Everyone wants their small business to be the first site that appears in the Google listings for their chosen keywords. However, reaching the number one spot and staying there isn’t easy. Add location based SEO into the mix and your chance of reaching the top spot becomes even harder. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of being discovered for local keywords. Keep reading for some local SEO tips that are worth implementing.

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Keywords

How beautiful your website looks doesn’t matter to the search engines – instead, it’s all about the words. So, it makes sense to focus as much attention on your website’s text as possible. First, you need to complete some keyword research and find a list of keywords that you want your website to rank for. Look for around 35 and then filter these further to around 5. You want to choose keywords that people will use to find companies like yours. Once you have your keywords, you want to start incorporating these on your webpages. Make sure each page on your website (and blog post if you have an on-site blog) contains your keywords, and make sure that your meta title, meta description and meta keywords make use of them as well.

Optimise Information

In addition to adding keywords to your website, you also want to optimise the information that you are including. Where possible, try to include your business address on every page of your website (placing it in the header or footer is one easy way to do this). Also make sure your website copy includes as much information about your local area as possible. This will not only help your readers, but it will also help the search engines to boost your local search visibility.

Update Your Business Listings

Another thing that can help with your SEO is including your business’ information on a variety of third party websites such as Facebook, Yelp, and Google Plus. By doing this, you can ensure that you have consistent information relating to your business on well known third party sites; something that Google will take into account when determining its rankings. When listing your business, do make sure that you place it in the right category, and, where possible, include some of your keywords: ‘Kev’s Plumbing Stockport’ for example.

Encourage Online Reviews

Online reviews help to build visibility in search results, and are also often used by people when determining whether to work with a business or not. So, whenever possible, it’s a good idea to try and get people to leave reviews of your company on third party websites such as Trip Advisor and Facebook. Google takes online reviews into consideration when determining search rankings, and the more authentic, positive reviews your company has, the higher your company will be ranked in search. It’s also a good idea to be proactive in responding to reviews, and, whatever you do, don’t place false reviews to try and trick the search engines – it won’t work.