Local SEO to Your Website in Quick and Easy Steps

SEO is a skill and it takes time to get good at and we working within this sector your time will be more taken up at times with the business and you will not have the time to get to grips of how the search engines rank websites and today it is even more of a puzzle as search engines like Google continue to change their algorithms every other month whereby you start to believe that it may be more worthwhile to get someone to do it for you. However, if you do not have the money to do this or in your spare time you like to get deep down in computer code well here I have included a few quick steps to get your website ranking as quickly as possible. Lets call it the Internet Marketing 101 for physiotherapists and osteopaths. 

1. Update Your Page Titles

The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. No easy trick. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly. This is something that is pretty easy to do and if anyone like your web developer tells you different then get another one.

2. Figure Out Your Target Audience

Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What keywords are your competitors using to rank for and what your potential customers are using to which your competitors are ranking for? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? 

In general pick terms that match up with the service you are providing, for example a physiotherapy clinic may use a keyword phrase such as sports massage clapham or sport physiotherapy clapham if I had a clinic in the Clapham area, the important thing is to make sure that there a sufficient search volume for the keyword or keyword phrase for it to be beneficial to optimise the webpage you will be directing the traffic. To get an idea of search volume use can use the Google Keyword Tool.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique

It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:

site:yoursite.com intitle”the words in the title”

The results of this search will show all of the pages in Google that have these words in the title. Once you identify these problem pages you can update the titles to make them unique.

And make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service in your city.

It also couldn’t hurt if you added some text to the actual page that uses the keywords you are targeting as well, in both the body of the text and the

h1 tag, which is typically the headline of the page. If you don’t have a page that targets the keywords you are using, add a new page that does.

You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

4. Add a Few Internal Links

The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most (and don’t say all of them) and add links from other pages to these pages. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “pizza” use the word “pizza” in the text of the links that go to that page. Try not to use the exact same phrases in each link to make it look more “natural”. For example in some of the links use “best pizza” or “man that’s a helluva a pizza”.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page

Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. 

6. Claim Your Profile on Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, etc.

There are a huge number of yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. At the least you should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site. There is alot of value to be got from listings in these directories and even better they are free.

7. Make a Video

Making a video is more harder than it sounds and can be as simple as plucking up the courage to mention and provide value to your clinic. Explain your service and try to be charming. Mention your website a lot. Then upload it to YouTube and every other free video site and title the video with your top keywords (ie: Balance Physiotherapy Clapham). Make sure your website is linked to from your profile. Then link to these video pages from your site with the keywords in the link text. You will be amazed at how easy it is for these pages to rank for your search terms.

8. Add a Blog To Your Site

A blog is just a simple way to add pages to your website and can be set up pretty easily in a few minutes. If you don’t want it super customized it shouldn’t cost that much. Once it’s up start writing. I am not talking novels or even journalism. I am talking keywords. If you want to rank for “Pizza in Pleasanton” write a blog post called “Pizza in Pleasanton: What’s Cooking Tonight At Joe’s Pizza”. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and add your blog’s URL to Google’s blogsearch engine. Now everytime you write something on the blog it will rank for these keywords.

9. Make Sure You Don’t Have Any Technical Issues

There are a number of technical issues that could be preventing your site from ranking. An easy way to identify them is to sign up your site to Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/start. By copying a short line of code to your site you can get an idea of some of the common problems that Google is having with it. Google provides you with some detail about the problem. There is not much you yourself can likely do about these problems, but you can at least show them to your website developer or a SEO guy and ask him/her to figure it out.

10. Get Links

Now none of this stuff will work very well if you don’t have any links to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust. So you should spend the remainder of your five minutes thinking about what other sites you think you can get links from. Here are some of the obvious ones:

- Chambers of commerce/local business groups

- Local business directories/Local newspaper site

- Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)

- Partners/Vendors

There are hundreds of other ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, making a fool of yourself in public, etc.

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-time thing just like running a TV ad campaign is not a one-time thing. It’s a marketing tactic like any other. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. SEO takes a little time to et used to but in the end it will be well worth your while. Use these quick steps and your website will be well on its way to rank in the search engines.