When it comes to rankings in local SEO, you’re website is being judged on three things: Relevance: Do you match what the searcher is looking for? Distance: How far away is your business or service from the person looking for it? Prominence: Do you have good reviews and a reputable online profile (consistent NAP information,
When it comes to rankings in local SEO, you’re website is being judged on three things:
Relevance: Do you match what the searcher is looking for?
Distance: How far away is your business or service from the person looking for it?
Prominence: Do you have good reviews and a reputable online profile (consistent NAP information, etc)
Local business on page SEO is one of the main things that gives you a better chance of being visible for relevant searches for your services.
Google itself highlights the issue, claiming that “richer, more specific information about your business improves local rankings”.
So, here’s how to do local SEO website optimisation for your business.
The biggest difference between “local SEO” and “normal” SEO, is that local SEO is based on geography and how close you are to the person searching.
If you’re an emergency electrician in London, you’re not much use to someone searching for an emergency electrician in Birmingham, so you’re not going to show up for it.
But if you’re close to the searcher and have a well optimised local landing page that matches the search, you’ve got a good chance of ranking.
You can get good results from local SEO with a well optimised Google Business Profile (even if you don’t have a website)
But Google is crawling web pages to rank in SERPs along with Business Profiles.
If nothing else, it’s not going to do you any harm to show up more than once at the top of Google for an enquiry, is it?
On-page SEO for local search is all about showing Google you’re relevant to the service a customer wants, and that you’re close enough to be useful to them.
Optimising your local landing pages around local SEO is pretty straightforward.
Start by writing down your services along with the areas you cover.
This could be straightforward if you’re a business like a cafe in one location (cafe in St Helens).
If you’re a service business that covers multiple locations, like a storage business with multiple sites around the North West, you’ll have a much bigger list.
This is just about thinking about the different aspects of your service that a customer may search for, and making sure you’ve included information about it on the page.
For example, someone looking for a storage facility in Liverpool might be looking specifically for a 24/7 storage facility.
So this is something you’ll have to include on your page to make sure you rank for the intent, if it’s something you offer.
Similarly, your primary service might be a local plumber, but you also do emergency callouts.
Again, this is something that will need to be included on your local landing page to make sure you rank for the enquiry.
There are two things you’ll be writing here:
Your title tag is one of the things Google uses to check if your page is relevant to the search. So it should include your main keyword, or a variation of it to help search engines match you.
It’s also the first thing a potential customer is going to see of your business in SERPs.
So, include a USP that makes you stand out and encourages a user to click through to your website.
If you have any certifications relevant to your business, you could try to include them in your title tag.
There’s quite a lot of debate about the value of meta descriptions to search results, but the consensus is that they don’t actually contribute to how highly your page will rank in search.
What it does contribute to, is how many people will click through to your site.
Your meta description is your elevator pitch to potential customers. Make it clear and obvious what you do and what the benefits are of working with you.
Search engines use your business’ name, address and phone number to determine how relevant you are to a search.
I can’t overemphasise how important it is that this information is consistent wherever it appears on the internet.
If your business appears online (business directories, listings, Google Business Profile, social media accounts and your own website) with different NAP information you risk hurting your chances of showing up in SERPs.
If you’ve got multiple locations, use your main office on your homepage, then use the different addresses on the relevant location pages.
You can see an example of this below from our client The Storage Team, who have multiple locations with the relevant name, address, phone number on the related landing pages.
Schema markup is used by search engines to understand what your page is about and identify elements of your page that are relevant (like reviews or ratings).
For local businesses, there are a few types of schema markup to include in your onpage SEO.
Local business schema helps search engines pull relevant details about your business (type, address etc) from web pages and rank you in results pages.
If you’ve got more than one location, you should include local business schema on each page with the information relevant to that location.
You can use a schema generator tool to help create your data:
Once you’ve created your information, it should be pasted into the header of your page’s HTML.
If you don’t know how to do that, you can use a website plugin like RankMath to make it easier, or you can use a Local SEO agency to help.
Review schema helps search engines display reviews or ratings about your business as part of your SERP, listing.
This has two benefits.
First, it makes your listing stand out more to customers (because you’re taking up more space in the results listing)
Second, it provides early social proof to customers that you’re a reliable, trusted service, which can increase the number of people who click through to your website.
If you’ve ever looked down a search engine results page, you’ll notice features like “people also ask” or snippets answering specific questions.
Putting FAQs schema on your local business page can help you appear in these snippets and SERP features, making you stand out more and increasing your chances of getting clicks to your site.
If you’ve read our Local SEO guide, you’ll already have an idea about how important local landing pages are to local on page optimisation.
Remember, Google is looking specifically at relevance and location to a search, which means it’s not going to work to have a single page with a “we cover everywhere in Mereyside” message.
Search engines are looking for location specific content, which means you need to write landing pages for each location you work in, whether you have a physical location or offer services to customers living
in that area.
The biggest thing is to get your service and location in the heading to show search engines, and customers what you’re all about.
The main advice I’ve got is not to be clever, just be clear on what you do.
If you’ve got location pages for multiple areas, don’t just duplicate each page with the area name changed.
This is going to cause issues on your site with duplicate content – which search engines don’t like – and could hurt your local rankings.
Your location page should be specific to the issues faced by people in that area.
Let’s say you’re an electrician. Do houses in that area have specific issues based on when the properties were built or any changes in best practice?
Are there any quirks to the way houses are plumbed if they’re older houses?
Anything you can add to make your location pages more relevant to the specific search will make it more likely you’ll rank and be found by customers.
You should also include relevant FAQs, and it can even be worth embedding a Google Map showing your address.
One last thing to add about location pages. Don’t just write them and leave them as individual pages.
Add internal links between your homepage and location pages, and between each location page.
These internal links make it easier for search engines to find and crawl your pages, which is what needs to happen if the page is ever going to rank.
We’ve got a full guide on technical SEO and improving on page elements of your website, so I won’t go into too much detail here.
The main thing to look at with on page SEO for local business pages, is Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals show what kind of user experience your website provides, specifically looking at issues around site speed.
A poor score on your web vitals can have a negative impact on your local search rankings, so it’s a big part of your on page SEO to make improvements.
You can easily check your web vitals in Google Search Console, which will flag any pages on your site returning issues that need to be fixed.
This could be image files that are too big and slowing your site down, for example.
There are parts of local business on page SEO that are quite technical (like schema) so it’s not unusual for us to see some problems on client websites when they first come to us.
We’d say these are the most common things we see:
Keyword stuffing is just trying to put too many keywords onto a page.
It used to be the way to win with SEO, but Google and other search engines have come a long way since those days.
Search engines are smart enough to understand what you’re page is about, without writing a keyword every other word to the point that it doesn’t make sense.
Instead you should add your keywords to the main headings, in subheadings and naturally in the body copy when it sounds natural and makes sense to do so.
It’s common for businesses to mix up name, address and phone details across pages on their website, and on business directories and other listings.
Mixing these details up can confuse search engines or make your website seem less trust worthy, which means you’re not going to rank as high as you could.
As we’ve said, schema markup and structured data makes it easier for search engines to work out what your page is about, and display additional elements of your page on search results (like reviews).
Not adding schema, or adding the wrong type, can mean you miss out on some search results features that could make you more visible to potential customers.
The main problem here is that it’s too easy to think of your website as something people will see on a desktop.
But way more than half of local business searches in the UK are done on mobile.
So if you’ve not optimised your pages for mobile search, you’re not going to be as visible as you could be.
Look, I’m not going to lie and say that on page SEO for local searches is the most exciting thing you’ll do for your business.
It can be quite techy, and you have to understand structured data, among other things.
But it is one of the most important things you need to be more visible in local search.
It doesn’t matter how good your service is, or even how good your website content is on its own.
Without a full on-page strategy for your local business, you’ll never reach your potential for visibility in search engines.
We’ve got loads more content about making your site stand out in search on our site.
But if you’re ready to get started working with a local SEO agency who knows how to get you found online by your ideal local customers, get in touch and let’s have a chat about how we can help.
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