Although we work with clients across Victoria and Australia, we are a Mornington Peninsula based digital marketing agency, so we have a special affinity for the area. For a lot of small businesses, local SEO is extremely important (and we have an article on getting started on local SEO if you need it).
While the local SEO tips in the linked article are of use for local SEO on the Mornington Peninsula, one of the important aspects of local SEO is knowing your area. We know our area well, which is why we advertise ourselves as a Mornington Peninsula SEO agency.
Determine How People Are Searching
One obvious solution to getting a local business to rank better for Mornington Peninsula search terms is to simply optimise for things like “Mornington Peninsula service type.” So, if you’re an accountant, you may want to optimise for “Mornington Peninsula accountant.”
While this is a good first step, you also have to consider how people local to the Mornington Peninsula are searching, and this may be different than how people in other areas are searching.
Tools such as SEMrush can help find specific search terms/keywords, but not every business can afford to pay the subscription fees or know how to use these tools.
Free tools such as Google Search console can give insight into what a site is already ranking for. While this is of more limited use, it does give insight into where you may be able to improve, especially for searches you may not have considered.
Consider The Local Area In Terms of Place Names
Considering the above, the Mornington Peninsula presents some interesting challenges in terms of place names.
The Mornington Peninsula sits over a fairly large geographical area, so, depending on the service, some searches may be around the entirety of the area and some may be even more localised.
For example, for a lot of trades or service based businesses, searches may be around the Mornington Peninsula in general. However, more retail based businesses or businesses that require a specific location (such as farm based businesses) may have searches based on suburb. An example here may be a horse stable in Merricks.
Again, this needs to be researched.
Going further, over optimising for the Mornington Peninsula takes away from other areas you may serve but aren’t traditionally searched for as part of the Mornington Peninsula. Here we’re thinking areas like Frankston, Cranbourne, and even going up towards Mentone if your business can serve it.
This is a challenge that we’re even seeing on our site. It hasn’t been too difficult to optimise for the Mornington Peninsula in general, but optimising for something like Frankston digital marketing agency is almost too specific for our general SEO strategy. However, through our research we’ve determined that this is an area we need to improve and that’s our next goal.
Content May Be King Here
We’re firm believers in the power of Content Marketing and SEO. It’s a great way of answering questions in order to rank for longer tail keywords, create links throughout your site, and generally pepper your site with keywords to make it stronger in search.
To this end, positioning your business as a Mornington Peninsula based brand and leaning heavily into this through content may help it rank better for local search; whether that search be for the Mornington Peninsula in general or for specific suburbs.
You’ll notice in this article and others that we try to use place names where possible and organic. This reinforces our service area and helps locally.
While it’s not a huge SEO indicator, these are little things. Like all things SEO, there’s no single thing that helps a site rank, it’s a series of little things.
