Search Engine Optimization (SEO) offers both a wide net and a local net approach. If you pull from the local population for the majority of your business, you will want to consider adding some additional profile work and listings to ensure that local people can find you easily.
Who should consider using a local SEO strategy?
Single-location service area businesses such as massage therapists, farriers, veterinarians, and saddle fitters. Anyone who is working out of a radius with a dedicated office falls under this category.
Beyond the on-page site optimization and performance guidelines for regular SEO, such as using tracked and selected keywords in your title tags, clean URLs and indexable menus, there are additional things that should be created.
- Be sure your NAP (name, address and phone number) is indexable and not a graphic.
- Create local landing pages (aka city/service pages). These kinds of pages are key if you are a single-location service provider.
How do I use local SEO if I have a wider business range?
If you pull in business outside of your city, the question becomes how to best represent this fact. If you travel and work in the area, say between Rochester and Syracuse, you will need to work on organic and local rankings, to cast a wider net and allow overlap.
One of the recommended ways to do this is to create a top menu link under something like Areas We Serve, or Locations, and build a sub-page under this section for each main city you need to target. This is not as important for your customer to find (although a good thing), but for search engines to register your business for each of these. This way, if someone searches for “Batavia farrier” your business will result in those returns.
When your business casts a state-wide net, say as a specialized equine stable designer that will travel to the customer’s location, you need to build a state-specific page that supports “New York State stable designer.”
Set up your Google My Business listing
Brick and mortar businesses should add Google My Business Page information regarding hours, pictures, map locations, add reviews, your website link, and direct contact information. Adjust what people see with a mobile view. Learn how to set this all up here: https://www.google.com/business/
I highly advise taking advantage of the post function to make regular updates. Google Reviews also live in this featured site and the more positive reviews, the better your business will rank in the search returns.
How does local SEO work if my office is my home?
Today, it’s fairly common to work from home and have your physical business address also be where you live. If you don’t want to openly list your house address (highly recommend that you keep this as quiet as possible) you may set up a PO Box at your nearest Post Office location. Pricing will vary according to Post Office location, so look to towns nearby if cost is an issue.
If you have a home office or you are a mobile service (e.g. a farrier or massage therapist) it can be confusing. If you have a real, physical office, use that address. I’ve worked around this by using my Post Office PO address, including the street address.
Schema markup code on your pages
Take advantage of schema markup. In non-programmer speak, this is code that you add to your website on the back end to give more dialed-in information to a search engine. Schema not only gives the data about your business, but it also explains what the data means and puts it into a context. There are specific types of code for different kinds of businesses, so work with your programmer to identify what you need to use.
If you are fairly code savvy and like to work on your web pages, you can do this yourself easily in WordPress and create the code in Chat GPT. Once you have a JSON-friendly code template, you will only need to adjust the URL information for each page. Add the code to your website in the <head>.
Are citation sites a thing of the past?
At one time, citations were thought to be a key element in elevating your SEO ranking by the experts at large. This is a listing in a specific business category (ie. restaurant) in local search sources, such as Yelp, Yellow Pages or Manta. The popularity of these sites varies so if you use them, stick to the ones that are most related to what you offer. Some are for healthcare providers or only restaurants.
Listing your service with citation sites, along with your contact information, gives you more chances that someone will see your listing in addition to your regular website. Be sure to update these listings if you move location or change phone numbers. Nothing is more aggravating from a customer viewpoint than finding what you need, but not the current contact information. If you make major changes such as a business name, you’ll need to use software that allows you to automatically update all of these listings. It’s typcially a messy process and takes time to clean up all of the old information.
What do you want someone to do now?
Now that you are funneling more local traffic to your site, does your site have a compelling call-to-action front and center? Also known as a CTA in the profession, your call-to-action can bring in a good percentage of new business when done well. This literally states what you want to happen next (Call me for a quote, download this article, request an appointment)
Read this highly complete article from Hubspot on what makes a great and actionable CTA and create your own.
And there you have several key steps in setting up Local SEO, making it easier to find what you do online in your locale.
