One thing that we love about working with businesses on the Mornington Peninsula and surrounds is that many of them are smaller businesses. While this can sometimes be a little more challenging from a marketing point of view, it’s a lot more rewarding.
And with local businesses comes local SEO. Many of the businesses that we work with don’t have (or even want) the national footprint that would warrant a large SEO campaign. Instead, they just want to rank well for local searches. Searches like “doctor Mornington” or “mechanic Rye.” This is what local SEO is all about: appealing to search for a local area, whether that be a suburb like Rosebud or a whole region like the Mornington Peninsula. When done properly, a business will appear not only at the top of search, but also in Google Maps.
That’s what we all want out of search engine optimisation, after all: to be on top. Being at the top leads to more visits to a website which leads to more business.
While we’re always happy to help local businesses with local SEO, some like to get started themselves. So here are five local SEO tips that will help your business rank locally, whether you’re on the Mornington Peninsula, Frankston area, or anywhere else really.
Create Hyper Local Pages
A hyper local page refers to a page that’s optimised for a specific area. Depending on the nature or your business, you may want a more general page and one or more hyper local pages for the same service.
The easy example here is our standard SEO page optimised for “SEO services.” This is an extremely difficult keyword to rank for, but, from a user experience point of view, we’d prefer a more general SEO services page. Separate from the we have two hyper local pages optimised for the Mornington Peninsula and Frankston. Obviously, our SEO Mornington Peninsula page is designed to rank for searches like “SEO Mornington Peninsula,” “SEO Mornington,” etc. Meanwhile, we also have a hyper local page for SEO Frankston, it does the same thing, except for Frankston.
These pages tend to do well for their specific searches, but you also have to take into account one hurdle with local search: lower search volumes! Although we’re ranking well for these searches, there are probably only about 50 searches per month for SEO services specific to the Peninsula and Frankston. That’s not a lot of potential business, but it’s more than enough for a small local agency like ours, not to mention we have other services beyond SEO. Keep this in mind when planning local pages and the geographic region you cover.
This is also important in SEO for trade based businesses. Very often tradies will cover specific geographic regions, or at least have a preference for specific geographic regions. Having hyper local pages for those geographic regions can really help with general listings beyond simply optimising Google My Business and getting into the Google Maps pack.
Maintain A Blog
A lot of small business owners are reluctant to maintain a blog because it’s both time consuming and they’re unsure what to write about. With that in mind, they often don’t see the benefits of a blog quickly or directly enough. In actual fact, blogging is an important cornerstone of both content marketing and SEO.
Although there are literally thousands of ranking signals for search engines, two things we know they evaluate are the depth and breadth of content on a website and the internal links of a website; if there are a lot of internal links to a specific page, search engines know it’s important.
Blogging helps with both of those things. A blog article put more content on a website that isn’t just “buy this service” while also linking from the blog articles to the specific landing pages, strengthening them for search. Blogs also show potential customers that you know what you’re talking about.
Take this blog article as a prime example. You’ve either found your way here through searching for local SEO or by coming to our website through other means, and you want to see if we’re credible. But what you’re not seeing from this article is that it’s giving more depth of content for SEO topics, strengthening us in search for SEO related queries. We’re also linking to specific services pages, making those page stronger as well.
Create A Google My Business Listing
If you don’t have a Google My Business listing yet, make one!
If your business is one with a specific location, it’s obvious that you should make a Google My Business listing for that location. If you don’t have a specific location, you can set up a Google My Business listing for a service area instead.
But beyond just listing your business, optimise the listing. Make sure your contact details are correct, link to your website and social platforms, and write a full description of your business. Google gives you 750 words to write a business description. Use all of them!
With a Google My Business listing created, your business will then appear on Google Maps when people search for your type of business in that area. It’s another great way to be seen.
Get Reviews For Your Business On Google My Business
A reputable, well reviewed business will appear higher in search, both in general search and on Google Maps. Beyond the benefits in search, if your business has dozens of positive reviews, people will be more likely to trust it. Because of this, it’s important to get reviews for your business!
And this can be a challenge. A lot of people won’t leave a review for a business unless they’ve had a negative experience. Those who will give a positive review only do so if it’s an extremely good experience. And it’s a common question we get from clients…
How do you get more reviews for your business?
Ask for them.
That’s it. For a lot of businesses, you’ll still find that as little as one in ten will leave a review, but that’s a big increase from one in a hundred. And the majority of those reviews will be five star reviews.
So just ask for reviews, it’s that easy.
Traditional SEO
With all this talk about local SEO, it can be easy to forget about more traditional SEO. Traditional SEO is usually divided into on page SEO actions and off page SEO actions. On page SEO involves things like optimising page titles, headings, meta descriptions, alt tags, and a whole lot more. Off page SEO involves link building, content marketing, some things listed here like Google My Business, and more.
Without a website built with traditional SEO in mind, it’s not going to succeed in local SEO. So, in a lot of ways, traditional SEO is the most important part of local SEO. Build a foundation and let the rest of the optimisation go from there.
These small parts of traditional SEO can be difficult and confusing for a lot of small business owners though, and a lot of them don’t have the time or skill to go through their pages to make sure headings are correct. But that’s what digital marketing agencies like ours are for. We’re a marketing agency for the Mornington Peninsula, and we’re here to help.
