The Gloucestershire business directory has been set up to help local businesses in Gloucestershire be found on Google local search.
The search engine that is Google is huge, having a website listed on Google and in fact most search engines is like have the smallest book in the world and looking for it in the biggest library in the universe. Generally independent businesses and sole traders have a limited budget to spend on advertising and competing with those large national and corporate organisations that in most cases have a huge advertising budget meaning the smaller businesses struggle to be seen in search results for their chosen keywords.
This is where Google Local Pack come into play The Local Pack appears at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) when a user makes a search query with local intent. It’s sometimes known as the Local 3 Pack, the Google 3 pack, the Google Map Pack, But what ever you want to call it is one of the best ways for a business to get noticed, and to gain an advantage over its competitors is to rank in the Google Local Pack.
There are many ways to help a business get into the local pack, with no guarantees as to what works the best as Google keeps its Algorithms a closely guarded secret and even then the Algorithm can change on a Google update. So let’s look at my favourite top ten tips.
- Make sure you claim your free Google Business Profile.
- Building good quality links from good quality local websites is critical for local pack visibility.
- Managing customer reviews.
- Building citations, A citation simply means your business information (name, address, phone number) is displayed online.
- Website is fast and mobile friendly.
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Make Sure Your website is localised (Plenty of reference to your location in your keywords)
- Authoritative and relevant content on your website.
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Optimising title and meta descriptions.
- Business structured markup. (Schema)
- Good content and regular social media posting.
Start working on the above and you should see an improvement in your search presence on Google and other search engines. Of course I can help if this is something you feel you maybe not be confident in or have the time as running your business.