Sigoti SEO Agency Blog | Local SEO services for Norfolk SME's (2)

Following on from our previous local SEO blog, we will now show you each factor and the actual work we do to build authority for our clients in Google.

Google My Business is a free listing that if somebody searches for your Norfolk business on Google, this is what will appear on the right hand side of the page. If your Google My Business profile hasn’t been properly optimised then you’ll never succeed in local search, period as it makes up 25% of the signals.

While creating and managing a Google My Business listing can be a rewarding experience, there are a lot of opportunities for making mistakes along the way – especially for Norfolk business owners who are busy running their business and don’t have the time to read through all of the information on how do it right.

So the first thing we do is identify which search terms people are using to search for your services in Google. We use our tools to pull back the total number of local searches they are conducting every month for each service you offer. This helps us identify which search terms we need to optimise your GMB profile for. From there we’ll run research on your top-performing competitor’s profile and build on this for your profile.

In addition, we’ll audit the data in your profile and make sure we add compelling reviews and images to drive conversion for anyone looking at your business.

We’ll also continuously create Google Posts. These are like social media updates that live on your GMB profile. These help drive conversions from your listing and are a good signal to Google that your business is active and relevant.

A strong indication of Google ranking is the number of links pointing to a website. It is crucial for standing in the Google rankings. Links are like endorsements of your business competency, quality, and character. Endorsement of your business by others puts their reputation at risk. 

Links have to be earned and you have to give people a reason to link to you. You have to consistently provide clearly differentiated, high-quality goods and services including, in many instances, blog content that is sought-after, unique, and valuable. As a local Norfolk business it’s difficult to acquire links for your business’ website without the right knowledge.

First, we conduct a link audit to understand your current link profile and identify and remove potentially harmful links. We also need to assess how your existing links compare to your competition in order to fully understand exactly what is required from a link building campaign.

Achieving quality links that pass authority to your site is extremely similar to earning relationships with potential partners and customers. Although others may link out to websites for the fun of it, they will never link to your website unless it is of high quality. This means that you must leverage any existing relationships that you have with organisations in the local area. This will help you achieve quick wins with your new business venture, boosting your reputation and trust among local communities.

Additionally we will look to approach local schools and charities, which can link back to you. In addition, we will attempt to target business directories, which can provide links to your site whilst growing your online visibility. Finally, we will seek out bloggers and relevant sites to write content for them in exchange for a link. All of these approaches help grow your link profile and online authority within Google.

We have witnessed a dramatic change in the past 5 years in the amount of power that the customer voice holds over all businesses. Online reviews have been growing in importance since smartphone adoption.

Online reviews don't just affect your rankings; they impact every stage of the customer's buying journey. Having more positive online reviews, you have a better chance of ranking higher in local searches on Google and other sites. So not only will you rank higher and get more clicks and calls, but customers will be easier to sell to and more likely to buy more from you because of your online reviews.

So the first thing we do is a reviews audit, benchmarking them against top-performing competitors. We’ll then introduce a review generation strategy using sophisticated software that works by asking their customers to leave reviews on important sites, helping improve their online reputation. We’ll also make sure we provide quick responses to reviews to improve trust signals.

The next factor is on-page signals, which is basically everything that lives on your website; everything that Google sees when they crawl it.

There’s a vast range of metrics to consider when optimising on-page signals and we’ll always run a full site audit to make sure their site is sending all the right signals to Google. Here are some of the areas we assess:

• Title tag + Header tag review
• Is there enough content, and is it locally relevant?
• Are there call to actions on your site to drive conversions?
• Is it easy for a user to navigate and get in contact?

A local citation is any place online that displays your business name, address and phone number. Google goes to sites like Yellow Pages to validate your business data and if it finds data that doesn’t match or is missing altogether this can really hurt your ability to appear in search results.

We’ll run a full audit of the citations for your business, making sure that we build out and clean up citations on the most powerful directories to ensure your business data is listed and 100% correct. This ensures optimal visibility in Google for your business.

Before we start implementing work for a new client we need to first understand their current performance and the size of the gap between their business and their top competitors. Until we’ve completed this audit, it’s impossible to understand exactly what work is needed and subsequently what level of investment is required to see results. What the audit gives us is a roadmap of our Local SEO strategy, determining exactly what we need to work on to increase the amount of leads you generate online.

Once we’ve completed the audit we’ll walk you our report, step by step, to make sure everything makes sense and that we’re both confident in how we’ll proceed.

In month 2 we’ll begin executing the strategy outlined in the report, implementing the most important tasks first to try and deliver as many quick wins as possible. 

Our work is based on an hourly rate of £25 and for local clients we typically spend between 6 - 14 hours a month working for them. Like I said, it’s difficult to know what level of investment makes sense until we’ve completed the full audit.

The audit takes 8 hours to build so we’d be looking at an initial investment of £200. This would enable us to build your roadmap for Local SEO in Norfolk and give clear answers on timelines and expectations from a campaign. Once we’ve presented this back to you, we’ll both have a clear understanding of what results and timelines to expect from your campaign.