What are the basic ways to local business website SEO optimization that can be completed within hours?

You can make most out of your local business website with SEO optimization strategy, of course, when handling it the right way. Basically, the major search engines (like Google itself) are betting on several factors to determine organic search rankings of every webpage within their index. Though a general process of its implementation is a definitely time-consuming and labor-intensive ongoing task, if you’re running a local business website – its basic SEO optimization can be measurably improved right away. I mean that it’s possible to quickly get everything in place with some of the main aspects of your online performance – and several actions can be taken right now. Below are some basic steps you can complete without spending too much time or effort – and already benefit from having your local business website improved with SEO optimization to a certain degree. Here is what I recommend to that point.

Basics of Local Business Website SEO: Optimization for Beginners

Title Tags

These elements are among the most important elements of your web page, which help Google “read” and “understand” what it’s all about. In other words, title tags are not only used to be displayed in the SERPs, but help the search engines categorize and list your web pages correctly. 

That being said, here is how to optimize your titles so that they will have better chances of being shown up prominently in relevant organic search:

• Embed titles with your top relevant keywords, and locate them closer to the title’s beginning for maximizing their ranking potential. 
• Try to get your titles as compelling and intriguing (if applicable) as you can – the thing is that you actually have something around 2-3 seconds to capture the user’s attention. Otherwise, people would simply shrug off.
• It’s good to keep the title tag length within 65-70 characters. Why? Simply because having more than that means that the search engines will be more likely to show an ellipsis, rather than show the whole text that makes good sense for the user.
• Pay attention to brand leveraging – try to embed more title tags with your brand name, as they can not only improve the whole website’s performance in the local SERPs, but are actually improving your business name awareness among the target audience.

Custom Metadata

Meta Descriptions are also very important elements of your website SEO – both globally, and at the level of locales. They’re like mini-snapshots (otherwise, snippets) of the related web pages, which are seen by the users – displayed in the SERPs along with the title. Try to make your meta descriptions customized to each web page body content so that they will give a concise summary of what the user can actually get reading the whole page. Hint: using long-tail search terms, keyword-based LSI variations, and relevant synonyms will be another advantage to stand out of the search competition.

Image ALT Tags – should be created anyway, as it’s actually the only way to make your on-page images “readable” for Google itself. Basically, ALT tags refer to the text alternative of an image – so it’s apparently another good opportunity to utilize your top relevant keywords. Note, however, that the file name of each image you have does matter too (at least, from the viewpoint of the search engines). That’s why pay attention when putting each image file name, and try to have a single relevant keyword mentioned over there too.