You’re an ambitious business owner that wants to get website traffic and customers through SEO. If you’re totally new to SEO, it’s not unlikely that you’ll make a few mistakes.
Many times, when people are just getting started, they will accidentally do things that can hurt their rankings in the search engines vs. help. Learning local SEO tips before you get started will help you avoid common mistakes so you don’t hurt your website’s rankings.
Continue reading this article to learn how to rank well in Google local searches and other top search engines.
Set Aside Time to Learn SEO Best Practices
Congratulations on already starting this step and learning more about SEO and how to make it work for your business. Companies like https://www.seoexplode.com have information on their blogs where you can learn even if you don’t use their services right away — or ever.
The best way to learn SEO is to get right into the thick of it. Start by reading the blogs but you might even want to get a course that goes over on-page and off-page SEO. Here are a few that you should know before you do anything.
1. Create In-Depth & Helpful Content
Creating helpful content is SEO 101. Google and other search engines want to provide the best search results to their users. When users are happy with a search engine’s results, they are going to keep coming back time and again.
Whatever you decide to write about on your site, make sure you cover every angle of it. When you cover every angle of the topic you’re writing about, you’re going to make yourself the go-to authority on the topic. You’ll also show up for more search engine queries.
2. Create a Google My Business Profile
If you have a website, you might not be sure why you need a Google My Business profile. While you’re going to share a lot of the same information on your GMB profile, it allows Google to easily organize and distribute your information.
You can also share updates and photos like it is a social media platform. These updates and photos may show up when someone searches for your business on Google. Having photos and updates showing up on the first page of Google can get a lot of attention and build trust with potential customers.
3. List Yourself in Local Directories
Making sure your business is listed in local directories will show Google and other search engines that you are indeed a local business. Some people try to manipulate the search engines to rank for local terms they shouldn’t be ranking for but local directories are a good way for search engines to get a clue that you’re the real deal.
The Most Common SEO Mistakes
Now that you know some of the most basic best practices for SEO, it’s also important that you know some of the things you should avoid. Below are some of the top things that can cause problems for your local business.
1. Wasting Time
If you’ve been thinking about implementing SEO for your business for quite some time, you’ve likely already lost some ground. The good news is that starting today is the best time to start since you can’t go back in time.
SEO takes time and the sooner you get started working on sending good signals to the search engines, the sooner it will be that your business will begin the positive movement in the search engines.
2. Not Going After Low Competition Keywords
It’s easy to focus on going after the most popular terms in your industry. You want to rank for the search terms that are bringing in hundreds or even thousands of searches each month. It’s not bad to want to get big results by going after high competition high search volume keywords, but that can take some time.
It’s better to go after low competition keywords you can start to rank for right away than to put your results off in the future. When your site starts to rank well for the low competition keywords and Google starts getting signals that your site is doing well, it will help you in your overall SEO strategy.
You should make sure there is at least some interest in the keyword terms you create content around. You don’t want to create a whole blog post for a keyword term that only gets 10 searches each month — in most cases.
If you’re in a business where the sale is very high then it might be worth it to you to try to rank for even the lowest number of searches.
Most low competition keywords are long-tail keywords which means they have more words in them. A good example of a long-tail keyword is “what is the best way to grow my business?” A good example of a short keyword is “grow my business.”
3. Over Optimizing for Search Engines
If you’ve been reading about SEO, you’ve most likely seen that you need to include keywords in your content so you can rank for multiple terms. While this is true, you don’t want your content to look like you’re optimizing for search engines.
If you’re reading an article and you continue to see the same keyword or a different variation of the keyword included unnaturally, it usually doesn’t read well. If you optimize for the search engines instead of creating content for your visitors, it isn’t going to pan out.
Google is all about providing the best user experience. If your website isn’t providing the best user experience, Google will be able to tell and they are going to ding your site for being overly optimized.
If you put too many keywords in your article, you may get a penalty for keyword stuffing your content.
4. Not Optimizing Your Site’s Code
If you’ve built your own website and that’s not your field of expertise, your code may be a little messy. Not only is your code likely a little messy but it may not include important information that can signal search engines that your website is about your given topic.
If you don’t have your keywords in your meta title and meta description, you’re missing out on one of the easiest ways to tell Google they should pay attention to your website for relevant search queries.
Not only does it help you show up in Google but when you do show up in Google, it signals people looking at the search results that you are a relevant website.
5. Not Linking Internally
As your website is growing, you likely have a lot of content that is closely related. That closely related content can help your website visitors but they may not know how to get there. If you don’t interlink between your articles, they are likely to end up lost in the blogosphere.
If you write a blog post and you remember that you wrote something similar before but focused in a different area, you need to find that post. The easiest way to do that is to navigate over to google and type in site:yourwebsite “topic.”
When you type in the information above, Google will only pull up pages and posts on your site that pertain to the topic you’ve typed into the search bar.
Not only does internal linking help you because you’ll keep visitors on your site longer but it helps with rankings in Google. The reason it helps with rankings in Google is that it adds to the user experience. Better user experience = happy searcher and happy searcher = happy Google.
6. Not Checking Analytics
It’s likely that you have Google Analytics installed on your website. While it’s great that you have it installed, you should make a point to keep a check on the analytics to see what is working and what isn’t working.
Having analytics on your website is like going to the doctor for tests and never going back to get the results. The information you need to succeed is there but you haven’t gone to pick it up.
There’s More Than These Local SEO Tips
As you’re learning these local SEO tips, you should know this isn’t the end. While using these tips will keep you out of trouble and may help you get some rankings, you need to continue your learning journey. Our site has many articles that can help you learn marketing and more.
Browse our site, find your favorite section, drop a bookmark and come back soon for more great reads.
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