The 5 Stages to Ranking: Your Local Business Journey

Not too long ago, local business marketing was specific to building relationships with your walk-in customers, putting adverts in local newspapers and making sure your customer care led to word-of-mouth recommendations. Whilst, these are still very important for your local business, you need to ask yourself a simple question about today’s market:

Are you making your website work as hard as your reputation?

If it isn’t or you’re simply not sure, read on to find how you can start making up on the difference today!

The Journey from Invisible to Visible

Just like building a strong local reputation, getting found online requires work to get it going and it won’t happen overnight, but there are steps you can take to help build your reputation (or? what’s known as Website Authority):

1. Getting Your Website Noticed

• Search engines need to know you exist. Imagine opening up a shop on your local high street, but you keep the door locked and the windows boarded-up. Obviously, no-one is going to pay any attention, it’s just another eyesore on the street. You need to give search engines (like Google) the opportunity to discover your shop. So, take the boards down and give the key to Google (it’ll come as no shock that Click Lion can help you with this, if you’re unsure what to do)
• Like locals knowing your shop location, so too does search, and making sure all aspects of Google Business Profile are in order, and tally with your website is greatly important
• Directory listings matter. Not only Google Business Profile, but local listings such as Yell can help boost your website visibility and authority
• Online reviews for your business help visibility

2. First Impressions of Your Online Business

• You’ve followed the steps and Google visits your website, it’s called crawling
• Crawling allows search engines to check out your services, and review your content. It’s like a potential customer walking past

3. Understanding Your Business

• Search engines read your pages. They try to understand your content, decide what relevance it has for customers
• This is where Google Business Profile comes in useful for search engines to map your location
• This ‘rendering’ is similar to customer wandering up to the window of your store and peering in to get a handle on what you offer

4. Is Your Website Ready to Recommend

• Search engines index your content and store your information
• If your website is accessible for search engines and customers, then it’s good to go and you can unlock your shop door

5. Website is Ranking and Business is Ready to Boom

• Your website appears in search results, and though there’s probably plenty of work to do to climb those rankings and appear on page one, your site can gain impressions and clicks on the way to attracting new customers.

A Hypothetical Example: Local Fitness Practice

A Manchester personal trainers gym wasn't appearing for "personal trainer near me" because:

• Google couldn't find their booking page
• Service pages were hidden
• Contact details weren't clear, like not having a mobile number listed on the website

Here’s a Quick Website Health Check

1. Google your business name
2. Check your website out on mobile to make sure it, at least, looks OK
3. Does your website take a long time to load?
4. Review contact details

Coming Tomorrow

Learn how to structure your website for success.

FAQ

How long until my Website is visible?

It’s like building your reputation, it won’t happen overnight. If you do it right it can take a few weeks, but if you don’t understand what you’re doing it can take a great deal longer. Click Lion will happily talk to you about your needs and lay out a strategy before charging you a thing.

What affects visibility most?

Clear information and easy navigation through quality site links, including headers and footers.

Can I improve my Website by myself?

Of course you can, that’s what I’m trying to teach you in this series, but it is time consuming and requires regular attention.

Need Help Making Your Website Work Harder?

Let Click Lion Technical SEO make your online presence match your stellar reputation.

Book Your Free Website Review

#LocalBusiness #OnlinePresence #BusinessGrowth