SEO For Local Search
For may businesses, national search rankings are not important, what they want is to rank in local search for their goods and services. The majority of companies in the UK only server their locality and so attracting as much local business as possible is much more important for them.
Local search requires a different mindset to a national SEO campaign but has the potential to deliver much more targeted traffic.
If you want to rank well and appear high in Google search for one or two towns, a specific county or counties then you need to focus your web content and off-page backlink strategy accordingly to make sure that your content is optimized for those geographical locations.
As a rule of thumb, if your site doesn’t contain at least one instance of a place name, location, town, city etc then it is less likely that you will rank in that area.
Google do use additional information from Google Maps listings, Facebook etc. to determine where your business is located and where you should rank for, but you shouldn’t rely upon that information to work for you & instead you need to deliver the signals that Google can interpret easily.
Over Optimization
However, there are potential drawbacks and the days of listing hundreds of locations on a page in order to rank in those areas are long gone & such strategies are viewed by Google as spam.
Instead, if you have several towns that you want to rank for, build a high quality page with unique content for that page and then include the villages that surround the town on that page only.
If you structure your site like this then you will have a series of pages designed to attract a targeted group of keywords which Google prefer.
There is more work involved and it is much more time consuming to create new, unique content for different pages, but it will let you rank for a large group of locations without upsetting Google!
Find out more, request a callback from Deeho, website optimisation specialists, who can help you to get your website in front of more customers.