Optimise your website for local search
As the search engines take “search” to next level, more and more people are beginning to narrow down their searches to their local cities or countys. This is due to a rising demand in visitiors wishing to know who they are dealing with. They want to personally visit your business or at the very least know that if anything should go wrong its not to far to visit. Targeting local and global visitors will help your website get the best of both worlds.
3 Reasons to Optimise for Local Search
- Build Brand Awareness. Optimise your website for local keywords to increase brand awareness geographically.
- Leverage Trust. If local visitors trust your brand, this can translate on to the web and capture the attention of global visitors. This superiority will set your website apart from your competitors.
- Increase ROI. A recent survey shows that, local SEO tends to convert more often, is cost effective and leads to increased ROI.
How to Optimise your Website for Local Search?
Optimising a website for a locally oriented business includes all the steps of on page and off page optimisation along with a few tweaks and additions. The following steps will ensure that your website marks its presence in the local search results.
- Add your nearest city name or county to the meta tags
It's very important to add the name of your local city to your original keywords and place them accordingly in the title, keyword tag and description tag of the web page. While crawling and indexing the website, the searchbots interpret the emphasis on the name of the city; then use the city name for the search engine results pages from the database. - Use Other Localised Metadata Available
There are various other Meta Tags present in HTML which favor local website optimisation. Some of them are present under the Meta name as ‘country’, ‘geo position’ or ‘ICMB’.
Meta Name – country can be used to input the name of the country where your target visitors reside.
Meta Name – geo position or ICMB can be used to input the latitude and longitude coordinates of your business city. Every country has its own unique ICMB code. These details give the search engines more favorable data to rank well locally. - Submit Your Website to Google Local Business Center
Google lets you submit your business listing free of cost to its local business center. You can add business details like address, area of operation, contact number and hours of operation to the listing. All these details are available on the screen with a snapshot of a map which shows the detailed location of your business. All you have to do is add the listing in the local business center by going through a quick verification process and the visitors will find their way to your business website. - Build High Quality Backlinks
Link building is the most important aspect of search engine optimisation. Search engines give a lot of importance to incoming links and consider it as a measure of a website’s popularity. You can build quality backlinks by submitting your site to high PR search directories, internet yellow pages, local search engines and Google webmasters tool. - Select the Correct Service Provider
If your business is based in UK and your domain (.com) is hosted with a service provider whose servers are based in its Australian data centers, then chances of your website ranking well in Australia are more. This is because; the search engine will interpret your website to be an Australian website making it harder to rank well in UK search engines (.co.uk). Thus, hosting your website in the country where most of your customers live is a practical decision.
Website optimisation for local search is a must for websites with service based businesses to increase lead generation, sales and ROI.
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