Tip #11: Take advantage of local search
If the majority of your business comes from your area, use this small business tactic for SEO success to your advantage. At a minimum, complete a Google Places page and Bing Business Portal page — both are free and easy to set up. Local search results are most often showed at top of rankings for those searching in your location.
Listing your address tells customers AND search engines where to find you. Include your city/town and state, ideally in the site footer but at least in your Homepage and Contact Us page.
All these information will allow the search engines to crawl your website and recognize the locality of your business. This will improve your ranking when dealing with local searches.
Optimizing for local searches uses the same techniques for “regular” seo. Some of the techniques you can use for local search includes:
Again, these are old-school basics, but we hardly see any websites correctly optimizing for local areas:
- Include city and state in your title tag. Remember, the title tag is incredibly important for optimization, and including your city and state is an important signal for local relevancy.
- Include city and state in your H1 heading. It doesn’t have to be the entire heading in and of itself — what’s important here is to include your city and state in the page heading to further show local relevancy.
- Include city and state in your content. Far too many sites forget to include City/ST information inside the site content. Optimizing for local search won’t work unless you’re talking about your local area in your content.
- Include city and state in your alt text on images. It’s amazing how many times we see sites that don’t include alt text. Remember, Google can’t see what’s in your images, so alt text helps provide a better understanding of your page content. Including City/ST information can really help boost local relevancy.
- Include city and state in your URL. If you’ve got the ability to edit your URL structure, try to include your city and state information in your URLs. Again, this can go a long way toward providing a stronger local signal to both customers and Google. Important Note: if you’re going to update your URLs, don’t forget to set up 301 redirects so that the old address is permanently pointed to the new one.
We are exploring different ways you can do to improve on your page ranking on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Follow us on Twitter @EvolutionPoint to get more tips on search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).