How to improve your websites SEO visibility: A guide for local businesses

Here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are Preston’s leading web experts. From stunning web design, to web marketing that leads to real results, we offer a wide range of services. And this includes boosting your websites Search Engine Optimization (SEO) both on and off the page. But how exactly do we do this? And what kind of boost can this intervention provide? Well, we have produced this guide for local business owners, outlining how to improve your websites SEO visibility,

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the abbreviated term for Search Engine Optimization. And this is all the steps that web professionals take to make sure that the website can not only be crawled and indexed by search engines, but that it will rank highly as well. Promoting the visibility of your website is essential, if you want to drive traffic and increase the sales potential. So how can local businesses do this? Well, here are some tips.

1. Evaluate your current SEO

The first step you need to take is to evaluate how well your website is performing currently, as this will help to establish any areas that need improvement or development. A wide range of issues could be hurting your visibility in the organic search results, as well as your websites performance. Here is a brief list of what could be going wrong:

• poor html structure
• missing or broken XML sitemap
• broken links or too many links
• duplicated content

For more information, check our our guide to Evaluating a website for SEO.

After evaluating your current SEO performance, it is important to make necessary technical changes to get your website back on track. But you should also consider further steps.

2. Improving your content strategy

When it comes to your websites SEO performance, content can really make a difference. In fact, content is one of the leading ranking factors, as well as being one of the key things that can persuade users to use your services, or buy your products. So one of the best things you can do to help improve your websites SEO visibility, is to implement a content marketing strategy. This should involve:

• making sure your landing pages are focused on the target keywords, relevant to your work, as well as being unique and well written
• producing content in the form of a blog, that can target long tail keywords relevant to your products or services

By covering both of these basis, you can attract more organic traffic, from a wider range of search terms and topics, that can lead to an increase in sales.

3. Respond to reviews

If your company is listed online on various review platforms, which it should be as part of your off page SEO, you need to make sure you respond to the reviews that are left. Whether these are positive or negative, keeping actively aware of what is being said about your company, and remaining professional, is a great way to build a better relationship with your customers. At the same time, Google values reviews as a source of your authenticity and professionalism. So if you are listed on Google, make even more of an effort to respond on there. An increase in the ratings (aim for 4-5 stars) will result in an increase in traffic.

4. Use image Alt tags

This should be a regular part of your SEO, but it often gets overlooked. Especially as you add new articles or content to your website, and forget to optimise the images. Completing the image alt tags is a great way to boost your visibility. This is because, images with a completed alt tag, will rank for that search term on search engines like Google. So when potential customers complete an image search, your company will be ranking highly. This can increase the traffic to your website.

For more information or advice about how to improve your websites SEO visibility, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design.