Author: W&P Web Design
Date: 18/12/2024

In the table of contents:

• What exactly is local SEO?
• Why do so many businesses invest in local SEO?
• How exactly does local SEO work?
• How does Google’s algorithm determine which business to show in Google Business 3-pack results?
• What are some of the best SEO tools to help improve local SEO?
• How do you monitor SEO results?
• How our agency can help you

 

What Is Local SEO?

First things first, what exactly is local SEO?

A website is just that.

If people don’t know the URL or the domain name, a website will not get many visitors, if any, if it cannot be found easily on Google.

Therefore, businesses will want to rank as high as possible on the first page of Google.
Now, there are many ways to make this possible. For example, there are numerous different ways a business can appear on the first page of Google.

These are:

• Google Business results
• Google’s organic SERP’s
• Google Adwords

For a business to get as much unpaid traffic as possible from Google.

This often means improving the business’s “ranking factors”, to get the business to rank as high as possible within Google results.

This article describes how to get a local business onto the first page of Google.

 

So why is a web design agency talking about SEO?

Increasingly today, many businesses and their directors don’t just have a well-designed website built.

They also want to get as much free traffic and visitors from Google as possible.

It doesn’t matter if you sell whiskey or aluminium ladders; naturally, you want your customers to find you as quickly as possible on Google.

To do this, you need to improve your organic SEO, and if you are looking for businesses locally, you need to improve your local SEO

 

Why is local SEO important?

Company directors who have never invested in SEO might not know its benefits or the dramatic effect it can have on a business.

Of course, snake oil salespeople always say they can walk the walk but can’t.

With that said, there are a massive number of SEO agencies that have cut the mustard.

It goes without saying if your business ranks high on Google then shoppers will find it easier to find you.

 

 

Increase business visibility and brand awareness.

Often, the most successful businesses are the businesses that rank high on Google.co.uk, and that come as no surprise at all.

It’s no coincidence that Google, the search engine, can drive thousands, if not sometimes millions, of shoppers to your website.

The hard part is getting a business onto the first page of Google organic results, which explains why we wrote this article.

To get your business onto the first page and high up in the Google SERPs, you need to establish the foundations correctly and have a well-designed website.

This is where we can step in and design a quality website for your business.

 

How do you go about improving a business’s local SEO?

Complete a Google Business Listing

It only takes roughly 30 minutes to complete, and a Google Business listing is definitely needed if you want to improve your local SEO.

 

Here’s how to best complete your business Google business listing:

 

Add NAP information

Make sure you add the most up-to-date NAP information that matches what is on your company website.

URL

Make sure you add your company’s URL that’s your website’s domain name, and ideally the homepage URL to your Google business listing.

Obtain customer reviews

Let’s say you run a restaurant, and one of your diners says the meal has been delicious.

Why not ask them to leave a positive review on your business’s Google Business listing?

 

Add a unique business description

Add a unique description of your business.

It has to be a paragraph of unique text, and the author must accurately describe the company.

For example, you might want to write how many years you have been trading, what services you offer, and roughly how many staff you employ within the business description. Then, people can get a better understanding of your business.

 

Add pictures

Let’s say you run a shop, you might want to take picture of your staff stood outside the shop. This will give people an excellent impression of your business, and the staff that you employ.

If the staff are friendly and welcoming, people are more likely to contact you.

 

How does this Google algorithm, decipher which businesses display in the Google business results?

So, Google’s algorithms work by using a separate algorithms.

There is an algorithms that power Google Adwords Googl, and a separate algorithm for the Google’s organic business results in a separate algorithm for Google Business.

So, for Google’s Business results, Google ranks are based on the following ranking factors:

Relevance

How relevant is your business / website to the product or service the customer wants to purchase?
For example, they might be looking for a very exact form of law practice. Does your solicitor’s practice offer that type of advice?

Distance

Where is the shopper stood?

How far are they away from your business?

Therefore, Google looks at the searcher’s proximity.
Lets say, your stood slap bang in the middle of Cardiff city centre; then will you will see businesses appear on the map based in the city centre.

Alternatively, if you were on the other side of the city on the outskirts of St Mellons in Cardiff and were to ask the same question to Google, you would likely see a different set of companies appear.

Therefore, Google ranks businesses according to location and proximity to where the shopper is at that moment in time.

 

Prominence: how prominent is the business?

Things get a bit technical here, and we need to talk about the “semantic web” and will need to think about the business like a dot on a giant spider’s web.

Google understands you run a business, so it is a dot on the spider’s web.

However, some businesses are more prominent than others.

Some receive regular mentions across the internet, win awards and the brand is mentioned, and have well-known company directors who participate in charity events for example.

Some businesses are more well-known; therefore, Google better understands them as “entities” in the semantic web.

So in this semantic web, Google has a much better understanding of some entities than others; some entities are more prominent and brighter in terms of Google’s algorithm as Google is able to better understand them.

To improve your prominence, you must gain more positive customer reviews, mentions, and backlinks across the Internet.
Lets gives you an example: Let’s say you gain a lot of good customer reviews, the business gets mentioned on BBC News for an award you win, the company directors and staff participate in a marathon, and articles are written about it.

These pages may all provide links (backlinks), and Google better understands businesses and entities such as company directors. Therefore, more prominent businesses often appear in Google’s business results more often.

That’s because the semantic web and Google algorithm understand that they are local well-known businesses.

 

How can you improve the businesses of local SEO?

Keyword research

Keyword research allows you to understand terms and the questions that shoppers are asking Google to find your businesses products and services.

Lets give you an example, lets say you own a window cleaning business, you also offer gutter cleaning, and you might also offer to clean conservatories.

And lets say you offer commercial window cleaning as well.

These are all related services, but they are all very different.

They should therefore have their own pages so that the web designers can add meta titles, meta descriptions, alt text, internal links, and titles to each page.

Google Keyword Planner

So, you might be a start-up business, and the company is just setting up and getting out of the starting blocks; she might not have, say, £200 a month to spend on an SEO.

The brilliant thing is that Google offers a range of free SEO tools. They can help improve your SEO, but and they are often used by many web design agencies, because they’re perfect for helping improve a businesses marketing.

One brilliant and valuable tool offered by Google is the Google Keyword Planner, which allows you to understand what people are searching for when looking for your businesses products or services.
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How can our business better optimise our Google business listing?

If you run a local business, we recommend investing time and effort in optimising your Google business listing.

We would break down the optimisation of a Google business listing into the following three stages
And we would recommend taking the time to set up the Google business listing correctly. It might take 30 minutes or longer to set up the business listing correctly, but do take the time to set it up correctly and add as much detail as possible.

Don’t rush the process.

Write a unique business description, and ensure you review all the information to ensure accuracy.

Contact information

Make sure that all the NAP information is correct.

Opening hours

If you’re opening hours change, make sure that you reflect this with your GMB listing

 

URL

Make sure you add your homepage; that’s your domain name.

Add an accurate business description

Add a unique business description to the page.

Keep your business citations up-to-date.

You might be wondering what business citations are?

Business citations mention your company website and NAP information on Thompson local, Wales Online unless a Yellow Pages for example.

These are brillant as acting as a reference for your company name, address, and phone number.

These business citations also have to be kept up-to-date as well.

If you switch addresses, they should also keep the NAP information.

Consistency is key

When it comes to improving your local SEO, let’s say, your Google business listing, consistency is the most important thing to remember, in terms of mentioning your companies NAP information.

What we mean by that is the business’s name, address, and phone number were all consistent across the web.

Let’s say you run a business in one industrial estate and moved to another on the other side of Cardiff.

Your web design agency should work to update your address and business citations as soon as possible.
Otherwise, you can have a website with two different addresses, which can wreck havoc with your SEO.

 

Customer reviews are a significant part of local SEO

When we talk about local SEO; we often describe how the Google algorithm works.
Still, it is just that it’s an “algorithm”, and an algorithm cant sit in restaurant and order a meal, an algorithm can’t call let’s say, a solicitor for help.

Therefore Google’s algorithm is dependent on feedback from customers, but there are many ways that Google can get feedback from customers.

For example, a website with a high bounce rate is feedback, it is negative feedback, saying that shoppers were generally dissatisfied with that page and left it, not wanting to click on another page.

Let’s concentrate here on customer reviews.

If receive lets say a lot of positive customer reviews, or from, let’s say, different Android smartphones where the customer is logged in using different account details, so you know the genuine reviews.

Well genuine Google reviews have a massive positive effect on the businesses’ local SEO.

Prominence and backlinks: you might not know the backlink, so let us explain it.

A backlink is simply a hyperlink, a link from one website to another.

There are internal links and external links.

Internal links occur because they can help shoppers better navigate your website.

However, when built correctly, external links can have a massive positive effect on your business’s local SEO.

Don’t buy links; spam links as this will damage your SEO. There are no two ways about that.

But, on the other hand, relevant links, high-powered links, from respectable businesses, let’s say a corporation like the BBC link to you, these backlinks can massively positively affect your business’s organic and local SEO.

So, backlinks can improve your website’s authority and prominence.

Google Search Console

If your business is serious about improving its local organic SEO, then an essential tool to have is called Google Search Console

Well Google Search Console is essential when improving a business’s local SEO because you need the following.

Average position

You need to know whether keyword ranks; if you optimise your website for say “wedding cakes” + city name, then you need to know where your business ranks on Google for that term.

You need to know the average position data that Google supplies.

You can check your businesses rankings over the last 24 hours, the previous seven days, the last month, or the last six months.

This allows you to understand the SEO methods you are applying, whether they are working, and whether you need to switch strategies.

Patience is a must when it comes to SEO

Talk to any good web designer or marketing agency, and they will tell you that 50% of the time, you often spend optimising the website, and then the other half the time, you manage expectations for the client.

That’s because businesses sometimes think SEO as a lightbulb: It switches on, and sales start flooding in.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this.

It is a slow process, and only when Google rules out major core updates do you start to see a reflection of your business’s changed position on Google.

For example, you could implement work today, but you might not see the benefit until four months later on down the road.

This is why it is a slow process, where you often only see organic SEO improvements after significant algorithm updates.

With that said, as long as a business is willing to be patient, you can get a business up the ranks; this can significantly dramatically affect the number of sales the company makes if it’s done right.
Foundations have to be correct; we are a web design agency based in Cardiff.

We are writing this article because many businesses have a website designed, and after it’s been built,then only contemplate the SEO, as an afterthought.

However, SEO can’t be bolted onto a website; improving the SEO should be considered carefully when first designing the website.

 

Web design done right

We can design a brilliant website for your business, and we will do our utmost to design it in less than three weeks

If you like the website designed, contact us today.