Top Tips For Local Businesses- Part 2

Hello again everyone. Lets continue part 2 of our mini-guide to ranking sites in Google Local places. If you missed yesterdays into post you can read it here.

4. Make The Most Of Your Titles. Having a great title is not just good for Sir Barnyard-Hall when he wants to get the best table in the restaurant, they are also vital for your local search engine rankings. A common mistake is to forget to put a keyword related title on every page and, instead, just leave the default title.This is an opportunity missed. The best format seems to be <keyword> - <place name> so, as an example, lets say you are an Aberdeen plumber who does heating and gas installations as well. To get the maximum benefit from your site you should set up 3 pages (including your home page) and structure them as follows

Page	Keyword	Title
Home	Aberdeen plumber	Joe Smith Plumber - Aberdeen 01224 123456
Sub-Page 1	heating engineer Aberdeen	Aberdeen Heating Engineer - Call 01224 123456
Sub-Page 2	Gas Installer Aberdeen	Gas Installer In Aberdeen - Joe Smith 01224 123456

Using this approach allows you to effectively target 3 different keywords on your site and, by placing the telephone number in the title you can even get enquiries without click-throughs.

5. Tag Your Rich Media Content. What? Well, basically, its a good idea to have video and images on your pages but the search engines don't understand what they relate to. So, help them out by using your alt tags for images or by creating a video site map and submitting it to Google. I'm going to cover this on my website at graniteseo.com in a few days so stay tuned for more info.

6.Install Analytics. Its amazing how many local businesses don't run Google Analytics. If you don't  then why not? Its a rich source of information about who's visiting your site, how they found it, what keywords are being used and so on. With even just a little bit of knowledge you can use this information to plan ad campaigns  spot new opportunities and even fine tune problematic bits of your site for better results. 

There we have it them, another 3 small tips to help local businesses succeed on-line. If you would like to know more then please feel free to check out my range of local SEO services on my website. 

Until tomorrow

dave