Do you want a local audience to find your business online? Then you need to understand local search engine optimisation (SEO). It is the practice of increasing visibility for your business locally, whether it’s a brick-and-mortar store or a service-area business.
We’ve put together this brief guide that you can follow to increase your local search marketing results.
Improve your Yorkshire-based local SEO strategy
Think about your target search terms
As a starting point, you need to think about your target search terms – what is your ideal customer typing into Google to find businesses like yours?
This could include the wider region or you could focus more locally on cities or towns. For example, in our case, it would be Yorkshire and North Yorkshire, with a narrower focus on Harrogate.
Local search terms include things like:
- Web design company Harrogate
- Web design agency near me
- Web designers in Harrogate
- Website company in North Yorkshire
Some tools you could use to research keywords are Google Ads Keyword Planner, KeywordTool.io, and just manually searching in Google to see how many results each search term gets and what type of search results they lead to.
Optimise your web pages for local searches
Now that you have a list of target search terms, it’s time to add them to your website. Put your location-related keywords in your URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, headers, and scatter them throughout the content too.
This helps your local SEO as search engines like Google will easily be able to pick up on all those hints and figure out what your website is about and which locations you’re targeting.
If you have a large business with many branches, highly localised content is the best way to reach local customers. You could add target location pages with each page dedicated to your product or service in a specific place, for example, creating a page all about “Web Design Harrogate”.
Get your business listed in local directories
No website should be an island. You need to create local listings that will help Google identify your website as a local solution and help you get more reviews.
These local listings will help small businesses send local signals to Google that reinforce that the information you’ve shared is correct and consistent.
You can add listings for free to local directories including Yell, Yelp, Thomson Local, My Local Services, and Touch Local.
Make sure you have your Google My Business profile up-to-date too!
Boost your business locally
This guide should serve as a starting point to help you optimise your website for a local audience and get your site found online.
If you decide you need some support with a new website that shows your business in the best light, get in touch with us today.