Whether your local business is a hair salon or you teach guitar lessons, SEO can help drive customers to your door. Here are ten quick (under 30 minutes each) things you can do to improve your local SEO.
1. Craigslist.org works. Put up a listing and it’ll get indexed fast and there’s a good chance it’ll rank. Include a link to your website in the listing along with your phone number. Don’t spam.
2. Ask your local friends to link to your site.
3. Ask your customers to review you online.
4. Create a quick, short video describing you and your services/products and upload it to YouTube with an SEO-friendly title. Ex: Birmingham Hair Salon Hair Today Offers Cut, Color, Perm. You don’t need to spend money. This can literally be you talking into your webcam.
5. Make sure you’re getting credit online everything you do offline. Make sure every board you volunteer on, charity you donate to and organization you’re a member of links to you or at least mentions you online on their websites and/or social media.
Hey Cathy! Still waiting on the other 5 local SEO tips…!?
Sidenote: I took notice of your permalink architecture for the blog. Each post is tied to its year and month, which already appears in the post, instead of an SEO-category.
So this one, for instance, is …/2011/04/10-quick-local-seo-tips/
Thought you might want to give this a try, and make some SEO category names. Might help boost visibility in your local sphere of influence:
/%category%/%postname%/
Let me know what you think!
Hey Dan! How are ya? Yeah, I thought I’d have ten but then I had five and forgot to change the title. Pretty goofy, oh well.
I’m kind of leery of blog post categories because it seems like unless they’re done correctly they cause more problems than they solve. So I’m not using them right now at all. And I have WP set to noindex any categories I do use.
Now I’m curious, what kinds of problems/benefits do you see from your category pages? Have you taken any steps to keep your categories SEO friendly?