Local Business Mistakes To Avoid

 

Struggling to be found for your chosen local search phrase within Google? Here are the 7 most common issues/errors/mistakes that local businesses commit.

Even the best SEO practices won’t help you if the foundation of your website isn’t up-to-scratch, so here are the 7 things to avoid if you want to find success in local search:

1) Only focusing on your brand

Quite a few estate agents only focus on their brand, which in most cases is the one area that they don’t need to worry about.

If you are the only business with that name then you don’t need to heavily optimise for your brand name.

2) Focusing only on what you sell

Of course you want to focus on the services you offer, but that doesn’t mean you should only focus on that.

Every estate agent pretty much does exactly the same thing, offering the same services at roughly the same price. To grab your audience’s attention you have to think differently, talk about your business, your community, your story, making it clear why they shoud choose you. You have to offer your potential customers something more than just the ordinary.

3) Forgetting on-site optimisation

On-site optimisation is a crucial part of your ability to rank highly within Google. Once you have written great content for your website, you should focus on getting your local optimisation set up correctly.

4) Forgetting off-site optimisation

Another thing many estate agents forget to do. Make sure you claim and fully optimise your Google Business Page and make sure all your citations are correct and consistent. You also need to focus on getting great and relevant links pointing at your website. Links from local relevant websites will help a lot with local search.

5) Neglecting content on your homepage

Sliders and big imagery doesn’t equal content. It may look pretty but without content your audience and Google won’t know anything about you.

Try to think of your homepage as an advertisement, you should be trying to sell the important points about your business. Your audience needs to know what you do and who you are. Google also needs to have content to index. If there is no content you are missing a huge opportunity.

6) Neglecting internal pages

If someone is browsing your site, internal pages with little or no content add no value. People come to your website to learn about you, make sure you are putting in enough information or they will leave.

7) Having long title tags

Longer does not equal better, if the title tag is too long then Google is likely to rewrite it. If they are too long they aren’t going to help your SEO or click-through rate so ensure all title tags are around 60-70 characters long.

So if you are trying to improve your local impact, make sure you keep this list in mind and avoid these mistakes. It is vital that the foundation of your site is solid before you start building on it.