Dreaming of getting in front of your competitors and being one of the first result on Google when people are looking for a business like yours?

This is quite possibly one of the biggest benefits a business can have once they have themselves a website, I mean who wouldn’t love to be the first choice for their customers?!

If you’ve already tried local search engine optimisation (SEO) with no success or have been doing research to build your knowledge you may have noticed that it’s not all that easy, especially when the internet is littered with bad information or people simply trying to sell you their services.

We going to cover the top 5 mistakes you can make with local SEO and we are going to provide you with nothing but the best information without putting our own agency or sales pitch into this post.

Will you become an SEO guru after reading? Nope... but you will learn some things not to do which could save your business months in wasted time or £1000s in wasted spend.

What is local SEO?

Local SEO is using local towns and local cities to rank your business in rather that trying to go national and getting overpowered by the bigger businesses in your industry with bigger budgets.

It ultimately is a way to dominate searches for your main keywords within your main local service locations  - these are usually less populated by others and especially bigger competitors therefore easier for you to rank in even if you have a very small budget in comparison.

The most common targets for local SEO are either smaller cities, towns or villages  e.g. “Plumber in Swadlincote” where it is far easier to compete for top-ranking positions.

Here's The Top 5 Mistakes You Can Make With Local SEO

We’re highlighting the mistakes that can happen with hyper-local SEO so that you’re well prepared and more equipped to increases the likelihood of your SEO being successful. Providing new leads and enquiries into your business from local customers looking for a business like yours.

SEO in general can be risky as there is no guarantee that you will rank meaning no ROI for the money you have invested.

Not only is it risky, it's also one of the most targeted services by marketing agencies who are looking to take advantage of its huge complexity and targeting businesses owners who do not understand this.

You only have to type into Google "SEO services" and one of the first things you will see is - SEO from £99.

A lot of companies when offering search engine optimisation for a cheap price will be outsourcing your SEO to another company who do not know or understand your business.

In their defence, you don't necessarily need to understand a business that well, for example if you are a plumber based in Swadlincote for example, this is pretty straight forward.

The main reason you should avoid cheap outsourcing companies is they rarely get any success.

Of course, when you click on their paid ads promoting their service you will see case studies of how amazing their work is, the amazing results for they have got for other businesses however we advise you to be very cautious with these types of companies.

A great question to ask any agency or business providing SEO services is "Do you do your SEO in house or do you outsource it to a 3rd party?".

If the answer is the latter, we would advise you to find someone else.

The average price you should be paying for local SEO is £300 - £1,000 per month depending on your industry, competitors and how difficult it is to rank for your key phrases.

For example, if you are looking to rank in a few local market towns  where there is not high levels of competition then you will be closer to the £300 mark.

If you are looking to get ranked in larger cities like Birmingham, or the east midlands (derby, nottingham, leicester) you should expect to pay closer towards the £1000 mark.

 
It's better to be spending £1000 a month and getting a good return on your investment  than it is paying £150 a month and see no results and losing faith and thinking "SEO doesn't work for my business.

It’s important to have local SEO for your main keywords e.g. “Joinery in Derby”,  however, these are also the most competitive optimised keywords making it harder to rank above others and taking longer to do so, meaning you have to spend longer before you see a return on your investment.

You’ll benefit more by adding in additional longer tail keywords to your local SEO  , as you are likely to rank higher and faster as these are not targeted as much but still search often by users.

Adding the word "best" in front of a search term is becoming more and more popular by users who are looking to find the best company to help them.

"Best local joiners in Derby" or "Highly recommended joiners in Derby".

Ultimately, the more keywords your customers can search to find you, the bigger return you can make on your investment.

There are approximately 310,000 WordPress websites in the UK.

WordPress users all typically use the same Yoast SEO plugin, and typically read the same types of blogs or articles about how to do SEO that they find on Google.

So if you and 100 other businesses in your industry are all following the same SEO tips  and using the same platforms and plugins yet there is only 10 spaces at the top of Google (and at least 5 of these are usually filled up by directories like Yell.com), is it any wonder why most of these businesses aren't haven't any success?

This is not to say people don’t ever have success with SEO on their WordPress website, it's just less common than people are led to believe, so if this is your strategy or the strategy of an agency you're working with, we would advise that you ask you "what are you doing differently that is going to get my business to outrank everyone else?".

 Related Article: 'Are SEO Rankings Guaranteed?'

SEO companies will stress to you that it is essential to have lots of backlinks for your SEO to be successful.

You only have to Google "are backlinks important for SEO" and you will find lots of articles telling you how you will never rank without any and these are the key to getting ranked #1.

Whilst this can be true for larger cities or national search engine optimisation for example if you’re competing to show in the most competitive areas e.g. London, and in the most competitive industries. However, backlinks are not essential for local SEO in smaller cities, and more often than not you can rank #1 without any.

With local SEO you could be causing more unnecessary damage trying to obtain backlinks as they can be super costly (for good ones) and as the ROI is not as big in smaller cities so you will only be able to afford cheaper backlinks and cheap can put you at risk of damaging your website through acquiring dodgy and poor quality backlinks.

The average time to get SEO results is roughly around 12 months, so you would think that tying down to a 12 month contract seems right and standard practice, however, local SEO is different and results can be obtained much quicker usually less than 6 months.

The reason why it varies so much in length would be due to contributing factors such as your keywords, location and competition. 

For smaller businesses, it is unlikely that it would ever take more than 6 months to rank for SEO in your local city or town, especially if you have a business website with history already. 

Therefore, it’s not advised not to commit to 12 or in some cases 24 month contracts as results should be apparent before this point and you could be stuck in a contract and out of pocket if they aren’t able to deliver results.

The only time it would potentially take up to 12 months is if you’re a brand-new business starting completely fresh with a new domain or as we mentioned above, the goal is to rank in the largest most competitive cities or nationwide.

Most SEO reports are conducted by tools that are essentially system robots that analyse data either automatically or by hitting a button and running a search.

What isn't clear is the data reported by these is commonly incorrect, therefore it is not an accurate representation of your SEO success and do not always provide a true reflexion on your rankings.

Companies will often use these tools to automatically generate reporting data, and rightly so, putting together manual reports can take hours and hours - how do we know? We do it once a quarter for all of our SEO clients and halfway through we always question our sanity.

When you receive your details report take the results as a pinch of salt initially and use this data as a guide to where you are ranked, and where to start doing your own manual search.

For example; report comes back and says you ranked #3 for your main keyword and location i.e. Solicitor in Nottingham - this would be the first thing I search into Google* to see if that happens when i do a live search myself, just like a potential new customer would.

*When searching on Google for your own keywords remember to use incognito mode and this gives you a more accurate reflection of rankings.

Dedicate 30 minutes on a regular basis to do searches your own keywords on Google and measure these against your report, and see where your business ranks in real time.

Is local SEO right for you?