As a small business, it is absolutely vital that you squeeze out every drop of value from the time you invest online and making sure you are well optimised locally is a huge part of that.

As a small business, the first key area to lock down is your local community, because a large part of your business will originate from here.

There are a number of activities that can be completed that will help with your local optimisation and these include:

• Using the LocalBusiness schema where applicable, so Google can read the page appropriately
• Utilise your Google Business Profile correctly, claim it, maintain it, and share updates on it.
• Create local area pages for your site where possible, rich with good, local content.

Google is helping with this optimisation with an update that rolled out to local search results at the end of November, concluding on December 8^th.

According to Google themselves in a tweet, the update involved a ‘rebalancing’ of various factors that they consider when generating local search results. 

While it is important to remember that Google has just rebalanced these, the factors that primarily determine local results are:

Relevance: This refers to how well a local business profile matches what someone is searching for. So, you should ensure you add complete and detailed business information to help Google better understand your business and match your profile to relevant searches.

Distance: Distance considers how far each potential search result is from the location term used in a search. If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, Google will calculate the distance based on what they do know about their location.

Prominence: How well known a business is. Factors in businesses that may be more prominent in the offline world, as well as being based on information Google has about a business.

If you want help optimising your site for local searches, please get in touch with us for a free review today.