4 ways you can improve your businesses local SEO

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Introduction

There are quite simply many different ways that you can improve your businesses SEO. We mean a business can quite literally take its pick, from implementing business citations, through to content marketing.

There are hundreds of different ways, but we realise that this doesn’t really help a business, as often they want to narrow down the list of SEO tasks, and to then have a list of the more important tasks that they can concentrate on.

So, this had our SEO agency thinking, and we asked ourselves what do we think are the most common things businesses miss when improving their businesses SEO.

So, without further ado, here’s 4 of top tips to help you improve your local seo.

#1 Add detail to your Google My Business account

Sometimes some business set their Google My Business account up in a bit of a hurry. Perhaps you’ve just rented or purchased new office space, and in the frantic rush to set up your business perhaps the Google My Business account was quickly created.

This means the Google My Business account could well be lacking detail, for example the business description may well be lacking detail.

Well here’s our top tip, its well worth going back to your Google My Business account, and then adding as much detail as you can. Accurately state which hours your business opens, add a detailed business description, and add photos of your business, i.e the store front, or your team of staff.

#2 Make sure your onsite SEO is spot on

Some businesses go to a website designer, and receive a website that they think looks great, and that the website accurately portrays the business.

Yet, quite often new websites can lack the most basic of SEO details. So, we would highly recommend working with an seo agency to spot seo weaknesses with your website.

These could be something as basic as not dedicating each service your business offers to its own page on the website.

Or it could involve a lot more work, such as the whole website may not have much in the way of written text. So for example, each service that the business offers just lacks detail.

This means your seo company will normally recommend changes that are needed onsite, that’s before further seo work is implemented.

#3 Obtain business reviews

We think its really important to obtain reviews from your customers. However, we would never recommend writing business reviews yourself, or obtaining fake reviews.

Google’s algorithm is really sophisticated, it can spot fake business reviews, which means instead of helping to improve your businesses seo, well you could be in matter of fact doing the complete opposite.

So instead obtain genuine reviews from your customers.

#4 Add blog posts

We believe adding well-written blog posts, that your customers are likely to find useful and interesting, well this can help to improve your businesses SEO.

However, some businesses write blog posts which can really help to improve their seo, while some others implement seo which is not white hat, and therefore means there business obtains a penalty.

For example, many businesses have obtained Google Panda penalties, that’s for adding blog posts that are deemed low quality.

For example, lets say the business is a skip hire business, so they keep mentioning “skip hire + city” in their blog posts too much, well this is a sure-fire way of obtaining a penalty.

So, if you do not know what white hat seo is, we would recommend contacting a white hat seo agency.

Can we help?

Does your business require help with its SEO? If so we can help, so why not call us today?

Which SEO tools should our business be using?

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Introduction

There are simply loads of different seo tools a business can use, some are free, yet often many require a monthly subscription.

And which tools your business requires does depend on what information you need, for example if you want to check your businesses backlinks, you will need a backlink checker.

However, there are some tools that we recommend most businesses to use, these tools offer really useful information.

This information can also help you while your implementing white hat seo.

Google Analytics

This is probably one of the more well-known seo tools, and its also fair to say that most seo agencies, including ours use this tool.

It’s very easy to use, and Google Analytics can offer you loads of useful information such as:

·        How many organic visitors have visited your website

·        The websites bounce rate

·        How many visitors you have received altogether, so say via organic, social or direct

·        And much more

Often most businesses use Google Analytics to simply see how many visitors the website is obtaining.

For example, a good seo company should help your business to improve where it ranks for certain keywords.

So for example, if you run a solicitors practice, that specialises in the divorce process, well you will often want your website to rank high for the term “divorce solicitors” or “family lawyers”.

As your seo agency works on improving where your business ranks, you should start to see more visitors visiting your company’s website.

However, a good digital marketing agency wont just use information such as how many visitors your website has received.

No, instead a good online marketing agency will want to know what the websites bounce rate is like.

For example, once visitors land on your company’s website how long are they spending their?

Or, are they bouncing straight-off? If the bounce rate is high, you have to ask how can this be reduced? For example, can the product or service descriptions be improved?

Google Search Console

Another really useful tool that Google offers is called Google Search Console. This tool was previously named Google Webmaster tools.

If you are implementing seo this tool is a must. It allows you to obtain a list of backlinks that link to your website.

It even allows you to obtain the list of backlinks via Excel, so its super easy for your seo company to get some idea of which websites are linking to your business.

Also you can obtain an idea of which search queries your website is being returned for. So let’s say for example you run an accountancy practice.

You may already rank on the first page of Google for “accountancy practices + name of a city”, so with that in mind your seo company starts to work on improving other keywords you wish the business to rank for.

So for example, you may have accountants that specialise in filling in VAT returns, so you wish your business to rank for “accountants that specialise in VAT” for example.

So by using your Google Search Console account, you can gain an idea of where your business ranks for this term.

Not only that, say your business ranked 33rd place for this term last month, well you can ask for the data of where the business ranked for this term last week.

You may spot that your business is now ranked 7th for this term, so you recognise that your white hat seo is helping to improve your website.

Yes, but we pay an seo company to do this, why should we do it?

Well, simply put its always a good idea to check if your SEO agency are doing what they say they are.

For example, you may obtain your monthly seo report via e-mail, and once opened you see that the marketing agency states your business obtained 10,000 organic visitors last month.

And you are impressed by that figure, as the month before it may have been a lot less. But now you have your Google Analytics account, you can check this yourself.

So you may spot that the figure is correct, yet the bounce rate for the website has increased massively.

So basically it allows your business to keep your seo company in check, and if you have any questions, you then have the information from your Google Analytics account to use when you ask questions.

For example, you may ask why has the bounce rate increased from 40% to over 90% and what steps are the seo business taking to help reduce the businesses bounce rate?

Does your business require help with its white hat seo?