Local Search

A lot of Pure SEO’s website enquiries come from potential customers searching for a local company. The number of visitors we are converting that locate us by typing into search engines things like ‘search engine optimisation Parnell’ or ‘search engine optimisation Auckland’ or even ‘Google Auckland’.

This post will give some advice about how to optimise for local search and will provide a few tips and tricks that should lead to extra enquiries and ultimately extra sales.

Google Places Listing

The first and most obvious thing is to complete your Google Places listing. Google Places is now a prominent feature of the first search engine results page (SERP) for many location specific searches:

Search Engine Optimisation Auckland

The thing to remember when creating your Google Places listing is to make sure you complete it as fully as possible. Try and fill out everything about your business and include as many images and categories as possible. Also beware of random cold calls you get of people trying to sell you a Google Places listing (we get lots of these and have great fun stringing them along). You can fill out and complete your places listing easily yourself… and if you are a client of ours we do it for you as standard.

Once your Places listing is up to date, ask satisfied customers to rate/review your company. Lots of good reviews will also help your ranking – just make sure they are genuine and not all done by yourselves….. you will be caught!

Meta Data (Meta Title Tag)

The next thing to look at is your Meta data, and more specifically your Meta Title tag.

Meta Title Tag

Notice that our title tag contains the word Auckland within it. This is because we want to rank for terms such as ‘search engine optimisation Auckland’. Without having Auckland on the title tag it will be difficult to rank for terms with ‘Auckland included’.

REMEMBER – The title tag must be unique for every page on your website.