Getting Local SEO right is key for roofing companies that want to attract more business from potential customers nearby. This is true for the entire roofing industry – whether you are a small independent contractor or a large building and roofing business operating across the country. Ranking well in the local search results when people search for your roofing services can increase your organic traffic by upto 40-50%.

What is Local SEO for Roofers & Why is it Important?

Most businesses looking to attract new customers and clients from the search results understand the importance of online visibility and that one of the best ways to maximise this is with effective Search Engine Optimisation. But with Google and other search engines placing increased importance on how close a relevant business is to the searcher, both with the ‘map pack’ rankings and organic search results favouring these local businesses, Local SEO is the more focused strategy for gaining the best possible position in these local search engine rankings.

For roofing companies like yours, where potential customers are likely to be searching for roofing contractors ‘near me’ or in a particular town or city, having an effective local SEO strategy to gain the best possible rankings for these local searches is going to be key to maximise the organic traffic to your roofing website.

Whether for location-specific searches, e.g. ‘roofers in leeds’, or for general ‘roofing companies‘ type searches carried out in particular towns and cities, the search engine results pages on Google are almost always going to display map and organic rankings of roofing contractors that are in that particular area.

In deciding which businesses to display in the search results and on Google Maps, Google considers Relevance, Geographical Distance, and Prominence – so your roofing company’s SEO strategy needs to have the right approach for optimising for these local searches if you want to grow your traffic and enquiries from the search engines.

Local Roofing SEO Checklist

1. Choose the most relevant search terms
2. Make sure your Google Business Profile is optimised
3. Optimise your website & webpages
4. Build local & industry citations & directory listings
5. Create content focused on the local area

Keyword Research

As with any optimisation project, your local roofing SEO should start with some keyword research to determine the best search terms to target. This doesn’t need to be too technical and in-depth and, in most cases, the relevant keywords will be fairly obvious.

If you’re a larger roofing business providing a range of services, it could be that you want to focus on the general terms and location you’re targetting for clients, such as ‘roofing company london‘.

Smaller, more locally-focused roofing companies may want to be a bit more targetted, so terms like ‘roofers wimbledon‘ might be better, as they would be more relevant and have less competition.

If your roofing business concentrates on a particular skill or service, then this may be something you want to focus on with your local roofing SEO. So, terms like ‘chimney repairs preston‘ or ‘loft conversion company bath‘ might be the most appropriate.

The good news is that if you do intend to specialise in a particular skill or service with your roofing SEO, then this should reduce the amount of competition and mean you could effectively target a wider geographic area.

Google Business Profile Optimisation

One of the most important aspects of a successful SEO strategy for businesses in the roofing industry is having a properly optimised Google Business Profile. The Google ‘map pack‘ of results appears at the top of the page for almost all local searches, and clients whose GBP we’ve optimised to rank here can see their listing drive up to 50% of the organic traffic to their website.

Apart from the website traffic and enquiries potential, ranking your GBP in the map pack is often easier and quicker than ranking in the organic listings below, relatively speaking, so having an effectively optimised profile needs to be an essential part of your roofing SEO.

If this is something you want to do yourself, we’ve created a comprehensive guide on optimising your GBP, which you can find here.

Optimising Your Website

Once you’ve optimised your GBP for the map listings, you should also look at ensuring you have the same local optimisation on your website. This is important as it will help with your rankings in the organic listings on the different search engines, but it can also complement and help improve your GBP rankings, too.

If you think about it, it makes sense that Google would view a business that has the same local service optimisation on its website and the GBP that links to it, as more relevant for local searches for that service.

Smaller roofing companies would probably want to consider optimising the homepage for the location and services they are focused on, with the relevant on-page optimisation for the search terms they want to target.

Larger firms that may have multiple locations or offer a variety of specialist services should consider having individual pages that can be optimised for a particular location or service, to better target the related search terms.

If your roofing business does operate across different locations/offices, then you would also want to have a GBP for each location, and make sure that each profile links to the corresponding location page on your website – don’t just link them all to the homepage.

With the content optimisation of your website taken care of, you also need to make sure the technical SEO side of things is up to scratch. Google uses the performance of your website on mobile devices as a factor when determining where to rank it, and it’s now estimated that nearly 60% of local searches are conducted on mobile devices – so having a website and customer enquiry process that works well on mobile is essential for roofing companies.

Local Citations & Listings

Getting links to your website from relevant sources is important for any SEO project, and this is especially true for the local SEO campaign for your roofing business website. Creating listings on relevant local and industry/service-focused directories, associations, and organisations will help build up your business’s relevance for the searches you’re targetting.

So you should be adding listings on sites like https://www.nfrc.co.uk/, https://www.checkatrade.com/, and https://directory.birminghammail.co.uk/ – all with the same NAP information as on your GBP. Not only are these citations and listings relevant, high quality backlinks that help with your SEO campaign, but they can also be a good source of referrals, too.

Locally-Focused Content

To build up the local relevance of your site, you should also consider regularly adding locally-focused content to your roofing company’s website. This could be general information about the area, updates on local regulations and grants for roofing, reports following local adverse weather – anything relevant and informative for your local audience.

To maximise the benefit of this content, from an SEO and user perspective, be sure to link all the relevant local content back to your relevant service or individual location pages, if you have them.

Roofing Companies & Local SEO

When you offer local services like roofing, getting your local SEO right is vital. With the majority of searches for the services you offer likely to display the most relevant local roofing services at the top of the search results, your SEO efforts need to be focused on maximising your location and service relevance.

You can find specialist roofing SEO services to help, but if you follow the steps laid out above, this is also something most roofing companies should also be able to do in-house. With a focused and consistent approach to your local SEO, over time, roofing companies should see this pay off in terms of more website traffic and enquiries.

If your roofing business is convinced of the potential of a fully-optimised business profile and requires some assistance from our Local SEO specialists to make the most of this opportunity, just complete the callback request form below and we’ll get in touch to discuss how we can help.

The post Local SEO for Roofing Companies appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.

If you’re new to Local SEO, it’s essentially a range of practices and optimisation strategies that help you to establish a good presence for your business in the major search engines.

These tools and techniques are vital to help local businesses reach the enormous proportion of search users who use local keywords in their online searches.

So, there are many advantages to following the best practices for good Local SEO strategies. However, for those businesses with multiple locations, local search engine optimisation presents some additional challenges and a few extra things to bear in mind.

In this short guide, we’ll explore the business benefits of ranking well in local search results, as well as a few advanced ideas and nuances, such as the Map Pack and the issue of multiple locations.

Why Multi-Location SEO Matters

If your multi location business has multiple locations, you have multiple opportunities to tap into the vast potential of local searches, and the power of maps results. However, this potential also comes with an extra layer of complexity, in terms of a good Local SEO strategy.

This is why it’s important to adapt general practices for ranking well in local searches, and taking extra steps to ensure that your customers find the right locations for your business. After all, you don’t want your premises in one region to show up for local search customers hundreds of miles away.

By taking steps to ensure your business has a strong presence in multiple regions, you can boost both brand awareness and sales. For example, a small chain of restaurants with a number of locations will need to pay attention to multi-location SEO if it wants to reach the right potential customers in the location nearest to them. This extra effort will pay off in terms of increased visibility in local searches, as well as heightened brand awareness and a streamlined user experience – something that is always beneficial for overall SEO.

Creating Location-Specific Pages

One of the key principles of a good multi-location SEO strategy is to have a unique page on your website for each of your business locations, and the URL of each page should also include the city or location.

Once you’ve set up these pages, make sure that they each include the key details required for local SEO, such as Name, Address, Phone Number (known as NAP), as well as helpful info such as opening hours and what services are available.

As with any kind of SEO strategy, it’s important to optimise the metadata for each page, ie title and meta description, but you should also go a step further by including relevant local keywords.

It’s also important that each page has unique content, ie different for each location page. This will help to avoid duplication penalties. Some ideas for unique content are things like local news, customer reviews, and specific service offerings tailored to that location or region.

Optimising Google Business Profiles for Each Location

As well as multiple pages on your site to represent each location, it’s important to set up individual Google Business Profiles for each local business as well.

While the location details will naturally be different to the other profile pages, aim to ensure consistency in business information across all profiles as much as possible.

It can be a good idea to encourage local reviews for each profile, and to interact with customers in each region.

If you’re managing multiple locations, look into using Google’s bulk upload option to help you save time in creating your various profiles.

Targeting Location-Specific Keywords

As with any local SEO strategy, you’ll want to use location-specific keywords in your campaigns. This is especially important in multiple location SEO, which targets each specific business location individually. There are two different types – explicit and implicit.

Explicit keywords include a specific location, e.g., “plumber London”.

Implicit keywords use a generic keyword that can be used anywhere, but will generate results relevant to the location of the search user. The more popular one by far is the key phrase ‘near me’. So, an implicit version of our example keyword would be “best plumber near me”.

To find out the most relevant and worthwhile terms and phrases for your business, invest in good keyword research. Do this for each location to find high-volume, low-competition terms, and make sure to use local phrases naturally in headings, body content, and image alt text on each page.

Developing Localised Content for Each Region

Beyond the basics, you can also develop localised content for each region or location. These could include blog posts and FAQs targeting local interests or needs. Or you might like to use local events, collaborations, and community involvement to build relevant content.

Consider publishing user-generated content, like customer reviews, and locally relevant case studies, which can all help to establish a strong presence in local search results, as well as building connections with people in the relevant regions.

Earning Local Backlinks and Citations

As with any SEO campaign, backlinks can play a key part in your success. When your business has multiple locations, it can be beneficial to secure backlinks from local sites in each area. For example, can you get a link from any local publications, chambers of commerce, and industry-relevant sites?

Getting listed on local directories can also boost authority, ensuring you maintain consistent NAP details as much as possible. Aim to build citations for each location, and ensure that all business data matches across your entire online presence.

Managing Reviews for Multiple Locations

Online reviews can be a highly effective way to boost ranking and credibility, and this strategy can be implemented for each location. As part of your multi-location SEO campaign, encourage satisfied local customers to leave reviews in the relevant profile for each region, and make sure you respond to negative feedback promptly.

Track reviews across all platforms (Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor) for each location and use them as localised content on the site.

Summary

To benefit from the massive potential of local search, multi-location businesses need to bear in mind a few extra steps and issues in their SEO campaigns.

These include;

• Creating individual location pages
• Optimising the Google business profile for each location
• Targeting location-specific keywords
• Developing localised content for each keyword
• Earning local backlinks and citations
• Managing reviews for multiple locations

As well as taking these initial steps, it’s vital to monitor and analyse results, and to update your Local SEO strategy regularly.

If you’d like some professional advice or support these advanced strategies, get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help you take advantage of the enormous potential of Local SEO for business with multiple locations.

The post Local SEO for Multiple Locations: Key Strategies appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.

Housekeeping

When you’ve finally parted company with your old SEO company, and your new provider has everything they need and has got to work on your new SEO project, you might think that the you’ve done everything you need to and it’s just a case of sitting back and waiting for your rankings to go up. The truth is, there’s probably still a bit of housekeeping you need to take care of, now you’ve made the switch from your old SEO company. We’re not for a second suggesting that your old provider will do anything underhand with the access they were given to your site, and/or the login details for the various other services you provided them with so they could do their job, but for the security of your website and the other, related accounts, here are some of the loose ends you’ll want to tie off:

Website logins – Your website might be based on WordPress or another popular Content Management System, and your previous SEO company were more than likely given a login for the platform, so they were able to complete the various on-page optimisation tasks as part of your SEO project. As they no longer need this access, to avoid any security issues in the future, you should look at deleting the user account you set up for them, or changing the main admin password, if this was shared with them

Google Analytics – Any good SEO provider will have requested access to the Google Analytics account for your website, they may even have set this up for you if you didn’t already have it. In most cases, where you simply added them as a user with permission to analyse and/or edit your Analytics setup, you can simply remove them as a user. If you shared or gave them access to a single Google account that was used for your Analytics, you’ll need to make sure you log into the account and change the password. Be aware, this will change the login password for all the services linked to that Google account.

Google Webmaster Tools – Similar to Analytics, Google’s Webmaster Tools allows you to add users who are able to access and make changes to the account for your website. This is also something that most SEO companies will request access to, so if you added your old provider you’ll need to go in and remove them. Again, if you simply shared the login details with them, you’ll need to update the password to the Google account to restrict their access.

FTP accounts – You may have created an FTP account for your SEO provider, or given them access to your main FTP account, so they were able to upload things like your XML sitemaps, or other web files. Once you’ve checked there’s no information in their FTP folder that you want to keep, you should delete the account. If you gave them the login details for the main FTP account, then make sure you change the password so they will no longer have access.

As we’ve already mentioned, if your old SEO company still has access to any of the above resources, it’s highly unlikely that they would intentionally or otherwise cause a security issue that threatens your website or your data, but some simple housekeeping means that this is something you never have to worry about.

Good SEO is a Partnership

Once you’ve finally done everything required to transition over to your new SEO company, you can start to look forward to what will hopefully be a much more successful relationship. To ensure that’s the case, it might be worth taking a bit of time to honestly reflect on why it didn’t work out with your last SEO company. Any SEO project has a much better chance of success if the client and the SEO company treat it as a partnership. So it might be worth thinking about whether there is anything more you could have done, or things you could have done differently, which might have made the SEO more effective. For the best results, expect to be more involved with your new SEO provider, and work with them to make sure your SEO project is a success this time. We hope you’ve found this three-part series on changing SEO companies useful. If you’re looking for a new SEO provider and would like to find out more about our services, fill out the enquiry form and we’d be happy to get back in touch and discuss your requirements in more detail.

The post Changing SEO Companies – Housekeeping & Making It Work appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.

What is Local SEO & Why is It Important for Dental Practices?

The majority of businesses that want to attract new customers from the search results understand the importance of Search Engine Optimisation. But as search engines like Google place increased importance on the proximity of relevant services to the person searching for them, with the ‘map pack’ rankings and in the organic search results, Local SEO is a focused strategy for gaining the best possible rankings in the results for these local searches.

For dentists, where potential clients are looking for a practice ‘near me’ or in a particular town or city, making the most of the right local SEO strategies to help gain the best possible rankings for these types of local searches is key to help capture as much of this relevant, organic traffic as possible.

Whether for searches focused on a specific location, e.g. ‘dentist in clapham’, or for more general searches carried out in different towns and cities, Google is now more likely than ever to display map and organic rankings of dental practices local to that particular area. To determine which listings to show, Google uses three main factors – Relevance, Geographical Distance, and Prominence – so, to capitalise on the potential for new client enquiries, dentists need to adopt the right approach with their local SEO efforts.

Local SEO Checklist for Dental Practices

• Select the most relevant local search terms
• Ensure your Google Business Profile is fully optimised
• Ensure your website/webpages are optimised for local
• Create locally-focused citations & directory listings
• Add locally-focused content to your website

Keyword Research

The success of any SEO project starts with selecting the most appropriate search terms to target, and Local SEO for dentists is no different. If you provide the full range of dental services, then you might want to focus your optimisation on general terms like ‘dentists leeds’ or ‘headingley dentist’ – depending on the size of the catchment area you want to target.

It’s worth mentioning that the larger the catchment area/location, the more competition for rankings there will be, and the more work is likely to be required to rank well. How well-established your dental website and practice are already will help determine the catchment area and location-focused terms you can realistically target.

If you are more of a specialist practice, you can focus on these more relevant keywords, as well as broaden the local area you want to target. For example, the local patients for a specialist in cosmetic dentistry are likely to come from farther afield, so this type of practice could be able to target and rank well for more focused terms like ‘cosmetic dentist leeds’.

GBP Optimisation

One of the key aspects of successful dental SEO is having a fully optimised Google Business Profile (GBP). Google’s map results are typically top of the results page for the majority of local searches, and when we’ve ranked clients in this map pack for their target search terms, we have seen it drive up to 50% of their organic traffic.

As well as benefiting from the prominence of these map listings in the search results, achieving these ‘map pack’ rankings by fully-optimising your GBP is also relatively quicker and easier than a traditional SEO project – so focusing your dental SEO strategy on these local search rankings could start to pay off in months rather than years.

You can find our step-by-step guide on how to effectively optimise your Google Business Profile for these local business map rankings here. 

Website Optimisation

With your GBP fully-optimised, your dental practice now needs to focus on optimising its website for the local searches you want to target. Optimising your website as well as your GBP is important for a couple of reasons:

1. Utilising the same local optimisation in the on page SEO of your website will help your site/pages perform better in the organic local search results.
2. In our experience, having the same local optimisation on your website as on your GBP complements and improves your GBP’s local SEO performance.

So, if you’re a general dentist focused on a relatively local catchment area, you might optimise the homepage of your website around the general terms for that area, e.g. ‘notting hill dentist’. But if you were a business with a group of practices or focused on specific services, you would probably choose to have a separate page for each practice location or specialist service, and optimise these individual location or service pages for the most appropriate terms.

If you did have a number of practices within your group, you would want to make sure you had an optimised GBP for each practice, and that this was linked to the relevant, similarly-optimised practice page on your website.

With your website content optimised, you also want to make sure your site’s technical optimisation is up to scratch. Mobile search performance is not only important because Google uses this to assess where your site should rank, but it’s also key as more and more searches for local services are carried out on mobile devices. So, ensuring your website works well on mobile devices is vital for the best possible local rankings.

Local Citations & Listings

Links to your website are one of the most important factors in an SEO project, and for Dental SEO the search engines will want to see locally relevant links to your site in order for it to rank well for local searches.

Improve your local search engine rankings and the ranking of your GBP in the map results by gaining backlinks from online directories and citation sources that are relevant to your service and location. With SEO for dentists, this will mean getting links on the relevant industry, governing body, and association websites (e.g. https://dentistdirectory.co.uk/ and https://www.gdc-uk.org/), as well as the locally-focused directories and news websites (e.g. https://directory.nottinghampost.com/).

All of the listings using the same NAP (name, address, and phone number) as your Google Business Profile provide Google and the other search engines with the key relevance and location information they use to determine the rankings for local searches.

Local Content

You can further enhance the relevance of your website for the local area by creating and adding content that is locally focused. This could be testimonials from local clients, local news that’s relevant to your practice and its customers, or any other content that is focused on the local area.

The Benefits of Dental SEO

Businesses like dentists rely on clients in the local area, which makes local searches for your services, and ranking well in the results for these searches, key if you want to grow your practice. This means that effective Local SEO is vital in order to achieve these rankings.

The good news is that effectively optimising your website and Google Business Profile for better performance in the search results for your area is relatively straightforward and can start benefiting your practice much sooner than you might think.

If your dental practice isn’t appearing as high up in the organic or map results for your most relevant search terms, following the simple steps above to enhance your local optimisation could go a long way to improving these rankings.

If your dental practice is convinced of the potential of a fully-optimised business profile and wants some assistance to make the most of this opportunity, just complete the callback request form below and we’ll get in touch to discuss how we can help.

The post Local SEO for Dentists: Our Guide for More Local Patients appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.

Setting up an optimised Google Business Profile through a business account is one of the best things you can do to increase organic traffic to your website. In this post, we’ll cover some of the basics for getting started, along with some insider tips for boosting your business’s visibility online.

Setting Up Your Google Business Profile

Now that you know just how much a good Google Business profile can benefit your business, here’s what to do to get started in setting up your Google Business listing.

Claiming/Verifying Your Business Listing

Claiming or verifying your Google My Business listing is the foundation of your Google Business Profile, so it’s important to ensure that you do this key step correctly.

To begin, head to Google Maps and search for your business. You should then see some prompts asking if you are the business owner and if you’d like to claim it. You’ll need to follow the steps suggested by Google as they walk you through the claiming process.

As part of this procedure, you’ll be required to verify that you are the business owner. This ensures that only the person with access to your business website can claim that Business Listing. These verification steps may seem technical or convoluted, but they ensure the protection of your business presence online, so they are well worth the effort. In addition, verifying your Business Listing can significantly increase your rankings in search engines, particularly in the maps.

If you find that your business is not already listed when you do the initial search, it’s possible to create a new profile from scratch. To do this, head to the Google Business Profile website and follow the instructions there.

Optimizing Key Elements of Your Business Profile

Once you have claimed and verified your Business Listing through the Google Business Profile dashboard, it’s time to optimise your profile with attention to the following key elements.

Using the correct NAP

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of your Google Business Profile is the accuracy of the NAP, ie Name, business address, Phone Number. Making sure that these details are not only accurate but consistent across all your online references is one of the best ways to optimise your profile and boost visibility.

Optimising your business description

While it’s important to pay attention to the technical aspects required by search engines, always remember that User Experience is also a key factor in ranking well. This is where spending time crafting an engaging business description and accurately updating your business information can really pay off. Do your best to represent the USP of your company in the space allowed, using any relevant keywords when it makes sense for the reader.

Choosing the right business categories

When it comes to business categories, having the correct business name is crucial as it is another opportunity to increase visibility, ie get your website in front of the right people. Take some time to select the most relevant categories for your business. This will send more clues to Google about your services, which can help with SEO.

Highlighting key services and business hours

Including key services is another way to increase engagement with search users and help Google understand what your local business is about. When you highlight your key business offerings, (ideally using relevant keywords), you make it easier for potential customers to find you by increasing your website’s visibility in relevant searches.

Specifying your local service areas

Local SEO is a huge component of online search, so it pays to include any relevant location details that can help your business to stand out in Google Search and the maps. Ensure that any details of local service areas are consistent with the NAP information you specified in the main profile settings.

Adding geo-tagged photos & videos

Google Business Profiles allow you to upload geo-tagged photos and videos that include location data. These can be highly beneficial for improving rankings in local SEO searches. When you provide high quality photos and videos in your listing, you can expect increased organic traffic from improved rankings, as well as higher click through and engagement from search users – humans love great images and videos!

Engaging & interacting with customers through positive reviews

Not only is it possible to use your Google Business Profile to interact with customers and accurately list your business hours, it can be a great way to boost visibility. Asking for, and responding to, Customer Reviews is good business practice, and it can provide a valuable insight into your company. When these interactions include engaging and positive reviews and responses, it can help your business to stand out favourably in the maps and local search results.

Monitoring Performance

Good SEO is about more than the initial setup process – it requires regular monitoring and analysis to continually improve ranking and traffic, including maintaining an optimized Google Business Profile. Google provides some great free tools for checking and tracking your analytics, so that you can use insights to make improvements.

Track rankings & customer interactions

Tracking rankings is a key part of a good SEO strategy. Keeping an eye on what is working well gives you data you can use to improve future performance. It’s also possible to spot any issues that can be addressed and easily fixed, helping to boost visibility and increase organic traffic. Analysing your customer interactions is also good practice, as well as being a great opportunity to engage with your audience and show your business in a positive light.

Adjust optimisation & strategy based on insights

While these insights can be fascinating, they’re only useful if they are followed up with implementation. The best way to make the most of insights is to regularly review analytics and adjust an SEO strategy accordingly. By regularly monitoring the results from your current strategy, you’ll discover valuable ways to improve existing efforts, as well as new opportunities that can be maximised.

Summary

Setting up a good Google Business Profile is a simple way to improve your company’s visibility online. With just a few steps, you can dramatically improve your rankings and see more organic visitors to your website.

Beyond the initial setup, there are many opportunities to make the most of your business listing and the free tools available. With a strategy of regular analysis, interaction, and improvements, it’s possible to turn your Google Business Profile into a powerful asset for your business success.

The post Google Business Profile Optimisation – 7 Top Tips appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.

What is Local SEO & Why is It Important for Solicitors?

Most businesses looking to attract new customers and clients from the search results understand the importance of Search Engine Optimisation. But with search engines like Google placing increased importance on the proximity of relevant businesses to the searcher, both with the ‘map pack’ rankings and organic search results, Local SEO is the more focused strategy for gaining the best rankings for these local searches.

For solicitors and legal firms, where potential clients are more than likely wanting to work with a specialist ‘near me’ or in a particular town or city, employing the right local SEO strategies to ensure the best possible rankings for these local searches is critical to maximise organic traffic. 

Whether for location-specific searches, e.g. ‘conveyancing solicitor in york’, or for general searches performed in particular locations, Google is now more likely than ever to display map and organic rankings of solicitors that are in that particular area. To determine which listings to show, Google relies on Relevance, Geographical Distance, and Prominence – so lawyers need to make sure they have the right approach to Local SEO to capitalise on this potential for new client enquiries.

Local SEO Checklist for Lawyers & Solicitors

1. Determine your most relevant search terms
2. Optimise your Google Business Profile
3. Optimise your website/webpages
4. Create locally-focused citations & directory listings
5. Create locally-focused content

Keyword Research

As with a typical law firm’s SEO, the first place to start is with some keyword research to determine the best search terms to target. If you’re a larger firm offering a range of services, you may want to focus on more general local keywords like ‘solicitors manchester’. But if you are a smaller or more specialist firm, understanding that searches for ‘property solicitors leeds’ are likely to drive the most traffic will be key to your local optimisation.

GBP Optimisation

One of the key aspects of successful Local SEO for law firms is having a correctly optimised Google Business Profile. Google map results show up at the top of the results page for practically all local searches, and local businesses we’ve ranked in this map pack for the right searches have seen it drive up to 50% of their organic traffic.

On top of this, ranking in these map results is relatively quicker and easier than obtaining top rankings in the organic search results underneath. We’ve created a step-by-step guide on how to optimise your Google Business Profile, which you can find here. 

Website Optimisation

With your GBP optimised, you now need to focus on optimising your law firm’s website for local searches. This is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, the corresponding local optimisation on your website will help with the organic results. 

It also helps to complement and improve your GBP rankings. If you are a law firm with just one location, optimising the homepage for that location, e.g. ‘Jones Solicitors Birmingham’, as well as adding your address/location to the footer of each page will be beneficial.

If you are a larger firm with multiple locations, creating individual web pages for each location will help, so having a specific web page optimised for your Leeds office, which you link your Leeds office’s Google Business Profile to, will be key to ensuring the possible rankings for local searches.

Finally, you want to ensure your website has the best possible technical optimisation so that it works well on mobile devices. Mobile search performance not only drives Google’s search result rankings, it’s also important as more and more searches are carried out on mobile devices, and the majority of these searches for services will display local search results.

Local Citations & Listings

Links from relevant local websites are important for any SEO project, but for local SEO your solicitor firms’ listings on relevant industry and local directories and organisation websites is key for better local rankings. These citations, where your address listings on law directories, legal association sites, and location-specific websites (e.g. https://directory.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/) all provide Google with the service and geographical relevance it needs to help determine where your law firm should rank for local searches.

Locally-Focused Content

To enhance the local relevance of your website, consider creating locally-focused content that could cover local legal issues or news, or highlight case studies and successful projects for local clients. Where your site has multiple location pages, linking all the relevant coverage back to the specific office location page will help to enhance the location relevance of that page and improve its performance in local search results.

Solicitor Firms & Local Search Engine Optimization

Local SEO is vital for solicitors and law firms that want to increase the flow of potential clients and enquires they get from the search results. Just try searching for any of your target search terms and it’s unlikely you’ll see results without the map pack, or a list of solicitors close by in the organic rankings. 

If your law firm isn’t appearing in either of these results, your law firm’s local SEO could need some work, and following the simple steps above could go a long way to improving your local search performance and gaining more potential clients in your area.

If your law firm is convinced of the potential of having a fully-optimised business profile and want some assistance to make the most of this opportunity, just complete the callback request form below and we’ll get in touch to discuss how we can help.

The post Local SEO for Solicitors: Our Guide to More Local Clients appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.

In this second part of the series, we’re going to look at what details you might need to request from your current SEO provider, to give to the new agency you’ve chosen, so they have as much information as possible to start turning things around.

Judge the Mood

Regardless of the results they’ve delivered on your particular project, the vast majority of SEO providers are professional businesses, and it’s reasonable to expect that they would act that way. Just because they haven’t delivered and you’ve decided to switch to another agency, shouldn’t mean that you’re unable to get them to cooperate and provide the information you’re asking for.

However, this isn’t a perfect world and rightly or wrongly, they may be unhappy about your decision, and prove to be less than helpful. If you’ve worked with your current provider for some time, you will probably have a good idea of how they are likely to react when you break the bad news – which might dictate whether you ask for the information you need before or after you tell them you’re leaving.

Whatever their reaction is likely to be, it’s important that you get as much information from them as you can about the work they’ve done on your SEO, and while it’s not ideal, it may be in your best interests to request the information before you tell them of your intentions to move on.

They may realise from you’re request that you’re thinking about leaving anyway, but if they are going to be difficult, this might be the best way to get the information you need.

What Information Do You Need?

You may already have a lot of the information you need, if you’ve been receiving comprehensive and regular reports from your current SEO company. If you’ve shared these reports with your new agency, they will probably already have told you of any gaps or glaring omissions, or additional details it would be useful for them to have, in which case, you can request this information from your current provider.

You should have been receiving regular reports, at least on a monthly basis, with details about what’s been done and the results to date. It would be a good idea to let your new provider have copies of these, so they have an understanding of what they’re working with from the start. If you’re missing any reports, ask your current SEO company for copies; if you haven’t been receiving any reports, then you need to ask them to provide you with one, outlining everything they have done as part of your SEO project in as much detail as possible. Ideally, you want any reports from your current provider to include as much as possible of the following:

• Keywords: Which keywords have they been targeting? If they recommended those keywords, what research did they do to ascertain that these were the best search terms for your project? How do these keywords compare to those your competitors are targeting?
• Rankings: What are your rankings for these terms, and how have they improved/worsened while they have been working on your SEO? If you’ve had a significant fall in rankings, what do they think is reason behind this?
• Techniques: What techniques have they employed to help improve your rankings and increase your traffic? How have they carried out the work that’s been done? Bearing in mind the poor results that are making you think of changing SEO companies, how have they adapted their approach to try and improve things?
• Site Optimisation: What changes have they made, or recommended be made, to your site, specifically to the on-page optimisation, that would help improve your ranking and traffic? What impact have any changes had?
• Links: What specific links have they built to your site to help improve your rankings? How have these links been built and is it possible to see what effect (good or bad) they had on your rankings and traffic?
• Competitor Analysis: Have they carried out any competitor analysis, and if so, what are your competitors doing to rank above you? How have they used this analysis to drive the work they’ve been doing?

Some of this information is quite in-depth, and may fall a little outside of what you could reasonably expect in a regular monthly report, depending on your SEO budget and the services being provided. The key thing to understand however, is that if you can get as much of this information as possible before you part company with your current provider, it could make things a lot easier for your new SEO agency – which means that you could see things start to turn around much quicker.

In the third and final part of our series on changing SEO companies, we look at a few housekeeping matters you’ll need to attend to once you’ve left your current agency, and also look forward, to offer some advice on how you can make sure the partnership with your new SEO has the best possible chance of success. In the meantime, to find out more about how we could help with your SEO project, visit our Services page, and fill out the enquiry form if you’d like to discuss thing sin more detail.

The post Changing Your SEO Company Part 2 – Information Gathering appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.

What Are Image Alt Tags?

In SEO terms, Alt Tags, sometimes called Alt Attributes or Alternative Text, are word-based descriptions of an image. Alt tags’ primary purpose was to make websites more accessible for Screen Readers. By attributing some descriptive words to an image, a Screen Reader is able to describe the image for any visually impaired users.

The careful use of Image Alt Tags is still a Best Practice recommendation for those who want to provide an accessible online experience to their website users.

However, the use of Image Alt Tags evolved over time and has come to be a part of effective Search Engine Optimisation. The alt attribute not only enhances the user experience for visually impaired visitors but also improves search engine understanding of image content, potentially benefiting page rankings.

What are They Used For in Screen Readers?

The primary use of Image Alt Tags is for Screen Readers, to facilitate an audible description for those who have difficulty seeing webpage images. Using descriptive alt text is crucial for web accessibility and SEO, as it ensures that visually impaired users receive accurate and specific descriptions of images, creating a clear mental image while integrating relevant keywords.

A secondary use of Image Alt Tags is to provide a text-based description of images so that search engines can ascertain what the image depicts, which provides information about the site and its topics.

In short, Image Alt Tags are used as a way of describing a visual image using words that can be read aloud (by Screen Readers), or used to provide text-based information about a website (for Search Engines).

Why Can They Be Useful for Image SEO?

Image Alt Tags can be useful for SEO because they provide search engines with key information about a website, which can help to improve rankings. Optimising image alt tags can also improve visibility in Google Images and image search results.

Paying attention to Image Alt Tags is an aspect of On-Page Optimisation. This is one of the easiest types of SEO for any website owner to address in order to see quick wins and improvements. However, be cautious of keyword stuffing in alt text, as it can diminish quality and reduce the benefit from the search engines.

Assuming that your images are relevant to your business objectives and preferred search terms, giving some thought to the use of Image Alt Tags can help your website contain more relevant keywords.

Image Alt Tags also reveal nuances and specific details about your site that can also help search engines learn more about what the site may be relevant to rank for.

For example, if your website is selling clothes, by describing the images used on the site (using Image Alt Tags), the search engines get a clear signal of the types of clothes, as well as specific details such as colours, styles, categories, and features etc… While these keywords may be included as text throughout the site, the use of relevant Image Alt Tags adds another layer of information that search engines can use and incorporate into an overall assessment of the site as a whole.

All this extra information can translate into improved ranking positions as well as more relevant ranking results, i.e. those that connect your website with the right people – the ones who are searching for your products or services online.

How to Use Image Alt Tags for SEO

Writing alt text for images is crucial for both SEO and accessibility. Optimising image alt text can significantly enhance visibility in search results. Writing image alt text that is both informative and optimised for search engines is essential. Using an empty alt attribute for purely decorative images helps screen readers ignore them, improving accessibility. Proper formatting for alt text associated with an image file is important to avoid assistive technologies reading the image file name. Well-written alt text helps search engines understand the relevance of the image to the overall content of the web page.

There are three ways to specify or edit Image Alt Tags for the images on your website.

Edit Image Alt Tags In Media Library

Whichever platform you’re using, you probably have a Media Library that houses all the images and other media (videos, audios, pdfs etc) that you use on your site. 

To edit the Image Alt Tag for a specific image, you can select the image in  the Media Library and navigate to the image settings. There you’ll usually find a field that you can edit – it might be labelled Alt Text or Alternative Text or Image Attribute. In this field, you can choose the words you want to use to describe the image. Ideally, use language that would make sense if the description was read aloud using a Screen Reader. For SEO benefits, you can also include keywords that reflect the image content and make sense within your business topic or themes. 

Edit Image Alt Tags On Specific Pages

Editing the Image Alt Tags in the Media Library is useful for using the image and its alt tag settings throughout the site, but there may be times when you’d prefer to tweak the wording of the description for a specific page. In this instance, you can edit the Image Alt Tag to more closely match the On-Page Optimisation goals for that page, as long as it would still make sense to a Screen Reader and provide a good experience for any visually impaired users. Writing alt text that is both accurate and descriptive is crucial for accessibility and SEO. Most modern website builders will have a facility for editing the Alt Tags or Alternative Text for a specific image while you are designing the page, either in the front-end or the back end. Again, you’ll need to navigate to the Image Settings and look for the field that allows you to write image alt text or similar.

Edit Image Alt Tags Within The Page Code

If you have advanced coding skills and are familiar with the HTML of your website, it’s also possible to edit the Image Alt Tags directly in the page’s source code. One of the easiest ways to do this is to first locate the image reference in the code, using a Browser Inspector tool or the Search function, then you can edit the Alt Tags directly. If there is an existing Alt Tag, you can edit it to include the appropriate description and relevant keywords. Alternatively, if the image has no Alt Tags you can add a new description with the code: alt=”new image description”, using the relevant keywords and phrases that best represent the image.

When you write alt text, it is crucial to ensure that it accurately describes the image file and includes relevant keywords. Properly formatted alt text not only enhances website accessibility for visually impaired users but also improves SEO by making your content more understandable to search engines. Neglecting the alt attribute can lead to assistive technologies reading the image file name instead of the intended description, which can be confusing for users.

The use of Image Alt Tags is a simple way to improve both the User Experience of your website and its position within the Search Engines. Since User Experience is also a key factor in successful SEO, ensuring your site is accessible for all users is not only a best practice for your online audience, it can be beneficial for your site’s online success as well.

By giving careful thought to the words and phrases you use in your image descriptions, and when appropriate aligning these with your business keywords and SEO goals, you can benefit from the improved optimisation that can translate to higher-ranking positions and more traffic to your website.

The post How to Use Image Alt Tags for SEO & Why You Should appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.

If there are 200 factors that determine rankings, a small number of these are much more important than the rest, and focusing on these is the better, not to mention less stressful, way of optimising the content of your site. One of these important considerations is the H1 tag, sometimes referred to as the page title. But, even with this optimisation factor which most agree the search engines consider important, there is still some confusion – how many H1 tags should you have on your page?

What is an H1 Tag?

So what are H1 tags, anyway? The H in H1 stands for ‘heading’ and the H1 tag is the HTML code that typically denotes the main heading of the webpage. Of all the HTML header tags, H1 tags have taken on significant importance for SEO as, usually being the main heading, they provide the search engines with a key indication of what the entire webpage is about; and therefore in which search results, as well as how high up in those results, the page should rank on the search engines results page.

As well as this main H1 title, properly formatted webpages are also likely to have a hierarchy of subheadings for the rest of the content, and these additional heading tags are usually designated H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6, depending on their position and importance to this hierarchy. You can see an example of this typically structured hierarchy below.

With regards to your SEO efforts, these H tags can help to focus on areas of the content to be optimised, but it’s important to remember they are tags for the HTML code, and better optimisation could come from considering the content itself and how it’s structured, as we’ll look at.

How Many H1 Tags on a Page for SEO?

Ideally, your web page should have just one H1 title tag, and it should certainly have one clear, obvious title for the page that search engines can understand. Additional H1 tag headings could be changed to H2, H3, etc. or styled appropriately without using H tags.

With the SEO significance H1 tags have assumed, how many you can have on a page has become a common question, and while we’ve outlined our view above, opinions on the answer to this vary. Google themselves have said multiple H1 tags on a page are completely fine, while most SEO experts would argue that you should only ever have one H1 tag, and this should probably be the main page title (not to be confused with the title tag) as well.

While you could probably argue both views are correct, we think it’s important to think less about the H1 tag specifically, and more about what the H1 tag is meant to denote – i.e. the main title, and therefore topic, of your page’s content. To explain this better, a short history lesson might be useful.

H1 Tags & SEO

Going back a few years, Google’s algorithm probably wasn’t as sophisticated as it is today. The layout of most websites and webpages was probably more traditional (in terms of using a proper H tag heading hierarchy), too. So the H1 tag would provide Google with a useful piece of information about the main topic of a page and which search rankings it would be relevant for.

These days, with a much more sophisticated algorithm, Google can probably discern the main title of the page whether or not it has an H1 tag, and has said as much, and use this information to help make ranking decisions. This implies less reliance on the H1 tag itself as a factor in ranking, and more importance placed on the first/main heading of the page. In most cases they are likely to be the same, and tell Google ‘this is what my page is about’, but it is this main page or blog post title, and its optimisation, that provides that focus.

Can You Have Multiple H1 Tags on a Page

Circling back to the original question, when you consider the above, it makes sense that simply having multiple H1 tags wouldn’t be an issue, but you would only want to have one, clear title for the page, optimised for your target keyword, in order to provide the most benefit from an SEO perspective. The rest of your subheadings could all be H1 tags as well, but doing this just because of the perceived benefit of them having an H1 tag, isn’t likely to provide much additional benefit.

It could even be argued that utilising the typical, and more structured, H1, H2, H3, etc. hierarchy is going to provide better comprehension for the algorithm and your readers, and deliver better optimisation for rankings, and conversions for your website.

Are H1 Tags Still Important?

When used for the main heading of a page, undoubtedly, and where the H1 tag may be even more important is when it comes to optimisation might be in situations where your main page title isn’t the first H tag on the page, as in the example below.

This could help the search engines better identify what you consider to be the main heading of your page, even if it isn’t the first heading the algorithms come across.

Other Considerations

One important aspect of H1 tags that is also worth considering is their role in improving the accessibility of webpages, H1 tags can play a vital role in helping more people access and understand these pages – screen readers can utilise the H1 tag to provide the screen reader users with the information they need to understand the topic and content of the page.

Multiple H1 Tags or Not?

Are multiple H1 tags on a page a good idea for SEO then? Probably not, but that’s not to say they would always be detrimental. It’s more a question of having a specific and focused main page title, with a structured hierarchy of related and optimised subheadings.

Basically, don’t think of the H1 tag as important just because it’s the H1 tag, the H1 tag is important because it more often than not denotes the main title (and topic) of the page – a well-optimised main title is what’s important and what you should probably focus on.

If you’re convinced of the potential of having fully-optimised content on your website and need assistance to make this happen, just complete the callback request form below and we’ll get in touch to discuss how we can help.

The post How Many H1 Tags Per Page for SEO? appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.

• Is it likely to hurt your Local SEO? Doubtful.
• Is it hard to do? Not really.
• Does it take up inordinate amounts of time? No (see rest of this article).
• Could it help your Local SEO? Possibly.

With that in mind, we don’t really have a good reason not to geotag the images we upload to the Google Business Profiles we optimise, and would suggest it’s something you might want to consider doing when you optimise your own GBP. So whether you believe geo-tagging images is essential for Local SEO, or view it more as another box ticked on the optimisation checklist, here’s how to quickly and easily geotag images and photos for your GBP.

Geotagging & Image Optimisation

Before we look at geo-tagging in more detail, it’s quickly worth pointing out that it is just one aspect of optimising your images and photos for your GBP. One thing we would argue is always beneficial, to local or traditional SEO, is optimising the filenames and any meta tags of your images. You would always want your images to be optimised for the search terms you are trying to rank for – that is a hill we would die on! So, for example, with local SEO, for the images and photos you upload to your GBP you might change the filename from /img-97833545.jpg to something like /grapefruit-london-seo-agency-logo.jpg. Similarly, you would want to add this keyword and location optimisation as the description/alt text for the image, too (we’ll show this when we add the geotags).

What is Geotagging & How Could It Help?

Basically, geotagging adds geographical details to the metadata of a photo or image in the form of longitude and latitude coordinates. This usually indicates where a photograph was taken but can also be added to images to provide some locational relevance which search engines could read and apply to the profile using the image. This additional relevance for a particular location could help Google determine which local business profiles may be more relevant for the map rankings for local search results in or near that location.

How to Geotag Images for Local SEO

If you’re taking photos for your Google Business Profile, your GPS Enabled camera or mobile phone should have the capacity to record and attach the location data of where the picture was taken to the photo. But as it will also likely save the photo with a decidedly unoptimised name you would want to edit anyway, and you may be using other images such as logos and graphics on your Google My Business profile, it can be easier to use a simple tool like GeoImgr to add the optimisation to your profile photos and images.

Using GeoImgr to Geotag Photos & Images for GBP

GeoImgr is a great geotagging tool and easy to use. If you only have a few images to optimise you should be able to do this with the free version, though if you want to upload a good number of images to your GBP you may need to upgrade to the PRO licence – but this is less than £10 for a month’s unlimited use. As outlined in the geotagging tool, the steps for optimising and geotagging are very straightforward:

1. Upload your images (the tools accepts jpg, png, and webp formats)
2. Place the marker on the desired location or enter the latitude and longitude manually (if you struggle to locate the marker as the Search option isn’t available on the free plan, you can actually get your lat/long coordinates from the URL of your profile on Google Maps)
3. Add additional keyword and location optimisation to the Keywords & Tags and Description/AlternativeText
4. Press the Write EXIF Tags button to save the optimisation and location information to the image
5. Download your newly geotagged and optimised image to upload to your GBP

And that’s it, you are now able to create geotagged and optimised images to use on your Google Business Profile, as well as the location-specific pages on your website. So while there may be some debate about whether geotagging has any influence on your GBP’s performance in the map rankings, when it’s almost as easy to do it as to not do it, it’s something we always do when we optimise for local search and just can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t – plus, the improved optimisation could help your images rank for any relevant image search. Will geotagging on its own improve your performance in the search results – very doubtful. However, as part of a more comprehensive Local SEO strategy, it could be beneficial. Of course, geotagging is just one element of optimising your GBP for better performance in the local search results, so if you need assistance to ensure you have a fully-optimised business profile, just complete the callback request form below and we’ll get in touch to discuss how we can help.

The post How to Geotag Images & Photos for Local SEO appeared first on Grapefruit SEO London.