Local SEO

In your local area, there are hundreds of people searching for businesses like yours. Image the potential even a small percentage of these customers could have on your profits. A1 SEO Glasgow specializes in helping local businesses dominate their area.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO helps you win traffic from people searching for products and services in your local area. There are two types of searches that local SEO focuses on; local searches and location keywords.

Local Searches

Local searches are searches where people are looking for a product or service whilst in a specific area. For example, someone searching for “SEO Consultant” on their desktop or mobile phone whilst in Glasgow.

Local Search Terms

Location keywords are searches where people are looking for a product or service in a specific location, using that specific location in their search term. For example, someone searches for “SEO Consultant Glasgow”.

How Can Local SEO Help You Dominate Your Niche?

46% of searches on Google seek local information. The average person conducts more than 3 searches a day. Based on Glasgow’s 598,000 population that means that there are over 1,794,000 searches in Glasgow a day or over 54 million a month. Converted into local search, that’s over 25 million people in Glasgow a month looking for local businesses like yours. Imaging being able to tap into that? With A1 SEO Glasgow, you can.

Our Local SEO Process

Ranking a local website is straight forward. At A1 SEO Glasgow we follow a process that we have refined over the past 6 years. There’s no SEO black magic here – just straightforward tasks. When followed correctly, this process willhelp boost your website’s rankings in the local map pack and on location-based keywords.

1. Keywords

The very first thing A1 SEO Glasgow do is look at the keywords that have the potential to drive business to your website.

Keyword research is the bread and butter of any good local SEO campaign. To succeed here, we really need to understand how people are finding businesses like yours.

Our local SEO keyword research takes generic keywords for your niche and adds a local element to them. We also look at what keywords other successful local businesses are using to rank competitively online, alongside other hyper-locations that could be profitable.

Without local SEO keyword research, we cannot plan your on-page SEO and anchor texts efficiently, making local SEO a crucial first step.

2. Exact Match Anchor Text Links

After we have some solid keywords to target, we look at your link portfolio and assess how many exact match anchor text keywords your website has. Links with exact match anchor text are links who’s text contains your keyword. For example, at A1 SEO Glasgow, we like to rank for the keyword ‘SEO Glasgow’. Having links like ‘SEO Glasgow’ help us rank for that keyword. However, there are a few more factors to consider.

Quality Of Exact Match Anchor Text Links

With exact match keywords as we will soon discuss, you really are limited to how many of your links can be from the exact match, so you want to sure that your exact match keywords come from quality sources. The team here at A1 SEO Glasgow are whizzes when it comes to assessing a backlink’s quality. We look at several factors including domain rating, spam score and common sense when assessing a link’s quality.

Quantity Of Exact Match Anchor Text Links

Before you see the word ‘quantity’ and think of the more, the better read on. There is a fine line between having enough exact match anchor text links to make serious movement in Google’s rankings and to have too many exact match anchor text links that Google flags your website as spammy. It is hard to put the finger on how many is too many, but as a loose rule we limit exact match anchor text links at 5 per site and keep the ratio at 5% – basically, if you have 100 other links to your website, 5 of those can be exact match anchor text.

3. On Page SEO

After assessing anchor text, we look at the on page SEO of your website. Using the same methods we would for an e-commerce or national service page we assess your website using at least nine different markers to make sure your page is optimized for your local keywords.

We look at several onpage factors; meta tags, headings, images, page word count, internal link architecture, keyword density and more.

These on-page factors ensure that your website contains the correct information that Google and other search engines are looking for.

We look at several onpage factors; meta tags, headings, images, page word count, internal link architecture, keyword density and more.

These on-page factors ensure that your website contains the correct information that Google and other search engines are looking for.

4. Site Structure

This is only really considered when dealing with businesses that are targeting multiple geographic areas. Depending on the search volume, it might be justifiable to create separate pages for Glasgow, Shawlands, Govanhill, Battlefield, Pollokshields, etc. Also, if you are targeting the central belt, it will almost always be beneficial to create pages for Glasgow, Edinburgh, Falkirk, etc.

These pages can each be targeted towards specific local keywords enabling stronger local targeting.

5. Google My Business

Another key factor for local SEO is your Google My Business page. A1 SEO Glasgow will set up your Google My Business page. Just remember to:

• Respond to customer client reviews

• Look out for bad edits

We look at factors like NAP consistency and image geotagging to boost your Google My Business page. However, the most important factor for a Google My Business listing will be proximity – how close are you to the people searching for your goods and services?

6. Competitor Research

As with any SEO campaign, A1 SEO Glasgow looks at your competitors to see why they are ranking high. This allows us to copy and evolve the strategies they are using, acquiring similar links and keeping you one step ahead of the game.

7. Citations

A key factor for local SEO success is citations. No, we don’t mean spamming your websites with hundreds of directory links purchased of Fiverr. We carefully select a handful of niche and geo-specific directories and submit your website manually.

Citation Campaign

During a citation campaign, it is essential to keep your name, address, phone number and website consistent. Google uses directory listings to validate that you are where you say you are and that the phone number, website, location and business all relate to the same place. Keeping all four consistent is key for local SEO.

Unique Descriptions

Most SEO agencies will copy and paste your business description when submitting your citations. This is poor practice. If you have 40 pages all with the same content (i.e. your description), Google will only index one of them meaning in Google’s eyes; you only have one citation. By writing unique descriptions for each citation, we ensure that the majority of citations are indexed and counted by Google.

8. Local Business Schema

Schema is a language used to talk to provide information directly to Google when Googlebot crawls your website.

For a local business, we include relevant information like reviews, geo coordinates, address, pictures, opening hours, telephone and URL. This is all in the hopes of gaining a thing called rich snippets in the results pages. Rich snippets deliver higher quality traffic and are often a way to outrank your competitors by being placed in position 0 (the position above the first position).

Trusted by Local Business

Over the years, we have had the privilege to help some of Glasgow’s most beloved brands grow their search presence. Below is a selection of some of those brands.

Testimonials

Outstanding knowledge of current SEO strategies and best-practice; A1 was really helpful in identifying the root causes of our ranking problems to deliver sustainable improvements, rather than artificial short-term boosts.

Graham is by far the best in SEO he not only goes out his way to help you but knows exactly what he is doing. Nothing is too much trouble for him. Thumbs up from Discount Pet Supplies

We used A1 SEO for our client, USC Hydraulics', website and were surprised by the results that the company delivered for us within a short space of time. The knowledge from the team was second to none after prevous experiences with SEO companies. We now rank much higher on key search terms in our industry and the long term stategy we have in place is working.

We've worked together with several local SEO clients over the last period and Graham is not only astute, he brings a wealth of knowledge. He does what he says on the tin. Would recommend 100% and look forward to working together again to improve our clients rankings in the SERPS!

We have seen unbelievable growth year on year since working with Graham and the team. The initial process was simple and Graham worked hard to put complex SEO terms into plain English for our senior management team. Organic revenue started to increase dramatically after 4 months, continuing to this day.

Having worked with A1 SEO for a number of weeks now, they've helped my business grow a lot within that short space of time. SEO, PPC and more, highly recommend.

Exceptional at what they do, we needed a tonne of SEO and Digital marketing help and Graham and his team did not disappoint! 10/10.

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