Businesses have a tough enough time trying to run their business, let alone finding, reading and interpreting articles about improving your businesses search visibility. Here Online Ownership provides some actionable SEO for Northampton businesses to incorporate into their site today, or perhaps your developer, if you don’t feel comfortable updating your site.

The first step would be an optimised website so you can build your presence online, direct traffic to your website, and then drive traffic through your front door.

 

Actionable SEO for Northampton Business

 

Please note that these SEO tips are based on the fact that, your business is located in Northamptonshire and you want to increase localised search visibility. A business looking for national search visibility, can still use these tips, but be mindful that some wont apply to a national SEO campaign.

 

 

Local Google Business Page

 

Yes, I know, I have heard it all before, “we are on Facebook”. Facebook is a closed system, yes your main page is indexed in search results, but it wont be appearing for actual business related search : Estate Agents Northampton.

It is critical to Create, Verify and maintain a Google Business Page. Using Google for your business is a way to stay ahead of the competition while having the ability to influence and impact your audience of consumers.

 

 

Town & County in Your Websites Landing Page

 

The “pigeon” update has hyper localised search results both in desktop and mobile search results

The Town and County should be in the landing page that you want to position in the search results. The Length of some counties in the UK take up a lot of real estate and this needs to be taken into account.

<title>Business Name - Estate Agents in Northampton</title>

<title>Business Name - Northampton Plumbers</title>

<title>Business Name - Florist in Northampton, Northamptonshire</title>

 

By including your town and county in your landing page title tag, you will be letting both search engines and human visitors know the area that your business serves and is located in a specific geographic location.

This was rated as the single most important local ranking factor by local SEO experts for 2015.

Read: Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors

 

Quality & Authority of Inbound Links to Website

 

The Quality & Authority of a link pointing to your Domain plays a part in your visibility in search results. The old adage quality over quantity is very real in earning links that point to your domain.

A Northampton business can earn links from a variety of sources; local and national newspapers, local charity sites, local business citations, business associations, chambers of commerce, local high profile bloggers.

Add a Blog to your site:

A blog is a natural platform for you to add product updates, business news and resources needed to attract  links and mentions.

- Create large resource lists
- Break that news story within your industry
- Case studies, interview clients that use your product / service
- Visual content
- Presentations
- Provide something useful to your industry

 

 

Relevant Northamptonshire Business Citations

 

A business citation is a reference to your business from another online source. This citation in ideal cases include Business Name, Address and Phone Number ( NAP ). These can be linked via your business name or just referenced without an actual link to your site.

To benefit your local SEO strategy, you should always keep your NAP information consistent across all your own properties, including your Google Business Page. If you build a citation, you must provide your exact NAP details. The more consistent the information is across the web, the better the citation flow.

 

 

Physical Address in Footer with Structured Markup

 

A physical address in an an area, city or county will greatly boost the relevance of that page for a search query.

Add the address to page or site and markup with schema. Local citations will also be using the address, creating a strong signal for that business and its locality.

 

Schema Local Business: HTML

<div class=” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/LocalBusiness “>
<span class=”address-title” itemprop=”name”> Business Name </span>

<div itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<span itemprop=”streetAddress”> Street Address</span>
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Town</span>
<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>County</span>
<span itemprop=”postalCode”>Post Code</span>
</div>

<div class=”phone-number”>
Phone: <span itemprop=”telephone”> Tel Number </span>
</div>
</div>

 

Schema Local Business: JSON-LD

<script type="application/ld+json">
   {
  	"@context": "http://schema.org",
  	"@type": "LocalBusiness",
  	"address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "addressLocality": "Corby",
    "addressRegion": "Northamptonshire",
    "postalCode":"NN17 1EZ",
    "streetAddress": "6 Regal Close"
  	},
  	"description": "Online Ownership is a results driven, ethical SEO and online marketing consultancy",
  	"name": "Online Ownership",
  	"telephone": "01536 269 657",
  	"email": "info@onlineowership.com",
    "url": "http://dev.onlineownership.com",
  				
  	"sameAs" : [ "https://plus.google.com/+OnlineownershipUK",
    "https://twitter.com/GuideTwit",
    "https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tcapper"]
   }
</script>

 

 

 

Town, County in Landing Page H1/H2 Tags

 

Making sure your town and county is present in the title, H1 and H2 tags of your organic landing pages is very important for search engines understanding the intent of the page.

For your main page your H1 should include name and overall service and the H2 would include town and county. On a product specific page the H1 would be the actual product / service and the H2 would ideally contain the area again.

This is not set in stone and could migrate to the H3 tag, but be aware of a proper structure.

If your H1, H2 tag looks too large to use, get your developer to change the sizes to what you want, it’s only a matter of styling and don’t let them tell you otherwise.

 

Consistency of Structured Citations

 

For your Local SEO campaign to work, having consistent and correct business citations is at an all time high for ranking in Google locally. So it essential that you find and correct any duplicate and inconstant citations.

If any part of the NAP information found on an external site is incorrect, Google may not pass the credit onto your business.

Read: How to Find and Correct Duplicate or Incorrect Citations

 

Business Reviews

 

Reviews help customers in their final purchase journey. Reviews for a business or product has shown to increase conversions by 28% and being a Local business, reviews on your Google Local Business Page are an important part of your Local SEO.

Incorporate asking for a review part of your customer service correspondence.

Dear

On behalf of ………, I would like to personally thank you for your business. 

We appreciate the trust you place in our company and strive to achieve excellence for you and all of our customers. Your review will help others customers know what to expect if they have not purchased from us before.

Please take a moment to leave a review on one of the following sites:

Google
Facebook
( Any other Review sites you have a presence on )

Thank you for your business, support and comments.

Regards


If you want to be a little more relaxed about how you ask for reviews.

“If you like what we do, please consider helping us to reach others by adding your review of our service to this page”

 

 

Businesses can underestimate the potential of a well-optimized website. Take the time to target your local area, citations, and content can have a massive effect not only on your web traffic, but also in local revenue.