Three things you need to know about local SEO

Stephen McCance September 24, 2016

When you’re optimising your website in local listings, there are a number of thing that are slightly different to the techniques that are used when you’re trying to organically promote your website on a national or international basis.

Our team are incredibly familiar with optimising for all three scenarios and, whilst we now spend most of our time working on larger campaigns, a number of our clients still have a need for SEO in Manchester and the surrounding areas. With this in mind, we’ve shared three key things to consider when your website is in need of local SEO.

Consistency

When you’re listing your site anywhere, it’s important to ensure consistency in the details that you submit. Your business name, address and phone number needs to appear consistently across all listings online, social media profiles and, of course, the details need to also be an exact match to those on your website itself. Consistency of contact information ensures that your business is clearly identifiable by Google as being within a certain area, particularly when there are a number of profiles containing the same information.

Google MyBusiness

As always, Google have a preference for their own platforms in local search results, which makes registering your business with them imperative if you want to rank well. If you haven’t registered your business before, you can register it with Google MyBusiness here . Once you’re registered, you’ll need to fill out as much information about your business as you can, and follow the above rule of consistency of information to ensure Google is able to match your website with the listing as easily as possible.

Local Presence

Having a presence on other locally based websites will also help with enhancing your local SEO. When approaching other local websites, quality is key. Having a few links from high authority websites will benefit you more than taking a volume-based approach. Think of approaching local news websites to see if they’d be interested in covering something about your business, which also has the added benefit of attracting referral visitors from sites that have high visitor numbers in their own right.

Local SEO is often less competitive than trying to rank your website on a national basis, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. As with all site optimisation, there are many considerations that will either help or hinder your SEO progress. If you’re a business in Manchester or the surrounding areas then get in touch with us for further details or assistance with local optimisation.