3 spots for your search terms locally. For example, I searched hairdressers near me and below are the search results. There is often quite alot of hairdressers in any given area so these businesses are competing for the top spots locally.

How Can I optimize My Google My Business Listing?

• Add your keyword to your listing name
• Update your profile well with your location, number, websites, logo, banner, services and opening times.
• Keep your location, website and phone number consistent on your website and directories.
• Add titled geo tagged images and videos
• Increase your Click through rate by asking your customers for reviews.
• Respond to your Reviews

Search Engine SEO Results

Next you have the organic search results, here we can see on the top of the search results are directory websites that have optimized pages listing top hairdressers for Dublin, where I am currently based.

You could even optimize your website with more condensed local keywords by adding the town instead of the county or city your business is based. ( So instead of optimizing your website for Hair Salon in Dublin, you could optimize for Hair Salon in Clontarf) For new websites I would recommend being very targeted at the beginning until the authority of your website grows, so you can potentially get results as early as possible/

How Do I Optimise my Website for Local SEO?

• Add your Business address to your website
• Find your local Keyword. For example, Hair Salon in Clontarf, Computer Repair Dublin etc
• Use that Keyword on your home page meta title, meta description, H1-H4 tags, in the body of text, image titles etc
• Have a Home Page with a good User Experience because a website with a high bounce rate will not rank well/
• Add your website link, number and business address to various directory websites
• Share your website link on social media to bring traffic to your website
• Build backlinks to your website to build its authority. You can do this through guest posts or even sending out press releases.
• Track your ranking position with any SEO tool of your choice.
• Make sure you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console set up and connected to your website so you can track your traffic, fix csearch engine coverage issues and index your website pages when neccassary.

By following this local SEO guide you should have the basic idea of how to rank your business locally with Google My Business and your own website.

For more detail on how to increase your business’s website with SEO, Check out Our 10 Tips to Dominate Google in 2021.