UK Local SEO Services
Local SEO services shouldn’t just deliver sales to your doorstep but also build your brand.
Well-executed UK local search engine optimisation (or local SEO) services can indeed increase your business’s visibility by driving your website to the top of local listings.
However, your local listing profiles are also your shop window to the world for prospects when they are already looking for you. An effective local SEO strategy can help maximise visibility for prospects looking for what you offer and people already trying to find out more about your local business.
How does Local SEO work?
Obtaining good local search engine rankings that appear dominant in map pack listings (the map view with a list of nearby service providers that can appear in search engines for certain local search queries) depends on adopting a consistent local SEO strategy. This is critical to maintaining a range of your business data, including name, address, phone (NAP) info, and much more. Getting this consistent exposure across a wide range of authoritative online directories is crucial.
However, this effort can be short-sighted if you only claim them, but then don’t populate these listings as much as possible. Many local business listings like Google Business Profile, BingPlaces, and Apple Maps allow you to post pictures, opening times, events, posts, and offers and crucially reply to and cultivate client reviews.
In addition to this key asset, your website and a wide range of important local SEO directories must also be optimised for your local SEO coverage to be fulfilled as much as possible. This involves ensuring that your NAP data remains consistent across all of these business listings so Google receives consistent signals about your business as it crawls across and mentions (local citations) of your website across the web.
Why Local SEO is important?
For many businesses that have not optimised their sites, about 80% of their traffic will be from people typing in their company or brand name. Given that Google Business Profile, for instance, will often be more prominent or visually more appealing than their own website’s organic listing, there’s all the more reason to give this digital asset the attention it deserves.
It also shouldn’t be forgotten that both Google Business Profile and Apple Maps play a part in showing up in Apple and Google Maps results and search engine results pages. This can be useful for prospects navigating to your business and is now even present as the resident sat nav on many cars.
Local SEO is a frequently overlooked element in SEO strategies. However, for three reasons, every small business should aim to be as highly optimised as possible for its local listing.
This is one area where they are on a level playing ground against the multi-nationals and chain store brands.
The local listings, for the terms where they exist, often appear above many of the organic listings.
These prospects' searches are on your doorstep, so they should be highly motivated to consider you. This is particularly true if you have many positive online reviews from various sources!
Local SEO on mobile devices
Local SEO plays its part on desktops, but with most searches now happening on tablets and mobiles, ensuring your listings are as well populated as possible is even more important. Why? Because your local listing on mobiles will frequently appear above your own website’s organic listing. So it’s all the more important that this asset represents you as well as it can.
Local SEO is more than just driving traffic to your site – it’s about strengthening your brand!
Many local businesses are surprised to discover that, on average, 80% of the organic traffic they receive comes from people who were looking for them anyway.
What do I mean by this? Well, most non-optimised sites receive almost all their traffic from people looking for them by their company or brand names.
Awareness of this makes it all the more important for many of your non-website assets to be as claimed, optimised, and populated as possible to maximise phone enquiries, website visits, and even visits to your physical location.
Consider, for instance, your Google Business Profile. This is much more prominent on Google searches, particularly on mobile devices, which are frequently shown above the organic results. Additionally, this asset is much more attention-grabbing than your own site regarding organic results, so investing time and effort into optimising this vital piece of real estate makes sense! Below are just a few things to consider.
All of these things help not only your presence on the map pack (e.g. local search results where you normally see a map with three of the nearest providers of the service you’ve searched for) but also make for a convincing portrayal, which means your prospects will likely then visit your website.
How can I improve your local SEO?
Several key local directories, including Google Business Profile, need consistent information submitted across each of them. Using the keywords discovered in the SEO report generated and any keyword research that was undertaken then, these profiles are optimised, targeting these keywords to improve their local SEO online visibility. In addition, pictures provided by the client are optimised to have these keywords featured in their metadata.
This work doesn’t stop with optimising these resources. An often missed part of local SEO projects is reviewing your own website to reflect this consistent data, too. This includes ensuring obvious elements such as the correct name, address, and phone details are on the Contact Us page. However, it also includes adding structured data behind the website that the search engines crawl, showing the correct name, address, phone number, opening times, and much more.
However, All this work may be in vain if the client has a poor or non-existent online reputation. Prospects will be frequently drawn to highly regarded businesses even if they rank lower. This is where I provide coaching and templates for you to use to maximise the positive sentiment that flows into your organisation and to turn this into detailed ‘rich’ reviews across the most important review platforms, including Google Business Profile. Detailed or ‘rich’ reviews are particularly important in 2020 since many prospects can spot fake reviews from a mile away or, for that matter, will ignore ‘thin’ reviews like ‘Great service’ or ‘Use them all the time’. Prospects want to see detailed information about how your products/services and customer service excel in real situations.
How do I measure your Local SEO impact?
Determining the impact that local SEO has can be very hard to judge. You may have already reviewed the monthly reports you get from Google Business Profile in some detail. However, I create a tracking code that can then see traffic that visits the website from your GMB profile. This can provide some very important insights in Google Analytics. For instance, overall traffic, bounce rate, average duration on-site, and much more.
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