Date: 08/07/2025
Subject: Local SEO

 

When any local business, regardless of industry, wants to improve its SEO, it’s judged on three main criteria.

Proximity

The first is “proximity”: how far is the shopper from your business premises?

Prominence

Next is “prominence,” which, in terms of local SEO, refers to the number of positive reviews your business has accumulated. This mostly refers to your Google Business account, yet positive reviews on Trust Pilot are still important.

It also includes the quality of your business’s backlink profile.

Relevance

Then there’s “relevance”. For example does your businesses content marketing—such as your product pages—match what the customer is

actually looking to buy?
If you sell say fishing rods, how have you made the pages relevant for each product that you sell.

How to improve on-page SEO for local businesses

Let’s go over those three areas in a bit more detail:

Relevance

Does the page you match what the searcher is looking for?

Part of the SEO process—and the magic, if you like—is making sure your website is as relevant as possible to the services you offer.

Now, this is where it gets hard if your business sells many different product lines. If you stock say over 1,000 different products, this is it gets harder to get every product line to rank high on page one of Google.

 

Distance/Proximity

Whether it’s the local organic search results or Google Map listings, where your business appears is based on the geographic areas you’ve optimised your website for. In Google Business, it’s based on the shopper’s actual location at the moment in time. For example, are they five miles away or 500 miles away?

Google usually only wants to show businesses that are close to the shopper- that’s if its clear they want to buy a product / service locally.

 

Prominence

If you have a lot of positive reviews—for example, on Trustpilot or your Google Business account—this can improve your prominence.

Many leading SEO consultants also believe prominence comes mainly from your backlink profile.

If you have a lot of good positive reviews on your Google Business profile, you’re more likely to be prominently placed in the Google Business results.

That’s all well and good, but how do you actually go about improving local SEO?

For Google Business optimisation, a key ranking factor is how close the shopper is to your company.

However, with organic SEO, there are over 200 different ranking factors Google takes into account.

And when it comes to Google Business, it’s not just about where the shopper is—it’s also about other factors, like how many positive Google reviews your business has, how many good backlinks, how often you have kept the profile updated.

 

How to optimise local landing pages

You want to create landing pages—often called main pages—that clearly outline the different services and products you offer.

Good On-Page SEO

This is definitely not just about ticking boxes with SEO tools. I’d recommend avoiding any tools that oversimplify the process—like ones that just use a traffic light system (red, amber, green). In my opinion, that’s way too simplistic.

Instead, you need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and give them high-quality, helpful information that’s valuable to them. Basically content marketing that helps them to make a buying decision, that answer there queries regarding that product or service.

Here’s an example of how you can help the customer while improving your on-page SEO:

Write really helpful product descriptions

Use a well written page title that sets out what the page is about

Write a strong meta title and meta descriptions, which can boost your CTR

Make sure your pages aren’t thin on content; the page should give enough information to help the customer make a buying decision

Make sure your pages load quickly, so customers aren’t kept waiting

Provide clear contact options so people can get in touch easily

Meta descriptions and meta titles

Meta descriptions aren’t a Google ranking factor—Google doesn’t use them to determine the strength of your SEO.

However, they do let customers know exactly what the page is about, grab their attention, and encourage them to visit your page.

For example, if you write within your meta description “We sell e-bikes under £2000” and that shows up in Google’s search results, it will immediately catch the attention of customers looking to spend that amount on a new bike, improving your click-through rate (CTR).

 

Time Poor

Our SEO agency would argue that people are more “time-poor” than ever today. You need to factor this into your SEO strategy.

 

What does this mean?

When you want to improve a business’s on-page SEO, think about how you can get your message across as quickly and clearly as possible.

Start with the meta description and quickly get across the positives of the page in just a few seconds.

Use bullet points so customers can quickly decide if your product is right for them.

Focus on quickly highlighting the benefits, using strong product descriptions, embedded YouTube videos with staff members explaining the benefits of that product, and try to reduce your bounce rate.

This is a key factor many SEO companies talk about: people are short on time and often buy products or services on the go—on the bus, train, or while out and about. Therefore think about how you can make your company website faster, but also more simple to use. This will improve the shoppers user experience, which will help to reduce bounce rate and improve conversions.

So, how can you convince someone in just a few seconds that your product is better?

Again, this comes back to a well-written meta description.

It’s all about improving your website’s visibility and getting it to rank higher in organic search.
Make sure that you have consistent Name, Address, Phone (NAP) Information

 

Does NAP Consistency Still Matter?

Earlier, we talked about proximity, where businesses is often selected based on how close they are to the searcher.

The way Google’s algorithm determines if your business is truly local is by checking your NAP information.

Some people think we’re now in the era of AI and citations don’t matter—but we disagree.

We believe business citations—your name, address, and phone number listed consistently across the internet—are still essential for improving your business’s local SEO.

 

The need for clarity

What can sometimes happen is that a business has strong search engine optimisation.

However, for whatever reason, the business may change its address and not update its NAP information, for example, on its Google Business account. This means the company website may say they based at new address, yet the companies Google Business profile may say it’s the old address, causing confusion to customers and Google.

Therefore what can sometimes happen is that changing an address, then having conflicting business citations, can cause the SEO to falter.
That’s because Googlebot and Google’s algorithms won’t know where you’re based—are you at your new or old address?

Use Schema Markup

 

Many businesses use schema markup to markup information, such as product reviews.

What this can do is help your business stand out more and grab shoppers attention in the search engine results pages by displaying your business as a featured snippet.

For example, you might have received 700 reviews for a particular product, and your customers are happy with that product, giving it an average rating of 4.8 out of five star rating.

This is an excellent product rating, so you may want to stand out as a featured snippet on the search engine pages, or “SERPs” for short.
One way to do this is by adding schema markup, which can be completed in just a matter of seconds.

Content marketing is an essential part of organic and local SEO.

As we have already mentioned, landing pages and main pages are essential parts of the search engine optimisation process. They are primarily used to make your website more relevant to the product or service you are selling. For example, if you’re writing hundreds of guides on bikes, it’s crystal clear to Google that your business sells bicycles and electric bikes.

Content marketing helps customers make buying decisions, for example, by answering any questions they may have. It also helps search engines understand more about the products and services your company offers. That’s because, regularly, the Googlebot crawls and indexes your main pages and determines how relevant your website is when deciding where to rank your business in the search engine results pages.
For example, if you have written in-depth guides about bikes, then this can help your website to rank higher for keywords related to e-bikes.

 

Internal links should be added within your website.

For example, a blog post might be written to promote a product or a service on your company website.
Therefore, if you are not using a blog post and internal link to a main product page, you could be missing out on an opportunity to generate more sales.

Technical SEO

It’s also important, regardless of whether you’re optimising your website to improve your local or national SEO, to take some time to improve your websites technical SEO.

This can mean:

• Fixing broken links
• Fixing indexation issues
• Improving page speed

Sometimes, a business—whether it’s a brochure site or an e-commerce website—can encounter technical issues. For example, the XML sitemap might be incorrectly written.

The XML sitemap may indicate that certain pages are not to be indexed- when actually they should be. This can mean that those pages will never appear in Google’s results, which means that unless the technical SEO issue is fixed, the page will never appear.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are essentially about how quickly your company’s website loads.

Remember that we discussed earlier how people are time-poor and impatient.

This means that if a business has a slow website, it can massively increase the business’s bounce rate.

What you will find, especially in large businesses such as e-commerce companies, is that they work on improving the site speed of their company website a lot.

You should work on this also, as having a faster company website can mean that your company in Bristol ranks higher on Google.

 

Keyword Stuffing

Why you shouldn’t keyword stuff your businesses content marketing

If your business sells fireworks, you might think it’s a good idea to keep repeatedly mentioning this keyword “fireworks”—like a dripping tap within your content marketing.

However, it’s not a good idea, it’s most likely going to end up with a Google penalty being applied to the website.
Google’s algorithms are very sophisticated; they recognise when a business mentions a keyword excessively.

This can lead to what is called over-optimisation issues.

We like to think of search engine optimisation a bit like tuning up an engine.
Just like when an engine’s power can be compromised if you tune it incorrectly, especially if it’s stressed too much. This can mean it will overheat and potentially blow up!

This is similar to your business’s search engine optimisation, in the sense that you can basically ruin your SEO efforts—and this can most definitely be achieved if you keyword stuff.

Instead of obsessively mentioning the keywords you want to rank for, you should naturally include them within your sentences.

Write your content to help the customer, as if you are doing your very best to assist them in their buying journey.

Imagine, therefore, when you’re writing content marketing, that you’re having a conversation with a real customer in your shop.

Consequently, it should be written naturally, as if you’re having a real-life conversation.

 

Utilise titles and FAQ-style content marketing

You may have noticed that we write content marketing using short and sharp sentences.

We also combine this with using a lot of page titles, which allows the reader to take a breather, and also to skip to the section where they want to read more of.

This can help reduce bounce rates and increase dwell times, which also helps Google’s algorithm better understand what the content marketing is about.

For example, suppose you split a 3,000-word piece of content marketing into sections using page titles and questions; this can help a shopper to skip to the sections of the page they want to read more about.
In that case, this can help Google better understand more precisely what the page is about.

 

FAQ on On-page SEO:

What can improve a business’s on-page SEO the most?

We would say that well-written content marketing with a very high Google E-EAT score is key; that is, well-written content marketing will significantly improve your business’s search engine optimisation.

Therefore, don’t write too many blog posts that contain thin content. Instead, focus your time and effort on writing better quality content marketing, perhaps less frequently.

 

Contact Us Today for a free quote

If you would like a free quotation, why not give us a ring?
We specialise in organic and local SEO for Bristol based businesses.