Research the keywords that you want to rank for before you start building out web pages and creating content. Some of the quickest and easiest ways to look at keywords that you might want your site to rank for is to actually sit down and brainstorm ideas. What words or phrases would you use to search for the services or products you provide? When talking to customers what words or terms do they use to describe your products or service? Speak to work colleagues, friends or family members to see if they can come up with any potential ideas.

You can also use tools to search for potential keywords, like Google’s Keyword Tool.

Optimise your website for local search traffic

Make sure your address is on your website, preferably on every page of the site. When putting your address on the site make sure you always lay it out in the same format and have it as html text rather than an image file. If you want to pick up traffic from people searching for the services you provide in the surrounding areas then make sure you mention them or even better create a page for each area. For instance, if you provided plumbing services in Manchester you may want to add pages to your site targeting Oldham or Stockport.

Claim your listing in Google Places

If you haven’t already done it go and claim your business listing on Google Places or create one if there is not one there already. Read this guide on optimising your Google Places page.

Track what you are doing with an analytic program

If you are not tracking traffic levels, where traffic is coming from and what keywords are being used to find your website then you are working in the dark. Google Analytics is free and easy to install, it will give you a wealth of information on where people are finding your site which will allow you to track whether or not the changes you are making to your site are working and where to focus future efforts.

Optimise the title tags on every page

Your title tags are a very important factor of On-Page SEO, they should be unique for every page of your site and contain the main keyword you want the page to rank for. Having the title of your page as “Welcome” or “Home” or even just your company name is not going to cut it. The title tag shows the search engines what the page is about and what it should be ranking for (assuming of course that the page content matches the title of the page), it also shows searchers what the page is about and entices them to click onto your page so you want them to be as relevant as possible.

Create a sitemap of your site

Simply put, a site map is a document that maps out all of the pages of your site. By having a sitemap and submitting it to Google via Web-master tools you increase your chances of having pages indexed quickly.

You can get a sitemap created on this website and if you have not already sign up for Google Webmaster tools here.

Optimise the images on your site

When including images on your site you want to make sure they are optimised for SEO purposes. Make sure the file name contains your keyword or a variant of your keyword and put your keyword phrase into the alt tag of the image. So, for example, if your page was was targeting the keyword phrase “liverpool plumber” you would call the image liverpool-plumber.jpg and when putting the image on the website fill out the alt tag as alt=”Liverpool Plumber”.

Make sure your site loads quickly

Google has publicly stated that they will be incorporating site load speeds as a search ranking factor so it is definitely something you need to look at. Site speed is not just a search ranking factor, it is a usability issue too. If your site takes too long to load people are going to leave and seek answers elsewhere. So what can you do to make sure your site is loading quickly? Get some decent web hosting, free sites are free for a reason (they will be packed together on the same server which will effect loading times). Optimise your images, make sure your not uploading huge image files. Take CSS and Javascript out of the main file and house them in external files. Don’t use images to display text.

Start building links to your website

Getting links pointing to your site from relevant websites containing keywords as anchor text is key to ranking high in the search engines. Find blogs relevant to your industry and engage with them in the comments, join and interact with forums relevant to your industry and have a link to your site in the signature section, find where your competitors are getting their links and try to get the same and submit your site to as many regional and industry specific web directories as you can find.

In general people use Facebook to connect with and remain in contact with people they already know, I know from my own personal experience that I have never used Facebook to meet new people. So would it not be fair to say that the same would go for the way people use Facebook to interact with businesses? Again from a personal point of view I have only ever added businesses to my Facebook feed that I have used previously, I have never used Facebook to shop around for new services. Based on this, Facebook would be better suited as a tool to remain in contact with previous customers, search (and in particular Google search) would be the better strategy for sourcing new customers.

Of course that is not to say that Facebook cannot be used to generate new customers but I believe it will go hand in hand with looking after previous customers. For example by offering incentives to previous customers to recommend your Facebook page to their friends you may end up getting new people arriving to your page that you could sell to.

In researching for this article I looked at many Facebook pages setup by small businesses, most of which had been initially set up, used for a while and then largely abandoned. This would suggest that businesses are creating Facebook pages hoping and expecting to tap into the user base thereby generating new sales leads and when this doesn’t happen they quickly lose interest and give up on the page. I also noticed that there was a high percentage of small businesses sending the same message day after day to their Facebook fans. These messages were just copy/pasted from the previous day and largely involved them trying to push some product or service to the follower. Obviously this is going to lead to people ignoring whatever that company puts up on Facebook or even deleting the page from the Facebook profile.

Small businesses then develop the opinion that Facebook marketing is not something that they should be spending their time on. The reality is that, if you are providing a product or service to the public, a massive amount of potential customers can be found on Facebook. The key is getting your service and business in front of these people.

Using Facebook as a Customer Retention Tool

Firstly lets take a quick look at what customer retention is and why it is important to small businesses. Too many small businesses put all of their marketing focus on finding new customers and attracting new sales opportunities while completely neglecting their past customers. After spending so much time and money on gaining the customer why would you then, after finishing the work or delivering the product, wash your hands of them and give your competition another chance of getting them further down the line?

Plumbing companies are a perfect example of this, we may use a plumber and be very happy with the work we had done but then not need the services of another plumber for months or longer. During this time there is a good chance that we may forget who we used last time and we will probably be inundated with advertisements from competing plumbing companies in the area. If the plumber who we used, and who we were happy with, made no attempt to stay in touch with us there is a chance we will pick somebody else next time.

Facebook is the perfect tool for keeping in touch with your past customers, though I must stress not the only tool you should be using. Again going back to the plumber, once they have completed the work and made sure the customer is happy with everything they should be switching back into marketing mode to make sure they get to retain this customer for future work. Ask for their email address, take down their postal address and ask them to Like your Facebook page so that you can keep them up to date with offers and related news.

Ok so you are starting to get customers “Liking” your Facebook page, now what? Well don’t feel the need to constantly be posting things to your page to keep them there and, more importantly don’t try to sell to them everyday. The quickest way to get people to ditch your Facebook page is to be constantly trying to sell them something. As an example, going back to plumbing, I had Liked the page of a local plumber so that I knew where to turn should I need one in a hurry (I had been recommended this plumber by friends who were past customers). My patience lasted a week before I deleted their page from my profile due to the fact that all they did was post the exact same thing every few hours trying to sell me plumbing services, it became tedious very quickly. Try to stick to the 80/20 rule, 80% of the time post informational or interesting content and the remaining 20% of the time post about your products or services.

Modern Day Word of Mouth Marketing

If we go back a few years before the internet was as huge as it is, long before Facebook or Twitter, local services used to rely on word of mouth marketing to keep the business coming in. The basic premise being, if you do good work and provide a good service the customer will tell their family, friends and work colleagues which will lead to more work.

This type of marketing is still alive and kicking it just has a modern twist. These days people connect with their friends, family and work colleagues via Facebook and other social networking sites and so there is a massive opportunity to get them to share about their great experience using your company. For this reason small businesses need to make sure that they make an effort to stay in touch with customers after the work has been done or the product has been sold. Here are a few things that we recommend doing:

• Get some cards made up to send with your product or to give out once you have completed the contracted work. On one side have your Facebook page link and ask them to join your page, on the other thank them for their custom and point them towards your Google Places listing for a review.
• Make sure you get their email address so that you can send them a follow up email.
• Ask them to refer your company to their family and friends, either via email or through your Facebook page. You may want to offer an incentive for referring new customers.

Google Places Optimisation

An image showing how the Places/Maps listings are shown in the Google search results for a localised search

So what is your Google Places listing? You might know it as the map results that come up whenever you search for a product or service. Regardless of whether you have signed up for the service chances are your company will have a Google Places listing already, just waiting for you to claim the listing and optimise it.

So why should you be bothered about Google Places optimisation? Recently Google have really been pushing the Places platform and they are giving more and more emphasis to Places listings in the search results, pushing the organic listings further down the page. If you are not up there you will be missing out on the opportunity to get your business in front of many of your potential customers.

You will need a Google account to complete your business listing, if you haven’t got one sign up for one here – www.google.com/accounts

Claiming Your Business Listing

The first thing you need to do to get on the Google Places ladder is claim your business listing. If you have been in business for any length of time and your address details are available over the web then chances are Google has already created a business listing for you, you may even have customer reviews on there that you never even knew about!

Go to maps.google.co.uk and in the search field search for “company name” + city, using the quotation marks around your company name. For example if I was search for a company called ABC Plumbing who operated out of Redcar I would search for “ABC Plumbing” + Redcar.  If you do not see your company it would be wise to try a couple of variations to the search terms just to be sure that there is no listing, we want to avoid making a duplicate listing if at all possible because this will cause problems later on down the line.

An example unclaimed business listing

If, after searching, you do not find a Places page associated with your company then you can skip the rest of this section and go to the “Adding a new listing to Google Places” section of this article. If you found a listing associated with your company your next step is to register the Places page to your business. Once you have clicked the link to open the Places page you should see a link in the top right hand corner that says “Edit this place – Business owner?”. If instead it says “Edit this place – Owner-verified listing” then the listing has already been claimed, speak to people within the business to see if anybody has claimed the listing on the businesses behalf. If they haven’t and you have no idea who has claimed the listing you will need to report the problem to Google. Under the business name and address there will be a link that says “more” click that and then click “Report a Problem”.

Your next step is to click the “Business Owner?” link, this will take you to a page asking if you want to “Add, Edit or Suspend a listing”. Check the “Edit my business information” option and click continue. This will take you to the area where you can edit the company information.

Adding a new listing to Google Places

If you need to add a new business you need to head over to www.google.com/places and click the “Get Started” link on the right hand side. This should then get you through to the Places dashboard where you can begin inputting details about your business.

Filling out your business listing

An example of a better Google Places listing, The owner has claimed the listing, added some photos and attracted reviews from customers.

When filling out your business listing you want to give as much information as you possibly can, in fact ideally we want the Places page to be 100% complete. The reason behind this is relevancy, you need to make your business listing as relevant as possible to your keywords. Google is the number one search engine in the UK, in no small part because people trust that when they search for something they will be presented with relevant search results, if they weren’t they would quickly start looking for an alternative search engine. For this reason you have to make your website and Places page as relevant as possible to the terms you want to rank for, to do this we need to completely fill out the business listing with relevant information.

Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts for filling out your business listing:

• Do – Use your exact business name as your company/organisation name on your listing.
• Do Not – Stuff your business name with keywords or locations. It is against Google’s Terms of Service and will get your listing pulled sooner or later.

• Do – Create custom categories pertinent to your business in addition to the one provided.
• Do Not – Stuff the custom categories full of keywords and locations. For instance “plumber Liverpool” is not an acceptable category and breaches Google’s guidelines.

• Do – Provide a local phone number as the main number, complete with area code.
• Do Not – Use a mobile number or 0800 number as your primary business number. You can add these numbers into your business description.

• Do – Write a compelling business description using your primary keywords within the copy.
• Do Not – Go overboard and fill the description box with keywords, making the content of the description box difficult to read. You should not just copy and paste something from your website either, take the time to write a unique description of your company and services.

• Do – Upload as many images as you can. At time of writing Google allowed you to upload 10 images to your profile, make sure you upload 10 images. They can be your company logo, photos of employees, your place of business, company vehicles or photos of past work.

• Do – Upload at least 1 video. If you don’t have one make one, or get one made. It doesn’t have to be Spielberg quality!

There are a number of other things you can do to optimise your Places listing both from within the listing itself and on other websites but this list should give you a good starting point.

Once you are happy with the way you have filled out your listing, hit the submit button. You will then need to verify your listing, to make sure you are allowed to make changes. Unfortunately for UK businesses this means waiting a few weeks for Google to send you a postcard/letter with a PIN number. When that arrives, simply login to you Places account and put the PIN in to activate the listing.

Improving your ranking in Google Places

Make sure you complete your Google Places listing

This one should really go without saying and it is mentioned earlier in the article above so go back and read the rest of the article if you skipped to this section. You need to make sure that you fill in the business listing completely, upload photos and videos, put in as many categories as you can, write a quality description of your company and services etc. This is an important factor and you should take the time to make sure everything is done as well as it can be.

Build citations on external sites

Firstly you need to know what citations are. Citations are references to your business on external websites, we are looking to see the business name, address, contact numbers and if possible email addresses and website. Citations can come from places like business directories (think along the lines of Yell or Thomson Local), industry specific directories, local publications (sometimes your local newspaper website will have local business listings), social websites and so on.

It is extremely important when building citations to be consistent, particularly when it comes to your NAP (Name, address and phone number). You must make sure that you use the same company name, address and phone number across all of the citations that you get. So for example if your company is ABC Plumbing & Heating make sure you use that, exactly as it is written, as your company name in external sites. Using variations like ABC Plumbing, ABC Heating, ABC Plumbers is not going to help your cause, the same goes for your address (if your located at 1 Main Street, make sure you don’t start mixing it up with 1 Main St on some sites). Keep it consistent!

This should go without saying but make sure your address is on your website (even if you are a plumber and you don’t actually sell from that address, we are trying to rank in local search results), having it on every page is even better (in the footer for example).

A bonus tip, if you are struggling to find places to get citations look at the companies who are listing well in the Places rankings and find out where they are listed and get your business listed there too.

Customer Reviews

Getting customer reviews direct to your Places page and other 3rd party websites is another important ranking factor, though not the be all and end all since it can be very easily manipulated. My advice to you is get real reviews from real customers, there will be the temptation to start registering accounts and leaving positive reviews under false names for your business, don’t do this it looks fake and sooner or later you will come unstuck. For example, in researching for this article, I came upon a Places listing for a plumbing company in London. They had 3 reviews on their Places page, all 3 gave a 5 star review, all 3 had only 1 review in their Google history, all 3 left the review on the exact same date and most tellingly all 3 had the exact same writing style (they capitalised the first letter of every word)! It was plain to see, even from a quick glance that the same person had left all 3 reviews. Now not only will this sooner or later get picked up by Google (a few complaints from rival companies will see to that), but any potential customer looking at that page is going to see right through it and instantly form a level of distrust for this company. Do good work, provide a good service and customers will be more than happy to leave a review if you ask.

Optimise your own website

This is really an article of it’s own so I won’t go into too much depth here but as well as optimising your Google Places page your need to optimise your own website for local search. Make sure your address is on every page and make sure it is consistent with the address you have used on your places page. Make sure your location is included in the Title, content and headings on your website. Build links to your site using your city name in the anchor text.

A well optimised website goes hand in hand with a well optimised Google Places listing.

Local business marketing has moved on from Yellow Pages ads

Why is local SEO important? A few years back marketing your business to the local area was a much simpler affair. An advert in the Yellow Pages, classifieds in the local newspapers and maybe a few adverts in trade publications is all it would take to start attracting local customers. Those days are very much in the past, I can not remember the last time I used the printed edition of the Yellow Pages to source a business, in fact I can not remember the last time I even saw a copy of the Yellow pages! These days more and more people are turning to the internet to find local products and services and, with the impact of tablets like the iPad and smart phones making accessing the internet quicker than ever, this is only likely to increase. This is why local SEO is becoming more and more important for small businesses.

Another key factor in why people are turning away from traditional business listing services to the internet is that a company website can grant the user far more information than a printed classified advertisement could ever do.

For these reasons any business that is not investing time and money into a local search optimisation strategy is very quickly going to get left behind by their competition. It is no good being the best plumbing service in town if nobody even knows you exist, and if you’re not on the first page of Google’s search results you might as well not exist in their eyes. Also if the service you provide is very much only offered in your local area than you need to be mindful of tailoring any local SEO marketing that you do to suit this factor. There is no point ranking on the first page of Google for a number of terms if 90% of the traffic you get is from outside of your local area.

What does our local SEO service entail?

Keyword Research

Everyday millions of people use search engines (predominantly Google, Bing and Yahoo) to seek out information on a massive variety of topics. The words or phrases that they use in the search box are known as keywords and these are of great importance for any SEO campaign, local or otherwise. As part of our service we will investigate what keywords your site should be targeting, what keywords your competition are targeting and what level of competition there are for each keyword.

On Page Optimisation

Our service breaks the on-page optimisation into 2 distinct categories. The first is optimising the website so that it has a better chance of ranking well in the search engines. This includes a number of things like making sure the code of the website is not bloated full of un-needed code, ensuring <title> tags are being used effectively an all pages, seeing that keywords are being properly used in headings and page content, that images are being optimised properly, that the pages within the site are all interlinking together effectively and using the right anchor text etc. All of these points, and more, will contribute to how effectively your site is set up for SEO.

The second category for on-page optimisation is how well the site is set up to convert visitors into customers or sales leads. There is no point in investing time and money into getting more visitors to your site if the site cannot convert them into sales. This could be due to a number of reasons like poor site navigation, poor sales copy, no distinct call to action, poor quality photographs etc.

As part of our service we will examine all aspects of your site and present you with a report on what needs to change. If you haven’t got a website yet then why not let us give you a price for a site that will be local SEO optimised right from the very beginning.

Google Places Optimisation

An example of Google's Places results

If you are not sure what Google Places is, here is a quick overview. Google Places are what are commonly called the “Maps” listings and very often appear at the top of the results page for local specific search term, it allows the business owner to present potential customers with a variety of information, photos and videos. It also allows customers to submit reviews of businesses for other customers to see.

As part of our service we will claim your business listing on your behalf, if you haven’t already done so, optimise the listing so that every bit of information is filled out, build citations to the listing to enable it to rank better and, depending on the package you choose, work with you to build genuine positive reviews from past customers. Please, if you take nothing else away from this page, do not rush out and starting posting up positive reviews yourself to your own page, it will not work out well!

Off-Page Optimisation

This involves primarily the building of links to your site in order to build up the domain authority and improve rankings. We will pro-actively seek out linking opportunities for your site, making sure to never do anything that will put your site in harm’s way.

We also offer, depending on the package you opt for, Facebook page and Twitter account management services.

Bespoke Solutions For Every Customer

We know that every company is different, every product or service is different and needs to be marketed differently and for that reason we will always tailor our local SEO solutions to suit your company and product/service. We do this by taking the time to learn as much as we can about your company, your products/services and the industry you operate in.

Please contact us to learn more.