If you are like most small fitness businesses, the success of your company is dependent on attracting local customers, whether they are in your region, state, county or even town.
While it’s great to see that your website is pulling in visitors from around the country and maybe even around the world, you don’t want your forms to be filled out by people who are too far to use your services.
The best way to minimise this is by getting your website top the top of Google for the region you work in.
Check out this list and discover how to get more local traffic to your website and generate more quality conversions.
Use Google my business
The first thing you need to cover when getting your business noticed locally, online, is creating a ‘Google My Business’ account. A ‘GMB’ profile is an essential for local SEO. It’s free and will enable you to appear in local search results for queries specific to your products or services.
Without it, you won’t be appearing on any local map listings in which Google displays for the vast majority of local queries.
You can create your Google My Business account here.
Engage with local bloggers and city-specific websites.
Engaging with bloggers from your area can truly establish your business locally. Popular blogging websites are perfect as not only are they based in your city and will help ranking, but they also have a loyal following. If the bloggers praise your business and your services then it’s more than likely that your business will develop credibility and trust.
This is also the same for city-specific websites. If you’re based in a large city then your area is more than likely full of websites that are specific for your area.
I’d also recommend researching this path too as it will only help boost your website.
Optimise your website for geographic-specific keywords.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to start ranking locally is by using local-based keywords throughout your website.
To do this, make sure that the Page Title, URL, H1 tag and page content of your web pages include your geographic keyword phrase and that you are consistent across all elements.
By doing this, you’re more likely to pull in traffic from your area rather than from people half way across the world!
If your business covers a number of towns or cities, make sure you tag them separately to ensure Google doesn’t mark them as just duplicate content, as this won’t rank properly.
Add your address in your website footer
Another element on your website that search engines, like Google, love is a local street address and phone number on all of your pages.
You don’t want to randomly put this throughout your page content as it more than likely won’t read well, so the best bet here is to place this information in your website’s footer.
This is great for search engine bots crawling your website. Just remember to use text format rather than an image.
Create Location-Specific Pages
As mentioned in the second-to-last tip, having multiple locations on your website isn’t a problem, you just need to create different tags for different areas.
A way of keeping this clean and organised is by having location-specific pages. Let’s say you had clients in Miami but on certain days you run classes in Orlando. Create specific pages for each location and this way, people from different regions can be directed to the appropriate page.
Final Thought
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last month researching SEO as it’s something our clients have been asking about more often. This goes to show that SEO is still a majorly important factor in online business.
The above tips won’t spring board you to the top of Google by tomorrow morning but it will play a part in gradually pushing you up the ladder and getting noticed by local searchers.
Follow the tips above and you should see a significant change in your website traffic, with more local traffic coming your way!
If you have any Local SEO questions or you just want to let us know your thoughts on this blog post, please leave a comment below!
