For a lot of business local to the Mornington Peninsula, or any regional area for that matter, local SEO is of the utmost important.
As part of our ongoing series to help educate clients, today we’re talking about local SEO. We do this because we provide local SEO for the Mornington Peninsula as well as other areas (like SEO for Frankston businesses). While we’re here to help, we want clients to understand what we’re doing and better help themselves where possible.
Ultimately that’s why we’ve created our SEO basics series. It’s not a full course/guide, just the basics to help you understand. If you are interested in something more in depth and thorough, you may want to check out Moz’s SEO learning centre; they always do a good job.
What Is Local SEO?
If you’ve read our article on keywords, you’ll have learned some basics about how search engines work. Basically, search engines assess the quality and authority of a website. If your site has more authority on a given search term, you’ll rank well.
So what’s the “local” part of “local SEO” mean and how is it different from “normal” SEO?
Well, it’s in the name. Local SEO focuses on search rankings for local areas, usually for businesses with a physical location to visit or who serve a specific area.
So if you’re a business on the Mornington Peninsula you want to concentrate on local SEO around searches containing “Mornington Peninsula” or specific suburbs on the Peninsula such as Red Hill or Hastings.
Take for example our business, a digital marketing agency based on the Mornington Peninsula. While we work with clients across Australia, our primary focus is clients in our own area. Because of that we have a page dedicated to being a digital marketing agency on the Mornington Peninsula. There’s different ways to go about things, but while our site is generally optimised around being an online marketing agency, we have specific areas optimised to the more specific niche of being an online marketing agency on the Mornington Peninsula.
Of course your site can just be optimised to a specific area (rather than multiple areas), which may be useful if you only service one location.
Real estate agents are a good example here. Most real estate agents only serve a specific territory and need a strong online presence as well as having a physical location to visit. A real estate agent should be optimising their site for their general area, like the Mornington Peninsula, as well as the suburbs they serve in that area like Mount Martha or Rye.
How Do I Improve My Local SEO?
We’ve touched on this a little so far. As mentioned, our site has a specific page about being a digital marketing agency on the Mornington Peninsula. This is a good start. On this page and others we’ve taken care with our HTML headings to ensure they’re locally focused. We’ve also taken care with keywords within specific pages and articles as well as what keywords we want to be ranking for.
Basically we’ve made sure that our site is very Mornington focused where applicable.
Show That Your Business Is Local Across The Internet
While links to your business’ website from other websites are more valuable, search engines will also see mentions of your business across the internet and understand more about your business from that. Because of that, having an optimised social media presence for your business is important. Thankfully it’s also easy to set up. But be aware you need to keep your social media updated.
This also means registering your business for things like Google My Business. Here you can tell Google directly where you are and what your service area is.
Going further, if your industry has any registry sites, you should register there too.
Local Reviews Help Too
Since you’ve set up your social media profiles and registered your business with Google My Business (right?), you should pursue reviews from customers. Positive reviews from customers are a signal to search engines that you’re a reputable local business that people should be giving their custom to.
How do you get more reviews? Well, firstly just do a good job and you’ll get reviews.
Beyond that, just ask for them! Make it easy to give reviews; most people will want to give one if they’ve had a positive experience and you make it easy. Send a follow up thank you email to customers and ask for a review. It’s that simple.
Your Address Can Also Be Important
Search engines look for other things on your site to rate authority and understand where you are. Having a strong about us page is a big trust builder with both search engines and customers, and search engines look at that.
Even more than this is having an address on your site. This is an obvious thing for search engines to see and better understand where you are and assess your service area.
Local SEO Is Important For Local Businesses
As a business local to the Mornington Peninsula we understand the important of local SEO. It’s important to us that we rank well for local searches and want our clients to do the same.
If you want to talk about how your site performs in search, or anything else digital marketing for that matter, feel free to get in touch.
