Can anybody guide me to local business website SEO for beginners?
Yes, I have a simple guide to local business website SEO, which can help you understand the very basics of the Search Engine Optimization for commercial projects at the level of locales. But before we start, note that below I’m going to outline the primary stuff related to local optimization, which includes simple yet efficient actions & practical suggestions that you can complete by self without paying too much time and effort. That being said, let’s delve.
Local Business Website SEO for Beginners
As for me, arguably the best way of launching your initial strategy in local business website SEO – is to focus on your target market, customer niche, as well as your target locale itself, right from the very beginning. Doing so, I recommend running a local competition analysis to get a big picture of your business environment. Put simply, I suggest getting a kickstart with running a website analysis of your closest niche competitors. Ultimately, to readily understand exactly what the most successful businessmen are doing in your target niche, in line with instantly using their best findings to your own advantage. To complete this first task, you should pick a good web analytical platform or at least a simple online tool. Among the others, I recommend trying such use-proven online frameworks like Semalt Website Analyzer (my fave one), Screaming Frog SEO Spider (all-round toolkit used by many webmasters), or Moz's Open Site Explorer (said to be good enough, too).
Part One: Local Competition & Niche Website Analysis
That way, you will be able to quickly set up a winning strategy in local business website SEO – being able to readily employ the best practices detected on the websites owned by your closest niche competitors.
So, once you have the right took, it's time to spy out there! Here are the main things and the commonest areas of their online performance in precisely targeted local search for you to be looking for:
- Links – make sure to run an in-depth analysis on your top competitor business websites focusing both on their internal link profiles, and the most valuable external links (otherwise, backlinks) with the highest PageRank and Domain Authority scores.
- Internal Links – otherwise, inbound links. As for good interlinking structure, everything should be nearly self-explanatory over there, as you should simply inspect the competitor's internal link profile (i.e., general logic of its creation, as well as the way it actually connects the primary category pages and landings with the rest of website's sections – ultimately, to help Google search engine with easier & fully correct crawling/indexing procedure, in line with providing a great navigation experience for your visitors, with a short-cut access to every web page without any spare click needed for that).
- External Links – otherwise, backlinks. This area of your competitor's local business website (off-page SEO at the local level, to be more precise) will need your maximum attention, mainly because it's considered by Google itself as arguably the most important ranking factor ever, both for general organic search, and from the viewpoint of much more user-focused local SERPs. That way, make sure to get a deep delve into every valuable backlink related to the following places: local business directories, editorial-based links, Chamber of Commerce, local governmental/educational sites with dot GOV/dot EDU domain extensions, as well as the rest of valuable external links pointing to the most trusted & relevant niche local websites/blogs.
- Content – to inspect the body content found on the web pages of your leading local niche competitors, you should simply review it manually. Doing so, when scanning the homepages, and making your way through their local landings, as well as the rest of key local/service pages found over there, ask yourself the following simple questions. When did they publish the content? Where lies the main local focus? For what basic purpose it has been created? Who actually writes the commonest types of local content? How many social shares/likes are seen with the most popular shreds of local content so far? What's the main topical/keyword focus seen with their locally-optimized website copy?
Part Two: Local Business Website & On-Page SEO
Next, I would like to concentrate mainly on the technical aspects of on-page SEO mainly needed to set up a sufficiently good online performance in Google's local SERPs with your business website. Basically, here are the key on-page areas of technical SEO for you to get focused with your optimization strategy before anything else.
Hyper-Local URL Structure
Best practices of custom URLs rich with hyper-local keywords are still killing. This means that you should make your web pages easier for crawling – rework each URL using highly targeted hyper-local search terms, niche keyword-based long-tail expressions, and a short & concise context giving an accurate description to each related web page and its core content idea.
Validated HTML and CSS Coding
Let's face it – without a crawlable and technically accurate local business website, your SEO efforts will actually make merely no sense. That's why you should probably reconsider the way of your site's initial development work. Under any circumstances, you must always keep up with a quality HTML/CSS coding before anything else, simply because there is arguably no other way of reducing your page loading speed or, for example, achieving a sufficient level of mobile-responsiveness with the whole site you're running.
Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Make sure to maintain the right local focus when optimizing your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. In other words, try to use your target city/region name with them (much like it was with your custom local URLs). Doing so, make sure to prevent these elements from "keyword stuffing," in line with having every shred of hype-localized metadata always unique & relevant to the relevant web page topic – and you're done.
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