YOUR GUIDE TO LOCAL

SEO SUCCESS

two

Index

3. Introduction

4. Ranking on search engines

5. Local SEO – What is it?

6. Google my business

8. Optimisation tips for success

10. Make your website google healthy

12. Creating your pages

14. The techy bit

16. Directories and backlinks

three

Introduction

Are you a start-up or small business starting out online, or have a web presence but have been banging your head against the wall with all the technical stuff to get your SEO, right?

I have written this for you, to help you with the basics of getting your website a ranking on google and create more traffic to your website.

Personally, I hate ‘geek’ or ‘tech’ speak so I have tried to put this into real speak that hopefully makes it easier to understand.

NB: I do hate when any business talks shop speak to outsiders, makes you feel a bit of a thickie doesn’t it? You’re not. If you think any part of this is ‘tech speak’ without explanation please email me at rob@wowcreatives.co.uk and I’ll do my upmost to change it and resend the book to you.

A few basic tips can go a long way to help you get more from your website.

4

Ranking on search engines

People search by asking questions such as ‘a plumber in Whitby’ or ‘a plumber near me’ so you need to think of what people will search for to find your service.

If you are selling products such as decorating supplies what do you think people would search for?

They may search for ‘decorating supplies’ or they may search for a product such a ‘emulsion paint ‘or ‘decorating brushes.’ These are the type of keywords or phrases you want to be found for.

Think of the type of keywords or phrase your customers may use to find your products and input each one into google to see where you are. If you are not on page one you may be missing business.

TIP: open up a ‘new private window’ when searching for your website, this will give you accurate results.

5

Local SEO, what is it?

Local SEO is designed to help users find businesses in a local area. It is important for businesses that do not sell products or services online, or customers from out of your area looking for local services.

You may own a restaurant in a tourist area and want to attract the people visiting your area, or help locals easily find your business information for opening times, menus or, your phone number.

If implemented correctly it is very reputable for local businesses attracting customers in their local town or city.

We are going to give you the basics on how you can get your business listed to attract more customers by implementing the following:

• Google my business listing• Your website• Citations and backlinks

LOCAL

SEO

6

Google my business

A free service to list your business

A great FREE tool from the king of the search engine. You will see google my business listings every time you search on google; they are the listings directly under the paid listings at the top of the page (The ones with ‘AD’ to the left of the title).

The listings will display a list of companies associated with your search. Each one will display information about the business such as telephone number, address, and website.

It will also give a ‘star’ rating. User reviews given to the business by real people.

How to get listedFirstly, visit https://www.google.com/business/

You will need a google account to create your listing, it is simple to do. Just follow the instructions on the website.

Input your information

Give google as much information as possible, make sure it is accurate with your business name, phone number and address. Don’t use abbreviations of your service, not only can it affect your ranking it can be confusing to the viewer.

A local area land line phone number is much better than a mobile number for your listing as google will match your area code to your local area.

7

Make sure your information is the same as it is on your website, this applies to any listing you create on social media or online directories (we list a few directories at the end of the book for you). Google will see all this information and if it does not match it will lower your listing on search results.

Reviews

Don’t be shy to ask customers to review your business. Not only can you proudly add these to your website, the higher scoring reviews you have on your listing the better.

Not only will this give your business creditability and trust to potential customers it is another score to help your listing get higher and drive more traffic to your website.

Collecting reviews is an ongoing project, don’t be shy to ask your customers to give you the thumbs up. You will be surprised on how many will give you a five-star rating if you are giving them a good experience.

8

Optimisation tips for a successful website

You may have built your website yourself using one of the many online website building platforms. Or built your website yourself using WordPress, or other similar services, or you may even be a coding whiz and have built it from the ground up. But with out good optimisation it would be like owning a car without an engine, looks good but can’t go anywhere.

Your website must be SEO friendly and work perfectly on mobile, we have noticed a 50/50 split of website views between mobile devices and desktop computers. Not having a mobile friendly website can cut your potential online business in half.

Also, when google ranks your website, it looks at the mobile version first. If your website is not working correctly on this platform it can seriously affect your website placement.

Keep your website fresh and updated with relevant new content, google likes this. As will your visitors who will see you are innovative and top of your game.

9

Speed is what you need

Google loves fast websites and much as your customers. Nothing worse than waiting for a slow website to download. If you are anything like me and most people, I will go to another website to find the information I am looking for.

Google understands this and will rank a fast website above a sluggish clunky site.How fast is your website via broadband or 3g/4g? You can easily check using the following tools:

https://gtmetrix.com/https://tools.pingdom.com/

Loading....

10

How to make your website google healthy

1. Good navigation structure

Think of the Sound of Music and Marias line “let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”

The menu navigation is the starting point of a well-planned website, the ‘Home’ page is the beginning and ‘Contact’ is the end with everything else in between.

Good navigation is good for the end user and google. Easy navigation to drill down to the information you want.

For instance, our website is structured in to sections ‘Home’, Design Services’, ‘Website Services’, ‘Portfolio’, ‘Blog’, and ‘Contact’.

We have many more pages, but each one (called the child) is navigated via its main page (the parent.) For instance, ‘Design Services’ has three sub-pages (child pages) of ‘Logos’, ‘Leaflets’ and ‘POS’.

Each child page is further information on ‘Design Services’ thus giving the user and google a simple path to the relevant information.

DOWNLOAD A SIMPLE DEMO SITE PLAN (EXCEL) Selecting your keywords and search terms

11

As I mentioned in the introduction of the book, people search by asking questions. So finding the correct keywords and search phrases for your business is key to successful SEO.

Google need to know what your website is about. If you are a ‘Plumber in Whitby’ you need to include the phrase within your page content and title. Google will consider your website when someone searches for the phrase.

Crafting good keywords and phrases

It’s not rocket science, or some magical mystical thing finding relevant keywords or phrases for your pages. If you are a ‘hairdresser in Solihull’ and have a branch also in Knowle use hairdresser in Solihull and hairdresser in Knowle as your main phrases.

To find a few more go to google.com and type that phrase into the search bar. You will see other suggestions appear such as ‘hairdresser in Solihull town centre’ and hairdresser Solihull open Sunday’. These are all terms people have searched for and give you a good start to create your keyword, keyphrase list.

Select 3 or 4 keywords/phrases and a couple of areas. You will end up with something like this

Business: HairdresserAreas: Solihull, KnowleKeywords: Blow dry, cut and blow, hair highlights, hair colouring

12

Creating your pages

1. Good navigation structure

You have your keywords and areas of business. Now you will need to create pages for locations and services. This will create pages that google can target for your service in your area.

This helps google direct your customer to the correct page to match their search and your website is more likely to appear higher in googles listings.

So how should my page be structured?

Your homepageKeywords: Hairdresser Solihull, Hairdresser Knowle

Hair highlightingKeywords: hair highlighting Solihull, Hair Highlighting Knowle

Hair colouringKeywords: Hair colouring Solihull, Hair colouring Knowle

If you only have one location your keywords would just be ‘service’ + ‘area’.

You can put all your services one page, but it is not advised as this can be confusing to the search engine. We always put an overview and mention each service on the home page along with areas that lead through to the landing pages.

13

Your page content (words)

Don’t stuff your pages with your keywords, mention them two to three times on the relevant page, this will help google match your page to the user search.

Have a least 300 – 500 words per page, and don’t write copy with search engines in mind. Write honest engaging copy then think where your keywords and headings will naturally fit in.

Google will ‘crawl’ your pages and will understand the content of the pages on your website. If google determines that the page is of value to the end user, it will rank it accordingly.

Never copy exact content from another website. Google will know and rank your website down.

Select 3 or 4 keywords/phrases and a couple of areas. You will end up with something like this

Business: HairdresserAreas: Solihull, KnowleKeywords: Blow dry, cut and blow, hair highlights, hair colouring

14

A techy bit

I don’t want to get techy but for this bit I have to, sorry.

If you don’t want to get under the hood of your website, you may need to employ someone in the know.

You may have heard of ‘meta tags’ or ‘meta data’ there lots of them, but don’t get to hung up on them all I only implement a few and it does the job just fine.

The Meta Title

This is the title of your webpage, it is displayed when your page appears in search engine listings, displayed in your browser tabs and will also be used as the title of a bookmark.

This is still one of the most important tags of search engine listings.

The Meta Title plays a large part in influencing how google understands your page, there is no perfect way for structuring your title, but I have found this works best for my clients:

You should use no more than 70 characters.

The structure of the title should be:

Keyword 1 and keyword 2 in area 1 and area 2 | Company name

Example: Hair highlighting and colouring in Solihull and Knowle | Curl up and dye

15

The meta description

This serves a purpose; describing the content of the page. Whilst this does not affect rankings, it is extremely important.

This is the bit of text that appears under your title in search results, it should be no more than 160 characters. If you are lucky enough to be on page one of google, you will be competing with other similar businesses. You want this text to sell your products or services. So be creative.

Meta keywords – we used to use these, but not anymore. Avoid using this tag as it no longer has any use to search engines.

H1, H2, H3…. TagsThese tags are on a page and are relevant to blogs as well as main website pages.

H1 (H stands for heading) is the main on page heading of your page such as:

Hairdressers Solihull – Curl up and dye

H2, H3, and so on are for subheadings on the page.

16

Local citationsCitations are social media and online directory listings of your business containing your business name, address telephone number description, telephone number, website etc.

Each one should mirror the other, being consistent across the web and will help your ranking as a trustworthy business.

A few places to add your business:

facebook.comgoogle.com/business/directory.independent.co.ukfoursquare.comdirectory.thesun.co.ukyelp.co.uktupalo.combrownbook.netinfobel.comshowmelocal.comuk.showmelocal.com192.comlacartes.comscoot.co.uk

yelloyello.comcylexuk.co.ukkompass.comspoke.com2findlocal.comaboutus.comexpressbusinessdirectory.comhotfrog.co.ukthomsonlocal.comgb.enrollbusiness.comcybo.comfindit.sunderlandecho.comcallupcontact.comuksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk

17

BacklinksBacklinks are simply a link from one website to another.

This said a website that has no traffic, poorly build and a low rank will not help your rankings. Links from good quality website will help heaps.

Types of links

Self-created links are obtained by commenting on blogs where you can create a signature with your information. Don’t spam website with useless information keep it relevant. Exploiting this can lead you into trouble with google.

Natural links are links that are given to you by them wanting to link to your content, I find websites with engaging blog content get the most shares.

Outreach links are submitting your website to directories or asking webmaster to add a link to your website. It is important to remember to only link from quality websites

For small local business local SEO is now an established way to reach out to your customers in your area. Promoting your brand and services and help expand your business.

I hope this helps you understand the basics of local SEO, if you would like to know more about WOWCreatives range of services please visit www.wowcreativesuk.com.

18

Testimonials“We have used WOWCreatives web design, promotion and support services since our business was established in 2010. During that time, the team have helped us through three variations of the site; each time helping us to take advantage of changes and improvements in technology, and the way that people search for products and services on the internet.

They have been proactive in ensuring that our site is stable, secure, robust, optimised for mobile and tablets, and given us sound advice on the best SEO practices to make our site ever more visible to our target market. Their services are affordable and professional, allowing us to have a corporate looking site at small business prices. We highly recommend their services unreservedly.”

Mike Hurney - The Shotting Party

As an established Celebrant training organisation with a large directory of celebrants worldwide our website is an essential part of our business. WOWCreatives took on the mammoth task of creating us a new website in order to train new students and to advertise those who were already members.

The result, is clean, modern, professional fast loading and informative website that is accessed worldwide. The site easy to use, easy to maintain and Rob at WOWCreatives goes above and beyond with his outstanding service when we need help.

I highly recommend WOWCreatives for all of those seeking website and design services.

James Convery, CEO - UKOSC

19

Want to know more?WOW Creative Media offer a Website Design service exclusivly for small businesses and start-ups.

Join my FREE Facebook gorup with daily tips, advice and live video sessions to help you grow your small business via Digital Marketing.

REQUEST TO JOIN GROUP BY CLICKING THE ICON BELOW

Graphic Design | Website Design | Digital Marketing

www.wowcreativemedia.co.uk

Whitby, North Yorkshire

email hello@wowcreativemedia.co.uktel: 07590 657418