Quite often, there are times when a Small Business owner or self employed person may find that they’re finding it tough to find and reach new customers within their local area. It might even be that a larger business is moving to a new area and wish to attract new customers to their new branch or area they’re willing to travel to.
In these cases, optimising a website for Local SEO is all important to gain those crucial rankings within these areas of business. There are many things that can be done to gain the upper hand and they do not have to cost the Earth to achieve. For a business which has a physical presence in the area, registering with Google+ Local, Yahoo Local and Bing Local as well as a host of other business directories is always a good start to optimise your website towards gaining those all important Local Citations.
Local Citations
Effectively, Local Citations simply require mentions of your name or business name, the address of the business, phone number and the website url to be found online. Often, some business directories will only allow your business name and address only unless you’re willing to part with a fee for additional information such as a phone number and link to your website. Do not feel like you need pay for such additional ‘services’ since you’re unlikely to see traffic from some of these websites. We would only suggest you pay (if you really want to) if you believe you’re going to gain additional exposure on these websites.
Business directories often categorise businesses into locations which will help to emphasis to search engines such as Google that your business is a local business within a particular area. With the battle over the years from the search engines to clear their indexes of spam websites and business listings. You may well find as you increase the number of citations within well respected and highly indexed business websites and directories. That your rankings begin to increase. This is because the search engines begin to trust the information they are finding, the more often they find these mentions of your business around the web.
Small Local Businesses without a Website
Citations are often more important to small local businesses without a website since these citations will be the only information search engines have to work with to connect the people doing the search with the local businesses. Small local businesses who rely heavily on their Google+ Local listing as their online visibility will find this increasingly important. Small local businesses such as Plumbers, Electricians, Landscape Gardeners and Handyman services are often the ones run by one man and his van who cannot foresee the need for a website or justify the expense of having one made. More often than not, they’ve relied for years on Yellow Pages inclusion Typically, most small local businesses fail to secure their place online through a lack of education about the relevance of the Internet on their business or because they are unsure if the expense will guarantee them a return on their investment (ROI).
By taking the time to get these local citations, a small local business will be showing the search engines that they are part of a local area and community and be far more relevant from somebody searching for a local plumber. Citations from becoming a member of a chamber of commerce, a city or county business index can be very useful. Quite often, local newspapers will be happy to feature stories about local businesses which in turn make ideal citations as the search engines will get a strong indication of your local credibility. These types of citations (which can sometimes include links) from these kinds of local websites can really help to improve your rankings for local search terms.