In today’s competitive market, online visibility is essential for all businesses. If you run a small business that operates on a regional level, you need to make sure your business appears in local searches for relevant queries. This is where local SEO plays a crucial role.
Local SEO helps your brand appear on the SERPs in a specific location. Optimising your website and its content for the local audience helps you capture more leads and conversions. While it is recommended that you hire a reliable SEO agency in Melbourne for your small business based in that area, you can focus on the following measures to improve your brand’s local SEO.
1. Optimise Your Google Listing
A Google listing or business profile is essential for businesses that want to rank higher in local search results. To optimise the profile, you need a Google My Business account associated with it. Once you share all the required details in the Google Business account dashboard, they will be updated to your business profile. Here’s how you need to optimise the profile:
- Verify ownership of the business.
- Add accurate and up-to-date details.
- Add your logo, hours of operation, your offerings, acceptable payment methods, and relevant images.
- Publish regular posts from your Business Profile using the account dashboard.
2. Optimise Your Content for Voice Search
With the growing popularity of smart assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google, there’s been a rapid rise in voice searches. In local SEO, it is important to optimise your content for how people ask questions when they ask questions. Essentially, you will have to use more long-tail keywords in your content while ensuring that the content fits the conversational tone of the users.
You also need to consider the user intent while optimising your content for voice. For example, when someone wants to know “how to fix a leaky faucet”, they want a quick and useful answer.
3. Focus on Local News or Events While Creating Content
You should start developing content that highlights local issues to grab the attention of your local customers. Here are a few strategies that may help:
- Write blog posts about local news, activities, or events
- Develop videos about charities or causes in the locality that your business supports
- If you serve different parts of an area, set up location-specific web pages on your site with hyperlocal content
For example, if you offer plumbing services in different parts of Melbourne, you should focus on creating dedicated pages for each location, where you can publish hyperlocal content based on local news events or changes in the local market.
4. Ask Your Happy Customers to Leave a Review
When your customers start leaving genuine reviews for your business, it helps boost the presence of your Google My Business profile. Moreover, the reviews encourage other potential customers in the locality to buy from you. Here are a few tricks to encourage your customers to leave reviews:
- Ask the customer in person for a review once you close a sale
- Send an email or text to the customer after a purchase, asking them to leave a review
- Respond to existing reviews professionally. Thank the reviewers for their positive feedback. If there is a complaint, address it in a professional manner.
5. Use Local Keywords to Your Advantage
Make sure the keywords you use in your content are relevant to local customers. You can use a keyword planner tool to filter keyword searches based on location. This allows you to identify the popular search terms for a particular area and use them in your site’s metadata, content, and URLs.
You should also mention region-specific landmarks and hotspots in the content. For example, if you run a restaurant in the heart of Melbourne, you can add references like “just 10 minutes walk from the iconic MCG” on your site.
Make Your Brand More Visible to the Local Audience
As search engine algorithms continue to evolve, it is important for brands to stay on top of local SEO. With these actionable measures, you can take advantage of relevant local search and also improve your brand identity in the local market. If you do not have an in-house SEO team to implement these measures, hiring a professional SEO agency will be a wise decision.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the value of comprehensive reports and analytics should not be underestimated. They provide a wealth of data that can be used to improve the learning experience for all students. By understanding how students use the LMS, what resources they are accessing, and how they interact, educators can make informed decisions about supporting their students’ needs.