Local Business Seo

It's best to set up a targeted Facebook page for a start. Also check your geographic settings in Google Webmasters to ensure they've got it right (they don't always).

Just do general SEO, comment on competing blogs (in your area) or suggest a guest post if possible. Directory listings could also be very (or more) useful for smaller niches.

Since everything is setup, try to get your website on top of Google Maps. In able to do that you will do different link building task like local directory submission, blog post, social media and etc.

You can also try to promote your business using social media sites or find forum relevant to your niche then join to some conversation. In that way you can help people and at the same time promoting your business.

Hi Will,

You are on the right track by registering with Google+ page etc. Make sure that your Google+ page is linked to your website as well. The next step would be to get some reviews on your Google+ page as these are seen as positive 'votes' for your company and will help you in the rankings. Try contacting previous customers and ask for a review, you may want to offer them a promotion to incentivise them with a money off coupon or something, however many will be happy to do it anyway if you provided a good service.

Then set-up social media profiles and link to your website, write some articles on your area of expertise with links back to your website and submit them to article directories. You are not really doing this from a gaining traffic point of view but more to build a link profile and presence on the web that Google can see, and looks natural. This will ultimately help your rankings. Try to add up to 5 links per day at first.

On-page SEO: Make sure the keywords on your webpages have a 1% - 1.5% keyword density with the area you cover and also the type of work you do.

Also take a look at your competition. Download Google Global for Firefox (this will de-personalise your search engine results) and search for your main keywords. See how many G+ reviews they have, how many backlinks they have and where they come from (majestic SEO), and what the on-page SEO is like. Do this for your top 5-10 competitors and then for your own website. Establish this as a baseline and then aim to do better than all of your competitors in every aspect.

Be more diverse, more creative and do more all round to beat the competition. It won't happen overnight but if you put in a small effort every day then it will gradually build up and within 2-6 months you should start seeing some results.

As this takes time, I would highly recommend trying out Google AdWords in the interim. They have location targeting down to the postcode level! I have a PPC marketing agency and currently have some free £75 coupons that you can use on a new AdWords account to give it a try. See my other post www[dot]warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/679758-uk-roi-free-75-google-adwords-coupon-here-today[dot]html and apply one of the codes to your new AdWords account and start using it before 30th Sept (5 days).

If you need basic AdWords advice, there are many Google training videos online that you can access for free. Also feel free to reply here and I will answer simple questions and give advice for you. Alternatively I could set-up a campaign for you at a discounted fee if you are not comfortable doing it yourself yet.

I would like to suggest you submit your business over other reputed local business directories hotfrog etc and try to get citation for your business from local customers.One more thing your address should be same on your website as you submitted on local profile.Placing same address on your website footer is a right approach and it also helps to improve local listing position.Next thing you can,update your listing regularly and add something else over there,it will also help to improve rank of listing.
I am not agree with submitting local business profile on blogs and directories etc,it won't help you. You can promote your local business address over social media websites.I hope this info will help you to improve rank of your local business profile.

Thanks for the post James, I can see Ive got plenty of work to do.

Funnily enough I set up a Google AdWords account the other day, I only had a £30 voucher though. So hopefully that will produce some results in the meantime.

Yeah I did feel a bit dirty doing the blog comments, but I made sure that I actually read the article before commenting though. Does this mean it wont be classed as spam? haha

Thanks!

Well, why not start from the most active online communities in your area. For instance, if Facebook is proven to be the most used social media site in the UK, then it might pay well to get your business a Facebook page and attract customers from there.

Lots of good information here.
Couple of things:
Images both in the listing itself and in the way you tie images, video and website together.
Video optimized and geo-tagged
G+page has images, video, profile has business description and citation
GeoSiteMap
Citations, all the ones you can find.
Business profiles linked back to your 1st ring social sites (youtube, g+, FB etc)

Thanks for the help everyone, I really appreciate it.

I am currently working on my footer to include my address details and was wondering if it would also be beneficial, from an seo point of view, to list the areas that I cover? So under a header 'areas covered' I would list the towns in my local area.

Is it acceptable practice to do this or would google not like it?

Thanks again,
Will