Local SEO Tips for the Little Guy

Diane Vautier
December 9, 2009

If you’re a local business with a small website, you want to get found – locally. It might not matter that someone half-way around the world can locate you online, especially if you’re not selling online, but it’s darn important that someone in the next-town-over knows exactly how to find you when they need you.

Here are five quick tips for your website that you can implement today to help you get the edge in local search.

1. Get listed in local search engines. The top 3 search engines are Google, Yahoo! and Bing and each one has its own local business listings where you can add your company’s information. Get listed. Here are links to the top three.

2. Add your company to the top online directories (kind of like the old yellow pages books). Make sure your information can be found.

3. Add your company information to every page. Always display your name, address, zip and phone number and maybe even a brief tagline or sentence of what you do. The footer is a good place to put this, that way it’s always available for the user to reference and a search engine to read. Make sure it appears as html, not represented as a graphic, so that it can be seen by search engines.

4. Create inbound links. Think about how you interact and get referrals in person and then translate that to online inbound links to your website.

Organizations. If you’re a member of a local organization like the chamber of commerce, ask them to include a link to your site.
Networking. If you network with other local businesses in person, or you already have a card or brochure displayed at a complementary business, ask them to also include a link to your site on their websites.

5. Don’t Let Content Get Stale. Search engines love to consume new content so don’t let your website become static. Regularly add new content, either through a blog or website pages like press releases, events, newsletters, etc. The more content that is on your site around the topics having to do with your business, the better.

Search Engine Optimization | Diane Vautier | 5:08 pm

2 Comments

By Dianne Smigliani, March 23, 2010 @ 12:52 pm

Great article Diane! Very helpful…Thanks!
By Diane Vautier, April 13, 2010 @ 11:35 am

Hey Dianne, we’re glad you liked it and found it helpful. Thanks for following and commenting.