Using Local SEO Copy on Your Website

February 15^th 2011 Sally Ormond copywriter, keywords, local search, search engine optimisation, SEO copywriter, seo strategies

If you are a business owner looking to get into online marketing and, in particular, search engine optimisation, don’t forget to think local.

More and more people are searching for local companies through the search engines so it’s never been more important to ensure you have a strong local SEO presence on the web.

Many companies concentrate their SEO efforts on fairly generic terms that relate to their products and services but forget about their geographical details.

With the advent of increased and improved mobile search, it is vital you stand out in your local area. And the best way to do that is by utilising the power of local search.

Location, location, location

If your company covers a specific geographical location, make sure those details are added to your HTML through page titles. You should also try and use these details within your copy and headings but be sensible.

Remember you are first and foremost writing for your reader – if you over do it, the page will look clumsy. Other areas for location information are within the footer along with your address and also within your internal hypertext linking structure. Instead of linking freelance copywriter, use a geographical reference such as Suffolk freelance copywriter.

YouTube

You can also boost your online presence through marketing. Upload your video to YouTube and then use very localised tags – without being spammy. The chances are (depending on the competitiveness of your keywords) you’ll be able to get these ranked and the more entries you can get on a front page local search results, the fewer your competitors can have.

Wider areas

If your business covers several geographical areas you could consider creating specific landing pages for each area. They should have unique content (you don’t want to fall foul of the duplicate content trap) and optimised for each specific area. Hypertext links within these pages can then drive your visitors to your main website.

Boost your profile

Social networking sites make it easy to spread your business name to a wide audience. Set up social media profiles which relate to your geographical region. But, as with the landing page content, make sure each description is different. You should also utilise Google Places, Yahoo local, and Bing Local to boost your local profile.

Remember to always think local by adding location modifiers to your keywords.

Tags: copywriter, keywords, local search, search engine optimisation, SEO copywriter, seo strategies

Comments (3)

6 years ago.

Interesting - not sure how they're managing that. Maybe they have some sort of techy re-direct going on because that should certainly trigger Google's duplicate content radar.

David K 6 years ago.

Hi Sally, All good advice, though I was taken aback when 'signing up' for Yahoo! Local to discover that unlike Google Places this was far from free. Since then I've had two sales calls trying to get me to commit. Your point about using separate locally optimised pages has been an interesting one for me lately. I noticed in local searches that another copywriting firm was suddenly ahead of me in the results pages and when looking into it I found they had about 50 pages all optimised for towns and cities in the south. What amazed me, though, is that the content was identical on every page, just with the town names replaced. Like you I understood this sort of thing would be penalised by the likes of Google, but far from it - they seem to have been rewarded! Mystified of Worthing

David K 6 years ago.

Well, even more interestingly the pages are all set out neatly on their sitemap! Click on any page from their list (neatly organised by county) and it's identical to the others bar the place name. In fact, I grossly underestimated the number - just counted and it's 126 pages! It really makes no sense. If you're interested I'll e-mail you a link.

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