In this article, I will explain how you can improve the local search performance of your WordPress site with 5 easy steps that won’t cost you any money just a bit of your time.
Google My Business and Bing Places
The first step is the most basic and easiest to complete, you will need to submit your business to Google My Business and Bing Places. Be sure to include all relevant information and select if you allow customers to visit your premises, you should also include some images.
This step should always go first as it can take a few weeks before your Google My Business page is live, this because Google will usually post you a card that contains a unique pin number that confirms you really are at the address you stated. Bing Places is usually easier to setup as they don’t always require that you receive a pin number and sometimes just need a phone or email confirmation will suffice.
Tips
Do you have more than one premises? You can add all locations to your Google My Business account.
More than one business running from a single location? You can give each of your businesses a unique ID that will allow to you list multiple businesses from a single address.
Name, Address and Phone Number
You need to ensure that the name, address and phone number on your site are the same as the values that you included in the Google My Business listing. You must use the exact same details in all areas and you will also want to use Schema.org markup to ensure that search engines can display your company information.
You can use various plugins such as Yoast SEO allow you to include basic information that will be output as Schema markup, you can see what your site already outputs by using the Google Structured Data Test Tool. You can also include microdata using JSON-LD which is what we recommend, there are also various plugins that allow you to include JSON-LD microdata from within the WordPress Dashboard if you are uncomfortable with adding to your theme or creating a plugin.
Local Reviews
Once you have completed step 1 and have a Google My Business listing you can ask your clients to leave reviews, you can simply send them a link that they can open and then leave a review right away. The link will look like this: https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=ChIJwYV1VZ5IcEgRnwDS8V60gOI. You can get your own link by getting your Google My Business map location ID from here. You can follow these instructions on how to make your own link for customers to leave reviews.
You can also ask your clients to review your business on Facebook if you have a local business Facebook page, you can then connect your Facebook page to your Google My Business page and then people searching for you will also see the rating from Facebook along with the ratings from Google.
Not only is this step important for local SEO its also important for user experience as visitors are much more likely to go with a business that has publically visible reviews.
Local Link Building
Local SEO still requires backlinks but more so on local backlinks rather than just backlinks with a high page authority. Lucky building local backlinks can be rather simple as you may find most towns will have unique online directories that you can submit your site to and even Government run projects where you can submit your site for free. Also dealing with local businesses is easier when it comes to asking for backlinks, you can try to build organic backlinks by including a blog on your site and writing about other local businesses. You can ask other local businesses to include a link to your site if you write a nice article about them.
When looking for local links try to find websites that have a similar category to yours as these will provide better backlinks due to their relevance.
How else can I build local links?
1. Join your local business board, most towns will have one and they will hold regular business events where you can meet other like-minded business owners.
2. Run your own local event or meet up.
3. Offer discounts to other businesses if you leave a write-up and link about your business on their own site.
Optimise on-site content
Don’t forget to optimise your site and content to target a local audience, if you don’t just target one local area then make focus pages that target keywords for local searches. This is what we do on this site, we will make dedicated pages that provide information for local search for services such as Hereford SEO Services.
We recommend you also identify all errors on your site, you can find basic errors such as Crawl Errors that Google has detected within the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. You can also use a free tool such as www.seoptimer.com to get a basic idea of what needs fixing on your site.
Be sure to include your business address, name and phone number as mentioned above on the frontpage or even in the footer of each page. Identify local keywords and ensure that they are included in the page H1 title, Meta Title and Description, don’t go overboard though, there is no need to include the keyword 100s of times and remember that the page needs to make sense to a human.
Add more content to your site, this is the biggest problem we see with local business websites. Don’t just stop with 4 pages that are updated 1 a year as this is simply not good enough to make it to the first page of Google. Publish more content, include more information, have a blog that covers questions that your clients ask the most.
Overview
This isn’t a comprehensive guide but I hope that the information above will help you get started in the right direction, SEO takes a lot of work and time. Results aren’t really seen until after at least 2-3 months and real results can take over 6 months to achieve depending on the state of the site you are working with and the level of competition.
Stick and writing quality content that covers your focus keywords and research topics that people are searching for and you will see a steady increase in your search position.
