Is Your Website Optimized for Local SEO? Check the Homepage First

If you haven’t audited your website for local SEO, now is a great time to start. As part of our SEO best practices, we perform audits with our web development team to make sure that our client’s website, and specifically their homepage, are optimized for local search. With so many consumers looking for a business in their general vicinity it isn’t enough to come up for a specific category, your site needs to show up when someone searches for “your business type in your city”. Doing so will help your site to come up faster in search results and increase your mobile marketing conversions.

What to Evaluate on Your Website

1. Is your phone number visible? The goal is to present information in a way that is easy for search engines and users to read. Make sure that your phone number is easy to read and formatted correctly so that search engines can identify it as a local number. If you have the click-to-call feature, this will also help with your mobile marketing.

2. Is your website mobile friendly? We recommend that all of our clients have a responsive design website so that it shows up clearly on any device including mobile phones and tablets. The importance of this cannot be overstated because of how many people have smart phones and use them to do a local search. The majority of adults have done so, and if your site isn’t quick to load or easy to read on a smart phone, you will lose business. View your site on your smart phone and if it doesn’t come up correctly, speak with your web development team.

3. Use caution when redirecting. If you have a redirecting homepage, you could be hurting your SEO. It is better to use your sites base domain name “mycompany.com”. If you must redirect your homepage, make sure that it is done using a 301 server status code. Check with your web development team to see if it is.

4. Check the text on your page. Many businesses and developers make the mistake of placing the majority of the text into images that are placed on the homepage. One of our SEO best practices is to make sure that there is enough plain text on the page for the search engines to read the basic information about your business along with the keywords we want them to see. During the web development phase, it is important that the content on every page is optimized for SEO, and this should include your business name, category, location, and phone number.

5. Check your title tag. The title of your website must contain your business name, category, and your city. This is important for improving your local SEO and will help with both your Google marketing and mobile marketing.

These are only some of the steps our web development team takes when auditing a website. We incorporate all of our SEO best practices into the site design so that your Google marketing and mobile marketing efforts are maximized. When you have a solid site design, your conversions will increase, and you will start to come up more frequently on organic searches which will save you money later on.