Local SEO for Vancouver
With a “bricks and mortar” business in today's world, you still need a strong online presence. Local online search is growing fast. Local search and advertising is taking a rapidly increasing share of advertising dollars – the only thing growing faster is online video advertising. The search engines have recognized that local search is growing fast and are investing heavily in making it better.
The fact is that people do most of their business with local merchants. People do their research on the Internet, but they still like knowing that if they need to, they can come see you in person.
It’s about trust. People also like to support local business. For these reasons, you need to capitalize on the power of local search engine optimization to gain a big competitive advantage.
The Basics of Local Search And Local SEO
You can register at the Google LBC without having a website! The results are even better if you do have one.
Keywords
“Keyword” is a term coined to mean the words and phrases that people type into a search engine, when they are looking for something. Most small business owners don’t know what keywords their customers use to try to find their business. If your website is not optimized for those “most used” search phrases, customers are not going to find you.
Do You Know What Keywords Your Customers Use?
The basics of keyword research are: Pick some terms that you think people would use to find you, your products and/or services. If you have a website, go to this free tool from Google: Google Keyword Tool and type in your site. This keyword tool will then suggest keywords based on the words used on your site and from Google searches.
Is Your Website Optimized For Those Keywords?
Once you have a better idea of the terms people are actually using, your next step is to use those keywords on your site. There are a couple places that you must put these terms on the pages of your website.
** Before you do that though, it is important to note that SEO best practices indicate that putting a maximum of 3 phrases per page is best — don’t try to put all your keywords on every page… that will not work! In fact, we only optimize one keyword phrase per page.
You want to use your keywords in the HEAD of the webpage: the Title Tag, and in the Meta Description Tag. Next use them in the BODY of the webpage as a Header H1 Tag above the content and at least once within the body written content on the page. It's always best to use your keywords as close to the front of the code or text as possible.
Are You Adding Regular, New Information To Your Website?
Most local websites are ‘brochure’ sites that are not updated regularly with fresh, relevant content. New information is what the search engines are looking for. It can be written, photos, or video — all of these are good, and video is best!
Perhaps you’ve heard blogs mentioned. A blog is a website that allows you to put new content up from your browser, like typing into a word processing document. The main advantage of a blog is that it is easier to add new content. Wordpress is also easy to optimize to get high rankings. We only use blogs for all our websites and strongly encourage you to consider doing the same.
The Window Of Opportunity
Right now, there is some competition… 10% or so of local businesses are doing some SEObut most websites aren’t very well optimized and most business owners (and their web designers) don’t know how to do it properly. That means you can optimize your site to take advantage of local search, reap rewards right away and then stay ahead of the pack by continuing to do what's needed to keep you at the top of the rankings.
Local Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing activity… Everything on the internet is! Your website is never done and neither is your SEO. It's competitive because the results are often amazing!
Multiply Your Efforts
You want to capture more customers with strategic submissions to directories and other hubs. Let’s look at some key tactics now.
* Submit your business to the Google Local Business Center. Google is far and away the leader when it comes to local search. Fill out everything, every field on your local listing. Get reviews on the Local Business Center by people who have used your services. Google loves reviews; and potential customers finding useful information, are more likely to buy.
* Remember mobile search. People use their hand-held Internet devices like the iPhone and the BlackBerry all the time. Think of how things will look to someone on a phone when you are designing your content.
Even better, if you have a Wordpress blog, there are great plugins that automatically detect if someone is using a phone to look at your website. They adjust what’s displayed so it looks good on a phone or iPod.
* Press Releases are a fantastic way to get business. There are free and paid PR websites to use to distribute your PR – do a Google search for online PR distribution. Generate a new press release whenever your business is adding or doing something new, gets an award or reaches a milestone.
Online press releases have a great reach and can bring a ton of links back to your website. They might also be used by journalists and that can lead to an article or feature. Especially important is that they can be picked up in your local online and print newspapers.
* Show where you are. Another important step of local search engine optimization is putting your physical address and phone number on your contact page and on the bottom of every page on your site. This information builds trust as well as your website’s local search rankings.
* Use microformats on your site’s contact page.
For Canadian Specific Local Search
* YellowPages.ca is a huge provider of local information for many sites such as local.Yahoo.ca.
Other directories and helpful places to get listed include:
• Shop In Canada; Business Directory
• Yelp; Restaurant Reviews, Doctors, Clubs, Salons, and more;
• City Direct.info; Business Directory
• CanPages; Another Yellow Pages (how many are there?)
• ZipLocal; Click on add a listing at the bottom of the page
• HotFrog; Canadian Business Directory
• Google Webmaster Tools; Build your sitemaps and see if there are any crawling errors; plus much more.
You are now equipped with more actionable information than all of your competitors about how to get more customers from local search.
This is a small subset of the actions that we take to optimize a site; both on your site and off… For help with creating your local search engine optimization, contact us today.