You’ve got a local business and you want to get in on this action. How do you go about optimising your site to rank for local searches in Auckland?
If you follow these easy local SEO strategies, we guarantee you’ll start climbing the rankings on Google.
One of the most important SEO tools that Google provides to local business owners is Google My Business. You can create a listing for your business for free, so there is no reason you should not be using it.
When creating your listing, you should try to provide as much information as possible. By adding your opening hours, address, menu, reviews, and more you’ll help Google understand your business and show it more prominently on search results pages.
Remember, if you have multiple locations for your business, you’ll need to create multiple listings. For instance, if you have one location in North Shore and another in Papakura, you’ll need a separate listing for each to prevent Google from mixing the two in local searches.
One of the most common reasons that people do local searches is to find the location of a business. Therefore, it makes sense to include a map on your website which shows your location. Plus, if your business is difficult to find, directions will help too. This will improve the user experience which helps with local SEO in Auckland.
Following on from the last point, you should also create and optimise a contact page. On this page, you should have the map mentioned above as well as your business name, address, phone number, and email address.
Since most local searches are made from a smartphone, you’ll need to make sure your site is mobile friendly. If users can’t access your site from their phones, then you’ll lose out on a lot of traffic.
Google views testimonials, reviews, and star ratings as a sign of trust. Therefore, you should include them on your website, ideally in a prominent location. This will help your brand in general, but it also shows Google your business is one that people want to find.
Having a blog is a great move for SEO in general, but it can also be a powerful tool for optimising local SEO in Auckland. In your blog posts, use local keywords like suburb names, landmarks, events, and news to bolster the likelihood of your website appearing in results for those searches.
For example, if you have a restaurant in Mount Eden, you will want to appear in the local search “restaurants in Mount Eden” in addition to “restaurants in Auckland”. Having a blog on your website and updating it with content regularly is a great way of achieving this.
The summary of the above is to think about why and how people do local searches. If you can tailor your website and content to deliver what local searchers want, your local SEO in Auckland will improve.