New to local search? Wondering where to start? Our SEO expert offers tactics and a strategy to help you kick off your local business page rank and search optimization and learn how to create yours.
Local Business Page Rank
Following SEO strategies, you know one thing: SEO constantly changes. When it comes to local SEO, it’s more important than ever that you optimize your on-site and off-site SEO strategies for clients and customers who may be searching for your local business. Local competition is heating up; if you’re not on top of your rankings, you can bet your competitors will be.
Structured data
There are 3 main things to keep in mind if you want to rank locally. The first one is adding structured data to your site. Having schema.org markup on your contact page is essential; you might also consider adding it to the footer.
Yoast’s Local SEO plugin can help you out with the first. It inserts Google Maps into your contact page, as well as your business address and opening hours. In addition, you might also see this data pop up in the search results pages if Google chooses to use rich results for your site. Seattle town car best ride currently doesn’t have any structured data, so we highly recommend adding it to their site!
Search for your business
It would also help to let Google know you’re a local business owner with a Google My Business account. This will help your site appear in the search results when people search for a car service in Seattle.
This can also lead to rich results in the SERPs, such as a knowledge graph. Ensure that the address listed in your Google My Business account is the same as displayed on your site. Otherwise, you won’t benefit from having this account. Now you can apply and answer how to create your local business SEO strategy.
Reviews For Local Business SEO
Having ratings and reviews on your site is essential to make your business look trustworthy to your visitors. Moreover, it also helps Google determine whether your business is valuable for its users. Therefore, Seattle Best Town Car Service should implement a possibility for customers to give a rating for their services or write a testimonial on their site. They can actively ask their customers to do this after using their services.
Performance
Page speed is one of Google’s most important ranking factors, so ensuring your site loads fast is key. We did a page speed check for Seattle Town Cars Best Ride, which we found.
First of all, we’d advise Hussein to take a look at their hosting company. When using the PageSpeed Insights tool by Google, ‘reducing server response time was one of the recommendations. You cannot do this yourself, but it depends on what kind of server your hosting company is offering. If they can’t speed up the response time, consider looking for a better hosting company.
Secondly, browser caching should be enabled for all types of files. This is not the case for some JPG and CSS files on seattletowncarbestride.com. Since this site runs on an Apache server, you can fix this quickly with the Yoast SEO plugin. You can do this by specifying the expiration times in the .htaccess file.
Last but not least, Seattle Town Cars Best Ride should optimize some of the images on their site. A list of the pictures that need compression can be found in the Pagespeed Insights tool. Compressing images will reduce the file size, making these images load more quickly.
User Requirements
If people work on optimizing their sites for search engines, they often tend to overlook user experience. But if your visitors seem to enjoy your site. Google determines by analyzing so-called user signals – this can positively affect your rankings. Google wants to offer the best search results and experience to its users. So don’t forget always to check your site’s usability.
Seattle Town Cars Best Ride has some moving elements on its site, causing distraction and possibly negatively affecting the user experience. Especially on the homepage, the moving images get a little annoying when scrolling all the way down. Toning that down will give the site a much more focused and calmer appearance.
Also, a slider is used on the homepage. This is something we advise against at Yoast. The most important reason for that, in this case, is that the call-to-action disappears and reappears if the slider changes. This makes it harder for the visitor to get to the page you want.
Images are essential to your site because they can make it more attractive. Make sure they aren’t broken or missing, especially on the homepage this looks a bit unprofessional for your local business SEO strategy:
Writing Content for Both your Visitors and Google
What we like about Seattle Town Car Best Ride is that they have separate landing pages for all their services. That makes it possible to optimize every service for its keywords. Therefore, their chances of ranking for every service will increase.
The service pages also have some decent content that describes what the service is about. Remember that you should at least write about 300 words on a page to show Google that you know what you are talking about. Because Google wants to offer its users the best search results possible, you should be able to convince Google you are an expert on that topic.
Some pages of Seattle Town Car Best Ride could benefit from extra attention. The ‘Reservations’ and the ‘Rates’ pages lack introductory content. Both can be seen as “thin content” pages by Google, decreasing their chance of ranking. Moreover, the ‘Reservations’ page has little content and a broken contact form. Always make sure that your visitors can reach you. Otherwise, there’s no point in optimizing your site at all. As a result, here’s how to create your local business SEO strategy.
Headings and Titles For Local Business SEO
Apart from visitors that – hopefully – read your content, Google also tries to ‘read’ your content. Headings play an essential role in understanding your content. Seattle Town Car Best Ride uses H1 and H2 headings to structure its text, but it uses the H1 twice on almost every page.
Google could find this confusing because it assumes that the H1 describes the page’s subject. If there are multiple H1 headings, Google doesn’t know which one you deem most important.
The meta description is another vital content element for SEO. A good meta description is crucial if you want to convince possible visitors to click through to your site. With a clear explanation, you can inform potential visitors what a page is about.
Seattle Town Car Best Ride lacks a meta description on many pages. This doesn’t mean the pages won’t show a report in the snippet in the search results, but Google itself will pick a sentence from your carrier, which doesn’t always turn out bad. Sometimes Google will do that, even if you have created a meta description. Nevertheless, we think it is worth your while to write a strong meta description. If Google chooses to show it, it can make your snippet more appealing.
Up the Time
As Google and the internet change and evolve, so does SEO. A few years ago, most sites were running on HTTP. Nowadays, you see more places using HTTPS for secure browsing. We encourage site owners to take this step, and so does Google.
Google has said that having HTTPS is seen as a ranking signal. Seattle Town Car Best Ride isn’t running on HTTPS yet, so we recommend making this change. In general, your hosting company can help you switch to HTTPS.
Another critical development in SEO is Google switching to mobile indexing first. This will probably take place in 2018, as they announced. As a result, Google will rank your site based on the mobile version of your site instead of the desktop version. Google is doing this because more and more users are browsing on a mobile device instead of a desktop. So having a top-notch mobile site should be everyone’s top priority.
Fortunately, Seattle Town Car Best Ride looks and works fine on mobile. What they should fix, though, is their site’s speed for better performance on mobile, as mentioned above. Read more to keep learning how to create your local business SEO strategy.
Significance For Local Business SEO
Want to understand more about how to create your local SEO strategy? Prominence is a Google term that describes a company’s online and offline visibility. A search engine determines your notoriety based on the offline information about a business and online means such as ratings and website popularity. Increasing the number of quality reviews for your business can improve reviews. Interacting and reacting to online reviews can also increase your awareness.
Algorithms tend to change periodically without notice. Like any SEO campaign, successful local SEO depends on consistent effort. Many businesses benefit from expert assistance in managing local SEO.
Conclusion
Overall, Seattle Town Car Best Ride isn’t doing badly at all content-wise. They are clear about their services and ensure their visitors know how to contact them by using call-to-actions near every content part. But they could benefit from some local optimization.
Adding structured data, creating a Google My Business account, and adding ratings and reviews to their site, make clear to Google that they are a Seattle business that needs to be taken seriously!
