Date: 24th of January 2024

Written by: Ryan Walsh

There are many businesses that hire digital marketing agencies to help the company to sell even more products on a national or even an international basis.

For example, the agency may complete the following work:

– Building backlinks
– Adding schema mark-up
– Adding NAP
– Building business citations
– Building backlinks

What is local SEO?

There are now more businesses than ever that want to promote their company locally within the immediate area in which their company is based.

For example, you might just want to get more customers in one single town or city. This is where “Local SEO” can help promote your business to better advertise the products or services you sell.

Formulate a detailed marketing strategy

As you walk around the local supermarket, grabbing things that are on offer- you might find that when you return home, you have spent, let’s say, over £100. Yet after all that expense and time, you might not have anything to make a meal out of!
If you have a shopping list, it’s much easier to make a meal plan; therefore, less food goes to waste.

Now you might think that we’re going off topic here are a bit! But trust us we are not, when it comes to search engine optimisation, its important to always have a plan.

It’s too easy to spend, let’s say, 1000 hours in total trying to improve your business’s search engine optimisation, yet you might not get anywhere unless theres a plan of what you need to do.

For example, you should ask yourself?

-How many quality backlinks do we need to get on page one of Google
– Is the website well designed?
-Do we need to add more pages
– How many quality blog posts do we need to write?
-These are just some of the questions you need to consider before you embark on improving your businesses SEO.
You, therefore, need to have a plan of which keywords, and you want to enhance how you can go about it.

Moz and Ahrefs

We would highly recommend using Moz or Ahrefs for keyword research.

And do make a really detailed marketing plan, as otherwise, you could spend a considerable amount of time trying to improve your company’s SEO and not get anywhere! That’s because you may not create a rounded marketing strategy. This simply means you may overly concentrate on say building links, when really you should spent more time improving the onsite SEO.

Carry out a local SEO audit

Hire a top Cardiff SEO consultant

First things first, even if you’re planning on doing the work yourself, talk to a SEO expert first to gain some initial advice to help come up with a marketing plan. This might sometimes be created for less than one thousand pounds. However, its well worth the expense, because, you will have a roadmap for how you can get your company on page one of Google.

The SEO consultant should therefore consider the following when writing your maketing plan:

-How many backlinks do your competitors have
-How many blog posts have they written

– How good is there onsite SEO?

Keywords

It’s essential to know which keywords you will optimise your website for. We would highly recommend using Ahrefs, this is the tool we would recommend using.

Some keywords might have an huge search volume and you can check this using “Google Search Console”.

If the keywords have a huge search volume, then this means you will want to get your company on the first page of Google for those keywords. That’s because if they describe a product / service you sell, then by getting your business on page one of Google, for that keyword, your likely to gain more business.

Technical SEO

Don’t purchase really cheap website hosting for your company, it’s a total waste of time- instead, you should choose a quality hosting company, which offers fast hosting, such as “Siteground”.

Do make sure the loading times on each and every page and blog post are good. We recommend either A2 hosting or Siteground website hosting.

Mobile optimisation

Use mobile optimisation methods, to make sure that your smartphone version of your website works well. Make sure your company website works well on i-phones and android phones.

A/B testing

You should use split testing to continuously improve the user experience (U.X) of your website.

Keep your Google Business Profile up-to-date

Obtain a Google My Business account and keep it up-to-date your

Ensure that your business obtains a Google Business Profile, it’s free so do obtain one. It only takes around less than an hour to

complete. It is straightforward to verify your business as well, then make sure you add as much detail as possible.

You should add the following information to your companies Google My Business account:

– Your businesses opening hours
– Ensure you choose the right business category
– Gain reviews from your customers
– Add your company logo
– Add your companies NAP (Name of business, address and phone number)
– Add a link to the home page
– Add phone number

Respond to customer reviews

Customer reviews can be left in many places, such as on Google My Business, Yelp, and other websites like Trustpilot. Therefore, if you do get a bad review, make sure that you respond to it, or if you believe it’s a fake, therefore a malicious view against your business, make sure you flag it as a fake business review.

Obtain a Google Analytics account (its completely free)
Obtaining a Google Analytics or Google Search Console account is completely free and really easy to set up so we would recommend obtaining one if you haven’t already?

A Google Analytics account gives you insight into how many organic visitors are coming to your website, which pages have a high bounce rate, and which pages have better engagement.

Keep an eye on your direct competitors SEO

Just like when you’re running your business, and look at the products and services your competitors are offering, you need to do this with your competitor’s SEO. This is so they don’t get a competitive advantage, for example, they may start building do-follow backlinks, from well known company, this could soar them to the top of Google. So you do need to monitor your competitors SEO.

We are a very well-known SEO agency that’s located in the heart of Cardiff. If you want to improve your business’s local or national or international search engine optimisation, then why not give our business a ring today? We have SEO consultants which now have well over 10 years experience helping many brands to get to the top of Google.co.uk.