Increase your local visibility with SEO

Local SEO

The acronym SEO stands for search engine optimization, which covers all the techniques that help your website rank well in search engines, including Google. The goal? To please search engines, comply with their standards and appear among their top results. We have to admit it: Google is the main reference for SEO, worldwide.

There are many of these techniques, and they are highly relevant; one of them specifically concerns local SEO. We could write a blog post about each of the dozens of tips surrounding SEO. In this post, we focus on local SEO.

Do you offer plumbing services in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region? Then it’s probably of little use to you if someone searching from Châteauguay finds your website in first position on Google. Generally speaking, consumers look for goods and services close to their home or workplace. A student in Sherbrooke knows there’s a yoga school right near the university residences, but she doesn’t know the exact address. Help her find you quickly! This consumer should be able to find you directly on Google Maps with her smartphone and use the “Directions” feature, or quickly find your yoga centre’s class schedule and opening hours.

Quality keywords

In local SEO, it’s essential that the names of the cities you serve appear clearly in the content of your pages. Set aside a section for your “service area,” but also mention it in various other contexts throughout your website.

There are many tools and directories that can increase your presence in search engines. Examples include Yelp, Google My Business, Google AdWords (which lets you run effective online media campaigns with paid search and sponsored links), Foursquare and more. As you can see, Google offers a range of very useful products for local SEO, which are often free, such as Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. We’ll soon publish a post devoted entirely to Google Analytics and its main features for local SEO, so stay tuned!

Of course, social media platforms (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube) are very useful for local SEO, so don’t neglect them. Offer quality content on your various pages, and don’t constantly try to promote your products and services. Instead, become the go-to reference in your field!

In conclusion, there’s nothing magical about local SEO: you have to be proactive and perhaps even call on a web specialist. SEO rules change quickly, and it can sometimes be hard to keep track. However, it’s worth getting familiar with the different tools and choosing the ones that really suit your field of activity. Remember: don’t try to fool Google. Give it unique, quality content, which can take a lot of your time but will be very profitable in the end!

Other useful directories for local SEO: