Local SEO Services

What Is Local SEO?

Local Search engine optimisation involves targeting an individual city, county or radius and generating leads and sales for this business within this target area only. This is usually a company that provides a service to individuals in a certain radius, where travelling outside of this target area would reduce profits due to the time and cost of the travelling itself. Another example is having a set location store, where you need to attract customers to do business at your location.

Local SEO Case Study
Below are a few examples of how we helped local businesses dramatically increase their sales and customer flow using smart local digital marketing strategies.

The Local SEO Process Itself

Local optimisation is very different to a national, saas or ecom based campaign. The reason is Google is looking for specific city relevance throughout all areas of the site. Simply saying “industry + city” in your SEO title isn’t going to get you very far nowadays because your competitors will be doing the same thing. This is why maps optimisation & topical geo-relevance becomes so important. Below is the framework process we use to rank for locational relevant keywords.

Technical Website Audit

Everything in SEO starts with a technical audit. At HQ SEO we’ve built tools to enable us to get an overall picture of a website within a very short period of time. From here we evaluate issues based on their priority. If there are serious issues holding a website back, these will be addressed at an earlier time in the campaign than less important optimisation issues. This is one of the core reasons how we can rank websites and generate a positive ROI so quickly, usually as early as month 3.

The issues that arise from the technical website audit are individual ranked in terms of importance and urgency. These are then added to our custom project management for the client in order of priority.

Competition Analysis

Competition analysis is an essential part to local marketing campaigns as it takes out all guess work. It allows us to see what Google values and ranks 1st. Once we know what Google is specifically looking for we simply reveres engineer the competition and improve upon each individual ranking metric and hence in a 6-12-month period we take the top spot. Competition analysis allows us to systemise everything we do, which is one of the reasons we’ve been so successful in our map pack and local organic rankings campaigns.

Keyword Research

Discovering the specific keywords that will generate the highest amount of sales and leads once the website is ranked. Another element that is pulled directly from the competition analysis section & based on search console, Google analytics & technical audit data. This then allows us to build the overall site structure based on the highest profitability keywords.

Site Structure Creation

This is very dependent on whether the site is targeting 1 specific location or multiple individual locations. The process is dependent on whether we target a city style URL structure or a service style URL structure. This is incredibly important when it comes to maps optimisation and ranking in the local map pack. If you do not build the URL structure correctly you will not be able to rank inside maps effectively.

Google maps actually has a different algorithm it is based on, many digital marketing experts do not actually know the maps algorithm, this is one of the key areas we’ve tested and developed in the past year and something we’ve found to be very profitable for clients.

On-Page Optimisation

Integrating a full on page optimisation campaign for each target page from the site structure creation. In this section is where we integrate all elements that lead to higher rankings in Google & other search engines.
This extends far beyond simply integrating your keywords into specific elements on a page. We use topical relevance and LSI keywords to ensure rankings are achieved not just for the primary keywords but for every single profitable keyword associated with the business. 80% of Google searches are based on long tail keywords. If you do not integrate these into your SEO campaigns you are leaving 80% of your organic revenue on the table!

Maps Audit & Google My Business Optimisation

Google my business optimisation. HQ SEO has developed strategies based on the top maps optimisation experts in the world. We’ve tested and refined this process into a guaranteed set of steps to ranking inside the Google maps listings. This is becoming increasingly important of local results simply because maps usually appear at the top of a search result on both mobile and desktop.

The click through rate for maps is TRIPLE that for organic and EIGHT times for paid. This is why our primary focus for local clients is to rank your business inside maps FIRST then organic results. As mentioned we’ve had a 100% success rate since 2017 ranking clients in maps and organic.

Citation Audit & Creation

A citation is a place on another website where your business’s name, address and phone number is located. The most popular one of these is Yell.com. Building a number of high quality citations is essential for 3 reasons. The first is these naturally drive traffic to your website as the aggregator sites rank in Google itself. If you look at any large UK based search query, you can see yell ranking in the top 3 results in 90%+ of cases.

Second these citations are trust signals to Google, they show Google your business is an authority in this local area. As a result, you are ranked slightly higher in the search results. Citations can also have links back to your website, which as of 2018 is still the number 1 ranking factor in Google.

Local Link Building – Stage 1

Link building as mentioned above is the number 1 ranking factor in Google. It is why Google is around today whilst other search engines died years ago. Google ranks websites based on the number of high quality, authoritative, relevant backlinks pointing to that website. This is where 99% of digital marketing agencies stop. They simply do not know how to generate high quality backlinks. It is very time and resource intensive.

Local link building stage 1 is where we build a number of these high-quality links to your website. This is where you will see the real ranking results in the search engines start to come in. Massive increases in organic traffic, as well as prospects coming directly from these link sources too. This includes writing and distribution of local press releases, reaching out to local authorities, guest posting on authoritative local and industry relevant blogs and many more strategies.

Note: Most local clients are ranked in the top 3 results by the end of this stage, before even touching the 2 stages below. For the more competitive niches or cities we integrate a full content marketing campaign to push these results into 1st position for all primary keywords and explode local sales and lead generation.

Content Audit & Generation Campaign

A content audit and strategy creation are where HQ SEO builds pieces of content to provide additional trust to Google regarding a certain topic. This is also called topical relevant and is essential for ranking higher competition keywords locally (and nationally.)

Local Link Building – Stage 2

The most powerful part to our digital marketing campaigns. Authoritative, relevant, link generation. This s what pushes clients from the middle of page one for hyper competitive keywords into the top position. It’s what we are most famous for in the SEO community and something we are constantly tweaking for each client.

If you have any questions or would like to get in touch regarding our local SEO services, please feel free to contact us.