How can we gain more local customers by using SEO?

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on How can we gain more local customers by using SEO?

 

Introduction

Okay, so we appreciate that its 2026, SEO has been around for, well donkey’s years.

However, each and every year brand new businesses will be set-up.

They may pay for a fancy website, thinking that will be the golden ticket to business success.

But what happens when the phone doesn’t ring?

What happens when the showroom is looking, well a bit quite?

 

Well this is where local SEO can help.

Google Business + Google’s Organic Results + Google AI Overviews = Business success

For businesses to be more visible, well you have to pop up when people want your products or services.

Therefore, the power of search engine optimisation really lies with the fact that your business can appear, when people want to buy your products or services.

This is where our team can come in, we can help your business to magically appear in the map results, the organic results. Plus, if really work our magic, then its possible that a business even gets cited in the Google AI Overview results as well.

 

What Is Local SEO?

Sock it to me, what is local SEO, how can it help my business in 2026?

Okay, so lets start with a slight negative, then balance that out with a positive point.

The negative is, for any business, solicitor, dentist or dog walking service to appear number 1 the organic results is now harder than ever.

Why is that so?

Its harder than ever simply because, your up against competitors who know SEO works for there business. They will have been working ultra hard to maintain their position, plus they will have a flying start, because well, they might have been investing in the process for many, many years prior to 2026.

This means that there ranking factors, such as there backlink profile is much stronger.

Should you give up? Pull down the roller shutter doors, and bow down to your competitors?

Well most definitely not.

You do need a top SEO company, that’s where we come in.

Are we cheap?

No, we most definitely are not the cheapest marketing agency out there. We leave the spam links, the AI content for some of our competitors.

We know what works, we know what doesn’t work.

Therefore, we are not cheapest, but our work is quality.

How do we appear in Google’s Business Profile results?

Less get down to the important part.

How can business magically appear in Google’s Business results.

Well, it comes down to relevance, distance and prominence.

In a nutshell, a business often needs to be close to a lot of the customer when they are asking “where’s nearest craft beer pub”.

Then there’s prominence, how many positive business reviews? Has the company got a good social media following, a lot of positive reviews.

Does the business have positive reviews on Google Business, on Trustpilot etc etc?

Is local SEO worth it?

Well, don’t get us wrong, as this article serves to illustrate, its not a cheap process.

Its also not a fast process.

If your competitors have good links, been writing quality content, plus the user experience is so blooming good there holding the shoppers interest for a long period, well you do have your work cut out.

There’s no two ways about it, it’s like competing in a heavy weight boxing competition, your going to reach the top by beating the competitors below you.

But if your competitors have been watching Rocky movies, and working out in the gym like there life depended on it, well your up against tougher competition.

And well this is the same with SEO, if a business is turnover millions, and lets say the majority of there revenue comes via digital advertising, there not going give up there top spot without a good fight.

 

Optimise your Google Business profile

When you’re running a small business, we appreciate that there’s a million one things to do.

Your ordering stock, you’re dealing with difficult customers, and staff that maybe not as productive as you like.

This is stressful, we get it.

So when it comes to setting up your Google Business profile, well you might think, lets put 30 minutes work and then lets get down the pub!
Hmmm

That is a flawed strategy. The reason being is simple, for some business there Google Business profile is a huge massive competitive advantage.

Its so strong that when anyone in that area is say looking for a accountant, you spring up, and you have say 47 positive reviews with customers singing your praises.

Now your competitor, or your business, if its half way down the page on Google’s results, well why would a customer choose that business?

They have to go past the Google AdWords results, past the Google Business results, then keep scrolling past the Google AI answer that might be there, then to select your business in position say 5.

 

Why would anyone do that?

Unless you’re standing out because of schema mark-up generating a rich snippet?
Precisely?

Often the majority of customers wont scroll past those results, therefore, you could be losing out on business. Therefore to optimise and enhance your Google My Business results, you need to do the following:

Gain positive reviews

Ask customers who are singing your praises at say your hair saloon to leave a review. If they love how their new barnet looks, then do capitalise on that, ask them to write a rather lovely review about how good Sharron is and doing a cut and blow dry.

Verify your Google Business account

If you’ve got a Google Business account that is being regularly displayed in Googles local results, well its likely to be the envy of your competitors.

Therefore, its better to verify the account, which means that you can lock people out from changing the details. For example, we have seen competitors change the opening hours, by reducing them, with the intention of costing that business sales.

 

NAP and opening hours

You need to add your companies NAP details. You also need to add the opening hours, and to keep them up to date. The reason being is, if the Google Business account says your open 6pm on Monday, yet you decided to regularly shut at 5pm, well you might have a frustrated customer.

Someone who has driven across Cardiff, then noticed the pet store is closed, there in the rain, he’s not a happy bunny- so he leaves a negative review! Therefore do keep your opening hours up to date.

 

NAP consistency is super important

A lot of SEO agencies bang on about this point, its with really good reason as it’s a common local SEO mistake.

That mistake is, that the business sometimes changes its main address, say to a unit just down the road. However, if all your Thomson Local,

Yell, Wales Online business directory listings are saying your old address, then your Google Business is saying another address, this causes what are known as conflicting business citations.

These are never a good idea. They will hold your businesses local SEO back, like trying to run in a very strong head wind.

So all NAP details must be the same.

Build local business citations

Okay, so don’t go crazy building too many business citations, you don’t need hundreds of these.

Just identify with your marketing team which are the best business directories in your business niche.

For example if you’re a dental practice in the centre of Cardiff, who are your main competitors using, to write there business citations. For example, it could be a dental website where you can write a profile about each dentist. It could be your on the Welsh Governments website for local dentists, it just be a Yellow Pages advertisement,

Whatever it is, just make sure that the NAP information is kept up to date.

 

Digital PR and Local Relevance

Okay, so this part is easier said than done

However, when you have Googled your main competitors, what you often see if a lot of news results about the business as well.

Whether that be on Wales Online or perhaps

 

Write content marketing for your local customers

The best part about owning a local business, is often the management and the owners are in the business on a day-to-day basis. This means that you get to learn the questions that your customers often ask about your products.

This means that you are best placed to advise and help the marketing agencies as to what the content marketing should be written about.

Then it’s the SEO agencies job to think about Google EEAT, the Google Helpful Content Update and also use best white hat methods to optimise the work.

In a nutshell, if you produce work that very helpful, useful to local customers, then they will read this work for a long period.

 

Your local business could benefit from the following:

• High dwell times
• More backlinks
• More customers
• More organic traffic
• Lower bounce rates
• Your local business appearing higher for even more keywords

 

Its important to carry out keyword research

This may contradict our previous point, but its an important point none the less.

Although the owners of the business will know what your customers are frequently asking in regards to the products or the services you sell, its still important not take a tunnel vision.

What mean by that is some businesses make the mistake of optimising for just one or a few keywords. However after using quality keyword research tools, such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs and also Moz Pro, you will often find that customers use hundreds if not sometimes thousands of different keywords to locate the products and the services that they want.

Optimise for a wide range of keywords

Therefore, your business might sell quality coffee to wholesalers and coffee shops. Now your business website might be optimised for arabica coffee, but if you don’t optimise for organic coffee beans, then you could be potentially missing out on a lot of business.

Should we be adding structured data to our website?

You should most definitely be adding structured data, such as JSON-LD structured data to your company website. If you don’t know how to do this, then talk to your web developer. Its particularly important for local businesses to have schema to mark-up your companies NAP information.

The NAP information is often in the footer, if not the contact us page, sometimes its also in the main pages.

The NAP information just means your company name, its address plus also phone number. Its fine to write this just in plain text, and most probably Googlebot will still be able to crawl and index that NAP information and still understand it.

However, top SEO consultant know that as this information is crucial to how Google’s algorithms work, especially which businesses appear in the Google MAP results, its worth taking the time to mark-up your companies NAP information.

The NAP information should be therefore highlighted using schema. Google actually offers a free tool to highlight your companies NAP information.

Technical SEO

When you consider technical SEO, its often only mentioned when your talking about large businesses, such as e-commerce shops. However, good technical SEO is still needed as well for local business. Therefore, for your company in Cardiff we would recommend doing the following:

Robot.txt

You can use robot.txt to give instructions directly to Googlebot and the other bots. For example, requesting that the terms and conditions page on your website doesn’t get crawled.

This helps preserve your businesses crawl budget, which is very important especially in the case of a local business.

The reason is, for a local business, its more than likely that the crawl budget for the website will be low.

Therefore, you need to use your crawl budget wisely, and get Googlebot to crawl the pages you want indexed.

Fast

If you make your website fast, then you could have the advantage over your competitors local SEO.

The reason a lot of local businesses might have gone with very cheap hosting.

The hosting might therefore be very slow, therefore this could damage your businesses local SEO.

You need super fast hosting, buy the best, buy the fastest hosting your company can afford.

XML sitemap

If you have say a WordPress website, use it to add an XML site map through a plugin.

WordPress has many plugin options, such as Yoast SEO, where you can actually add an XML sitemap for free.

This then acts like a sat nav, directing Googlebot to crawl and index the pages you want.

The XML sitemap should be configured so that it automatically updates, this is important.

Say that your business add a brand-new blog post, that many of your team members have worked on. You want this to automatically add to the XML sitemap, so that the work can get crawled and indexed by Googlebot, then so that the new article can appear in Google’s results.

Smartphone

We all know how important it is that the website works on say I Phone and Android devices. Practically all website designers now will offer a mobile version of yoru website, if they don’t include this in the fee, well you most definitely need it, because roughly 50% of visitors comes via mobile phones.

Therefore you need a mobile version of your website.

However, that’s not the end of the matter, you also need to spend a long period improving the UX.

UX stands for user experience, which means basically make the website super simple to use.

When you on websites such as Amazon, there website design is so good, the user experience is excellent. What this does is offer a better user experience, which means higher dwell times, lower bounce rates.

Therefore make sure the user experience is good.

What marketing tools should we use?

For all businesses we would recommend using Google Analytics.

We would also recommend using Google Search Console.

These are both excellent tools, you can for example see how your organic traffic is increasing, or if the SEO is going wrong, how it might be decreasing!

Then there’s Google Search Console, where you can monitor where the keywords are ranking.

We would recommend using these tools, plus, for keyword research and link building do use Moz Pro.

We think that Moz Pro comes with a one week free subscription, so you can try the SEO tool before you buy.

Come to the SEO experts.

We are one of the most experienced and knowledgeable SEO agencies in the whole of Cardiff.

We have SEO experts, some of our SEO team have over 10 years’ experience. Therefore, we can help you to obtain more sales.

How can we gain more customers by using local SEO?

Our SEO agency answers how a business can gain more local customers via local SEO. We an an agency in the U.K with over 10+ years’ experience in offering organic and local SEO.

 

How can we get our business to rank higher on Perplexity?

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on How can we get our business to rank higher on Perplexity?

Introduction

The amount of AI search queries is increasing. Perplexity is one of the AI giants; as a result, many businesses are increasingly interested in improving their generative engine optimisation (GEO). Businesses, therefore, do not want to miss out on a slice of the AI search results.

For example, Perplexity mentions business citations in its answers; it’s been reported that a lot of the citations bear some resemblance to Google’s organic results. To therefore stand out in a crowded market you have to better optimise your business’s content marketing. This article is therefore concentrating on how you can increase the number of business citations your business receives from Perplexity and the other LLM’s such as ChatGPT.

 

What is Perplexity’s RAG system?

When you’re reading about generative engine optimisation and LLMs, another term will pops up time and time again. That, term is RAG, which stands for “retrieval-augmented generation”. The LLM’s use this system to generate answers to prompts typed by someone.

The RAG process has five distinct steps:

Query

The LLM understands the question beyond just keywords; therefore, it is believed that LLM’s have a semantic understanding of “entities” (Semantic SEO). For those who don’t know what entities mean, they can be events, celebrities, or products such as brands. An entity is, therefore, anything that is well-known.

Live Web Retrieval

It’s thought that the Perplexity can search for a relevant answer within a piece of content marketing that contains the answer to your specific question.

Snippet Extraction

It is then thought the Perplexity, and other LLMs can then pull out the most relevant answer from the text.

Answer Generation with Citations

The large language models, such as GPT can create a bespoke response in real time based on the information they extract from a businesses content marketing.

Conversational Refinement

Then, like most large language models, Perplexity uses the “query fanout technique”, which means you can ask follow-up questions and gain a much more precise answer.

How are citations changing search engine optimisation?

It used to be the case that businesses were competing for clicks in Google’s organic results.

While this is still very much the case, businesses now also want to gain citation clicks as well from the LLM’s. This therefore means ranking higher in LLM’s, such as ChatGPT, as well as Perplexity.

 

Google’s Organic Results and Perplexity

What has been mentioned a lot of SEO consultants should find extremely interesting, is that there is a close correlation and crossover between Google’s organic results and the citations that Perplexity mentions. This is good news for any SEO agency, because it means that if you work hard to improve your organic results, and produce high-quality content marketing (Google EEAT), you could gain more Perplexity citations in the process as well.

For example: a very well-written blog post by another SEO consultant noted that around 60% of the citations mentioned in Perplexity have a close correlation with the top 10 results in Google’s organic results.

How does Perplexity rank content?

Perplexity ranks contents in the following ways

Domain Authority (DA)

Perplexity organises search results using various ranking factors; domain authority or DA is one of the major ones. For example, how many quality backlinks ultimately determines where many businesses end up in Google organic search results.

However, it is also thought that domain authority that determines the trustworthiness of say a blog post, has a bearing on how Perplexity also ranks the content.

Freshness

A lot of agencies will fully appreciate, but for a long time, Google’s algorithm has preferred to rank content marketing higher that is more up-to-date and fresh. Many SEO experts think the same in terms of how Perplexity works: it evaluates the recency and freshness of the content marketing– therefore often citing pages which are more up to date. This is why it’s so important to include the date of when the work was first published, as well as the date the work was last updated.

Good page structure matters

This is a point we found particularly interesting, in that it requires a good on-page SEO and structure for the work to be cited by Perplexity. It also worth knowing that, in the first paragraph, many experts believe it’s important to convey the article’s main purpose, in terms of what its discussing.
It is also thought that the work should be split into sections with headings to address the content marketing in chunks.

FAQ style content

We have found that, for a long time, especially in organic search engine optimisation, it’s a good idea to write content marketing copy using a conversational tone. This means writing questions and answers and keeping the work to the point.

However, there is also the argument that AI, LLMs, that’s large language models, like content marketing, to be split into headings and answers. This means that the answer can be extracted more simply from the content marketing.

Quality is still key.

What’s great to hear, from many marketing experts around the world, is that there are strong crossovers between high-quality content marketing with a high EEAT score and work cited in the LLMs.

Therefore, if you’re writing, say, 2000 words plus blog posts, you’re wondering whether it’s worth the effort; it most definitely is, because large language models can also cite this work.

Backed up by statistics and supporting evidence

Here’s another area where we believe there is a strong crossover between organic search engine optimisation and optimising for Perplexity.

That is in the top-ranking content on Google and what is also cited by Perplexity; it often written work where a lot of statistical data is mentioned, and reinforced with outbound links. Therefore, if you want to improve your chances of being cited as a business within Perplexity, it is often a good idea to quote reliable statistics and facts to reinforce your work.

Author bios
It’s really important to make it clear when writing content marketing who the author of the work is.
For example, an important part of Google’s EEAT, is that the author of the work shows their an absolute expert in terms of what they are writing about.

Therefore, it just stands to reason that if the LLM starts to use semantic SEO, it will understand the actual author of the work and their expertise in terms of what they are talking about.,

Therefore, again, it’s important to cite the author within the content marketing itself.

Outbound links

Its important to mention authoritative sources, you should therefore cite other people who have helped or influenced how content marketing is written. We believe when this is done right it can large impact on your business, and how often your brand is cited as a citation within Perplexity.

This is a point we mentioned earlier; however, it’s important to note that the outbound links should be highly relevant and from authoritative sources.

 

Schema markup

It is thought to boost your visibility in LLMS you should add schema to your website. Schema is a form of structured language; it makes sense that LLMs would use this format to understand content marketing better.

Scannable content

Just as a reader thinks about how to read a page quickly, the LLMs prefer scannable content that they can quickly extract an answer from.

As example mentioned by leading SEO consultants is the use of HTML comparison tables, with statistical data, or just simple straight forwards answers, it lets the data to be easily read by bots and people, therefore making the information easier to cited by the AI systems.

This means that if the information is better organised into bullet points and numbered lists, and the headings are clearly split on the page, the work is more scannable and therefore to be mentioned.

Last updated.

It’s clear that LLMs, such as Perplexity, prefer to mention and cite up-to-date site information.

Promote your content marketing when it gets published

Some SEO agencies widely cite the idea that when you publish a new piece of content marketing, you should shout about it from the rooftops. This means that if you promote on social media and it gets more clicks, the content will be cited more often within the LLM, such as Perplexity.

Key takeaways

Content marketing structure

To increase your business’s citations, we recommend writing content with question-based headings and answers.

Also, write the information as if you’re talking to an actual person, offering helpful advice. Also, within the first paragraphs, make it absolutely clear what the content marketing is about and who it’s aimed at helping. This is widely thought to be the case: this work is cited more often by the LLM’s.

Add structured data

Work with your web designers and web development team to add structured data.

 

How Ryan Christopher Walsh can help:

In essence, the main way to increase a business’s visibility, whether locally, nationally, or internationally, is to focus on publishing quality content marketing. If you focus on SEO best practices, this can improve your organic search engine optimisation and make content marketing more visible on platforms such as ChatGPT and Grok, which Elon Musk owns.

Therefore, it all boils down to offering helpful, well-researched answers. We hope this article has provided you with some food for thought on how to improve your GEO and SEO.

If you require further help improving your organic search engine optimisation, Ryan Christopher Walsh is an agency in the Cardiff area with well over 10 years’ experience. Even though generative engine optimisation and LLMs are a relatively new concept, it still boils down to producing quality work and understanding white hat practices.

Ryan Christopher Walsh is one of the leading SEO consultants in Cardiff. He advises and consults with businesses and offers fixed-price monthly packages.

If you would like a free quote, why not contact our team today?

 

How can breadcrumbs be used to improve a business’s SEO?

By Sarah Jones|Categories: Uncategorized|Tags: |Comments Off on How can breadcrumbs be used to improve a business’s SEO?

 

Author: Ryan Christopher Walsh
Date: 11.12.2025

What are breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs are simply allow an additional way for a shopper to navigate a website. Breadcrumb navigation is especially used on large e-commerce websites, where many products might be viewed, allowing the customer to simply go back to previously viewed pages without having to re-enter the websites main navigation.

Why do breadcrumbs matter for SEO?

Breadcrumbs wont make a huge difference to where your website ranks on Google by themselves. So, therefore you might be wondering, well if breadcrumbs don’t affect rankings, why bother implementing this work?

Well, it can be said that breadcrumbs when implemented correctly can help your website in two main ways: those are improving the U.X but also helping Googlebot.

 

Googlebot

Googlebot can crawl and index the links, meaning that the page can get found more easily by Google.

U.X

If you have ever been on an e-commerce website for a very long period, well, you most likely have viewed a huge number of products. Perhaps hundreds, its too easy for a shopper to get tired, then want to leave the website because they cant get to the product they want.

However, breadcrumb navigation makes it that much more simpler, that much better to simply get back to a product you once viewed. For example, it could have been a handbag you really like it. Yet, you wanted to browse some more items before committing to that purchase, well by using breadcrumb navigation, it makes it simpler to go back and to simply take another look at an item you had wanted to purchase.

Internal links and Googlebot

For those that truly know how Google’s algorithm works, they will simply know that Google uses a automated bot, called simply “Googlebot”.

Its Googlebot’s job to crawl and index pages. However Google does this depends on the crawl budget that has been assigned to your company website. However, the more important websites they are assigned a higher crawl budget, which just simply means that Google checks for changes, edits, website design alterations that may have occurred. If the content marketing, that’s the text, if that changes then Googlebot will crawl and indexed it, then replicated the new page into its index.

Now, with breadcrumbs, what these allow is for you to add more internal links onto your website.

Not only is the customer able to better know where they are on your e-commerce website, but also the search engines, such as Google will know where that page is on your e-commerce website.

For example, you might sell luxury cars, if the breadcrumb navigation, says “Rolls Royce” then the next breadcrumb navigation says “phantom” – then it will be apparent that your on that particular model of luxury car. The internals links can therefore be followed by Googlebot and it helps them to know the structure of the website, for example, that you sell luxury and sports cars, that might be clear from the homepage. Then the sub pages, it clear you sell a range of Rolls Royce luxury cars and you also stock the Phantom range of Rolls Royce’s as well.

Its all about improving the U.X

You know you walk into a luxury hotel, well the hotel makes it a piece of cake to enjoy your stay and it’s a very nice place to be.
Well, you should apply this logic when building your e-commerce website, make it a great place for shoppers to purchase goods from you. Make it easy to navigate, make it a great place for shoppers to select the right products, with well written content marketing such as product descriptions to help the shopper to make a decision on whether that item is for them.

 

Bounce rates

If you help a shopper to locate the product they want, perhaps through the main navigation being well designed, and going the extra mile by adding breadcrumb navigation, then you can help keep shoppers on your website for longer.

No matter what type of business you run, if you want to improve your businesses search engine optimisation, then the SEO company should be looking to improve dwell times, plus working really hard to decrease bounce rates. Our agency writes and creates some of the very best content marketing, which has an extremely high dwell times, low bounce rates, and always is written with Google EEAT in mind.

 

Sticky

It used by the case that marketing agencies used to refer to making their websites, or their clients websites “sticky”.

What they actually meant by this is what is important, whats crucial to really improve that dwell time. Google uses “RankBrain” and this powered by AI, what it is doing is monitoring, how long are shoppers are spending on the website.

Are there different types of breadcrumb navigation?

Yes, there is, there is, there’s “hierarchy-based breadcrumbs”- there is also “attribute based breadcrumbs” as well. Both are a type of breadcrumbs that are widely used on a number of e-commerce type websites. When you talk to any really good web designer, that understands how to improve the U.X of a company website, they will you that the design of navigation, such as the main menus and the breadcrumbs are very important.

There are also path based breadcrumbs as well. So therefore the large online retailers, they often use these breadcrumbs and they be very useful.

 

How should breadcrumbs be added to a website?

Make them clearly visible, its important in terms of bread crumb navigation, that the navigation can be clearly seen by the shopper. This way when there browsing products, if they did want to go back and visit a previous item they have looked at, the breadcrumb navigation makes that really simple to do.

Also do consider your other ways that you could improve the on-page SEO such as

 

Product schema

We are an SEO agency that can add schema to your website. There is also the possibility of adding breadcrumb schema as something your digital marketing agency can do. In terms of schema, our business also works with a lot of companies that want improve their local search engine optimisation. Its important to think about improving the U.X factors, such as adding breadcrumbs, but also its important to think about adding schema as well.

 

Well designed main menu

There’s no point in investing into adding breadcrumbs, unless the main menu is really well designed. Therefore when we work with clients, we choose WordPress websites that offer good breadcrumb navigation, but also good main menu design as well.

How our company can help

Who are Ryan C Walsh Marketing?

We are a marketing company based in the city of Cardiff. We have been helping businesses to improve their local search engine optimisation for over 11 years.

We are one of the best, if the best set of SEO consultants.

 

For a no obligation quote, do call us today.