Focusing on SEO for your local business is a great way to increase the local exposure of your company, but it can be hard knowing where to start.
Here are 6 simple ways to boost your SEO today.
1. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Around 60% of Google searches are made using a smartphone. Making your website mobile-friendly is key to getting noticed by Google. Your site should adjust its design and content depending on the device's screen size, load quickly without any hiccups, include only animations that work smoothly across devices, and be easy for touchscreen users to navigate through with buttons or sliders as needed.
2. Write SEO-friendly content
To optimize your website for SEO, make sure that you're using SEO-friendly content and keywords. Writing SEO-friendly content also includes including meta descriptions on every page of your website so that search engines can find it.
Add fresh content frequently, because sites that are updated regularly have a higher chance of ranking highly on Google's search results. This is ideal for local SEO as well since it gives customers more reasons to visit your site and read about updates on your company.
3. Build backlinks
Building links is one way to improve your ranking. Sites with more high-quality backlinks tend to earn higher rankings in the SERPs as a result, so it's an important tactic for boosting your website's visibility online.
Backlinks should be high-quality, and building poor-quality links can actually hurt your SEO efforts. The trust and authority of the pages linking to your website play a big role in how Google ranks your site, so look for links from sites that already have high authority. The anchor text you're using on links coming into your page has an important impact too since they tell Google what keywords are associated with this specific webpage.
4. Add pages to your sitemap
Google's bots crawl the web looking for new and updated websites. If you add an XML sitemap on your website, it will tell Google that there are more pages to find and index. This is ideal for boosting your SEO because it ensures that Google is keeping track of all the newest pages on your site so they can be added to its search engine index.
5. Don't make your website too Flashy
Flash is generally not well-liked by search engines because it makes the content of your website hard to read and can also slow down load times which in turn, will affect SEO traffic. It's also generally considered a security risk with a long history of security flaws and bugs.
If that wasn't enough to convince you, then it's also worth knowing that Apple's mobile devices don't support flash at all.
So what should you use instead of Flash? The HTML5 Canvas element is a more modern solution that won't hurt your SEO.
6. Make good use of HTML title tags
Your HTML title tags should be descriptive and not too short or long. The usual best practice is to make it a maximum of 60 characters. Use your keywords naturally as early as possible in the title tag and make sure it represents a quick summary of the page content.
Finally, make sure the title tags are different on every page to get the most out of your HTML title tags.
At Leadspruce, we help local Philadelphia businesses to boost their online presence. If you're looking to improve your website's SEO, why not find out how Leadspruce can help?