On-Site SEO For Local Businesses

While vital local SEO tasks like Google My Business and online reviews happen away from your website, there are some site optimization tactics that take place on site. This is known as on-site SEO and that’s what this section is all about.

Defining an Optimized Website

On-site SEO optimization is an important factor that contributes to your search engine ranking. But how do you define a well-optimized website?

First thing, the website has to be user-friendly. Meaning your users must find it easy to navigate from one page to another. Second, it must have the up-to-date information for the users.

For example, if your Google My Business account has different information than your website, then the conflicting info might steer your visitors away from your site.

Here are some ways to achieve on-site SEO optimization.

Website Localization

Website localization is the method of adding your region, city or locality’s name around your website. If your local business has several locations, you can achieve website localization by creating separate pages or content silos for each location.

You must add names of relevant locality to your website as naturally as possible. Avoid keyword stacking or stuffing because it’s a malpractice that might get your site penalized by Google.

Try creating content where you can mention your locality. For example, you can write content that will help the visitors to navigate around the area. You can cover events happening in your community and write an article. You can promote new products or service available in a locality on your website.

There are plenty of ways you can keep mentioning local details without spamming. Just be creative.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile

About 50% of the internet users predominantly rely on their mobile phones to browse the internet. If your website is not optimized for a mobile, then almost half of your visitors will find it difficult to navigate your website.

To check your site’s mobile optimization, just open your site from your own mobile. Try to look out for any obvious flags: such as obnoxious pop ups or long load up time for a page.

Google has its own tool for you to check out your site’s optimization. You can get suggestions from the tool to make your site more mobile-friendly.

Improve Site Speed and Technical SEO

To get a general idea of your site’s loading speed, use trustworthy tools or plugins. Remember, search engines like Google dislike slow sites, and they tend to remove these sites from the top results.

If the loading speed score is not good, do not worry. You can improve site speed by following through good practices of SEO. For example, try to compress your HTML or CSS files, and your image files. Reduce website redirects within your site to minimize waiting time of your users.

Optimize your code with the help of experts. Try to follow through the suggestions from the tools to improve the site speed

‘Core Web Vitals’ of Google

Google determines how well your website is performing with the help of its core web vitals. At present, it pays attention to three aspects of user experiences:

Visual stability – It measures the shift in the visual elements of a web page while it’s still loading for the viewer.
Interactivity – It’s a metric that tracks how fast a website respond to a user’s first interaction with it.
Loading – All about site speed and how fast or slow a page loads.

We suggest heading over to Google’s resource on page experience to understand more about the web core vitals.