5 tips to leverage local SEO in Guilderland, Albany, or Any Town

If you have a business in Guilderland, Albany, or anywhere else and want to bring more visitors to your website, search engine optimization (SEO) needs to be a key part of your marketing strategy. If you have no idea what SEO is, then read this article and come back often to learn more.

At its most basic level, SEO is the process of developing and/or improving your web presence to make it more easily discoverable through popular search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. If you didn’t know it already, people are turning to the Internet for all of their research needs. People are using search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) for practically everything. It doesn’t matter if  they want to try a new pizza place, find a good attorney, or get their teeth cleaned. Think about how you use the Internet. When you need something and don’t know how to get it, what do you do? I bet you Google it.

The search engines are aware of this and are making changes to offer a better experience and give searchers what they are looking for. You’ve probably seen this in action when using Google or other search engines. If you type “Guilderland Dentists,” into the search bar, you will see a list of businesses near the top along with a map, addresses, and phone numbers. As a result, a local part of SEO is now available and should be implemented with regular SEO practices to increase targeted traffic to your site from search engines. This will help you get more local, targeted traffic to your website, which will then create more leads for your business.

Here are five tips to begin leveraging local SEO in Guilderland, Albany, and beyond.

1. Brand consistently across all aspects of your web presence. It is important to have the same business name, category, phone number, and address in every instance of your web presence.
2. Make sure you have local pages set up for all the major search engines and local indexing services for each place you want to optimize for. This could include Google Places for Business, Yahoo! Local Listings, Google +, Bing Local, Yelp, and so on. Claim your account and complete your profile as completely and accurately as possible.
3. Do the same for Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Yahoo! Maps. This is increasingly important because of the increasing number of smart phone users and navigation integration.
4. Regularly update your website (possibly with a blog) with high-quality, industry specific content. Search engines love fresh content.
5. Begin actively using Google+ as your business, organization, or persona. Create and share relevant content (yours and others), build circles, and be social. Do the same with Facebook and Twitter. Other social networks are good too, as long and you use them consistently.

Local SEO is a great opportunity to leverage search engine technology to set up a brand in your area of expertise and help you become more visible to your ideal customers, clients, or audience. If done properly, SEO optimization can greatly increase your visibility and help you enjoy greater results from your web presence.

If you want to get a general idea of how well your website is optimized, please fee free to contact me to get a free SEO audit of your website!