Fire protection is a key business worth billions of dollars around the world. Yet if your business is making local SEO mistakes, you could be missing out on some of your share.
Local SEO is, put simply, the use of SEO to attract local customers. It’s a key facet of most business’ approach to digital marketing. If you don’t use it or use it poorly, you’ve lost business.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at some of the costly SEO mistakes that you need to avoid. Ready to get started on making your business better? Then read on!
1. Not Claiming Your Google My Business Listing
The very first thing that you need to do when it comes to local SEO is to claim your Google My Business listing. While you can list your business on Google Maps without registering, if you want to put up accurate information about your business, you need to join Google My Business.
You’ll have seen countless numbers of these listings while surfing the web. If you search the name of a business and you get a profile on the right of your screen with information and photos, that’s a Google My Business listing.
Having this listing not only helps people find you, but it also lets them learn more about you.
For instance, you can put a link to your website, your phone number, photos of your products, and opening hours. This lets prospective customers learn a lot more about you before they visit your store or buy anything from you.
This, in turn, means that they’re less likely to go to a competitor. Claiming a listing is free and easy. It’s the first thing you should do when branching out into local SEO.
2. Not Having a Responsive Mobile Website
A huge part of local SEO is having a good, responsive mobile website. If you don’t have one, you won’t be able to reap all the benefits of SEO. This is because a lot of people search for local businesses while they’re out and about, away from their computer.
They could be standing right outside of your place of business, and want to know whether you’ll have what they need. If they go to your website and it doesn’t work well on their mobile, why wouldn’t they go to a rival?
Google also puts a priority on responsive mobile support, indexing mobile sites first. Ensure that your website works well on mobile or you could be sabotaging your entire SEO strategy.
3. A Lack of Local Content
One of the best ways to appear higher in local search results is by creating local content for your site. This could be blog posts about local events and how they pertain to the fire protection business, videos, or podcasts. For instance, you could write an article about “firework safety on the fourth of July in [your town].”
It may sound basic but this kind of content helps you establish your site, and thus, your business, as local to the area. This means that it can help your local SEO and your rankings in local searches.
Creating this kind of content isn’t difficult. Create and publish content regularly! This kind of content also helps get more eyes on your site, which could attract more business.
4. Not Getting Backlinks
The more backlinks you have, the better. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours and they’re how Google finds and indexes your website.
If you don’t have enough high-quality backlinks, you will not rank highly in search results. So how can you get great local backlinks?
You should reach out to businesses that are clients of yours and ask them to feature your company on their site. Or, if you’ve been the client of another company, you could ask them to include you on their site.
You could also consider creating content and guest-posting on other sites, for instance, blogs about the local area. Links on Facebook or Twitter posts also count as backlinks, so being active on social media can help your local SEO a lot, too.
5. Not Removing Duplicate Citation Listings
If your business is listed twice on Google My Business, Google Maps, or any other directory online, your local SEO will suffer for it. Why? Google and other search engines hate duplicate content as they’re often signs of spam.
If you don’t remove the dupe, you are going to get worse local SEO results. Make sure that you only have one listing on the above directories and that it points to the right site.
6. A Lack of Online Reviews
Online Reviews can help your local SEO tremendously. They show prospective customers what level of service you provide. This can make all the difference for that prospective customer when they’re deciding between companies.
Having a lot of reviews also proves that you’re an established and well-known company. For instance, if a company only has 10 reviews and another has 500, it stands to reason that the one with more reviews is more established and gets more business, right? People like to go where others have gone: this concept, called social proof, is of vital importance for your digital marketing strategy.
Ask customers to leave reviews: it will help a lot.
7. Incomplete Contact Information
It’s recommended that you feature your contact NAP information on your website. You should include your telephone number (complete with area code), address, and email.
This lets customers get in touch with you more easily but it also serves another purpose. Having your address and a telephone number helps Google locate your business and feature you in the right local search results.
Avoiding These Local SEO Mistakes Is Vital
You must avoid these local SEO mistakes if you’re hoping to get found online. Appearing in search results, especially local search is absolutely vital and your SEO needs to be top-notch.
Fire Protection Marketing is here to help your business reach its online potential. For more information about rates and services, take a look around the site. If you’d like to know more, you can get more information here!
