My Local SEO Journey
I’ve only had this website live for a month or so…and I know good SEO doesn’t work fast. I do want to start off how I mean to go on. I’ve been consuming as much SEO best practice to help me get there organically and more importantly, in my setup phase, lean on budget.
1 big use case for the website is to rank well for Dry Ice Blasting / Cleaning / detailing near me. The hope being those potential clients in Farnborough, Guildford, Woking and further afield across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire and Great London find me to add to their comparison with my peers.
So far I’ve learnt
I need to optimise my Google My Business listing > This took a few day to get right and be approved, but at least I’m in control of my business profile with Google and more importantly, as it’s a new build, the actual location of the shop on Google Maps.
Optimise Local SEO > Ensuring that every page of my website is unique and the SEO includes my target areas of Hampshire, Surrey and Berkshire and that Dry Ice Cleaning / Blasting / Detailing is mentioned. I’ve tried to make sure that the details are specific to the page as well as mentioning the keywords and locations.
Creating local content > see this blog post is hopefully fulfilling that one
Directories and local links > Finding the online directories and making sure my details are registered and consistent. I found YELL had a tool to check this which was quite useful. Keeping a spreadsheet as every site needs a login and if I were to change any of my details, I would need to manually update all of this.
It seems to me that the sole purpose of online directories are for SEO - I can’t see anyone using most of them to locate business. Most sites go full on upsell with SEO optimisation once you register.
Follow vs NoFollow. It appears that the follow links are the gold dust of directories I need list on as they have ranking benifits. I’ve found several ‘top 100’ uk directory listing so I won’t list them here. Painstakingly registering and updating my details. Once I’ve got this, I’ll target the Nofollow listing.
Local Social Media engagement. Now this bit I haven’t started other than claiming my company name before someone else does. That’s a job when I have some content.
