How to Optimise Your Website For Local Search Traffic

With search engine optimisation getting more and more competitive, it can be tough to reach the top of the search engines for highly competitive keywords. For popular keywords it can take months and a great deal of cash to get anywhere near the top but that doesn't mean your website is destined to sit at the bottom of the listings though. Search engine optimisation is all about finding niches and thinking as a search engine user so you can predict what people will search for.

Whether your company has a small or large marketing budget, you can make an impact in the search engines by focusing on highly targeted keywords. Optimising your site for a very broad term such as 'search engine optimisation company' is unlikely to bring you much traffic as there will be hundreds or even thousands of companies out there who are also targeting that keyword. Instead of broad terms include local key search phrases in your website copy such as 'SEO Leeds' so local businesses looking for local service providers can find you.

How to incorporate local search terms in your website copy
Thankfully the days of cramming multiple keywords into website copy have just about gone with many businesses opting for fewer keywords and quality content instead. The next time you review your keywords and website copy consider these tips below...

• Local speech
Depending on where you are in the country, people will speak in different ways and call certain items different names. If you're looking to attract local traffic then consider how people in that area will search for your service by the way they talk. For example, local people tend to shorten local place names such as referring to 'Scunthorpe' as 'Scunny'. People who live in the North of England use different words to describe different items to people in the South and these can vary greatly from city to city. Decide on the terms which are used in the areas you want to encourage local traffic and use these in your website copy. Another aspect to optimise your site for includes covering the local area of a town or city. If you optimise your website for 'SEO Leeds' then make sure you also cover the term 'SEO West Yorkshire'.

• Contact page
The Contact page on your website is the ideal place to mention the areas that your business operates in. Most Contact pages have the business address but try adding a paragraph above this to encourage people to contact you as this will give you another opportunity to add a keyword to the copy. You could also include the local areas you operate in and also exact towns and locations in the copy. Consider adding a footer to each page of your website which features your company name and address - this is good practice from the website visitors' point of view as well as it means people can easily find your contact details.

Make sure you harness local traffic looking for local services in your area by using these simple tips to optimise your website with highly targeted keywords.

SEO Leeds