The purpose of generating website content is to supply resources for Google Searches. You want your content to align with the intent of those who use search engines to find websites like yours. When users search, they typically search with an intent that falls in one of three categories:
Navigational
Informational
Transactional
The first of these, navigational, typically centers around the need to geographically identify a business, brand or other entity, often nearby. Searches like “Find a Coffee Shop near me,” or “Omaha hardware store” serve to drive traffic
Of course, there’s no need to explain why businesses should want to show up in the rankings when navigational searches occur in their industry. The fact is when navigational searches do occur, it’s typically because people are at least nearly ready to interact with the kind of business they’re looking for. But how do you do that? There are actually a few ways to build a strategy to show up for your industry in navigational searches. These are three that offer powerful access to local SEO.:
- Schema Markup: Schema or structured data is a special language search algorithms can understand that is typically not often visible to the naked eye. This language often gives search engines information about the website that help them to index it accurately. With schema markup, you are able to identify the business industry, phone and physical address for your brand. It’s that physical address that helps Google to rank your site positively for local SEO. There are many free schema generators online to help craft the kind of code you need to add schema markup. And with that schema markup, you generally get priority for searches near your businesses, showing up in the search index for people that are geographically near your business.
- Location-Based Landing Pages: When people search for businesses in a given city, they typically want a solution. They want to engage with that business in some way. But if your business operates in many cities, its quite difficult for your website to rank outside of its main address (the one used for the website’s home and contact pages). Google uses your published address to rank the main URL in the city in which the business is based. To rank in other cities, cities with satellite offices landing pages for those specific cities can be the next best thing. Simply optimize the page with a location based URL, and create focused, useful content relative that location. Once it ranks it becomes a portal to your website in that city for which it ranks.
- Google Map: Adding a Google map is the simplest and easiest way to help your site to rank for a given navigational search. Google algorithms recognize Google maps. Embedding a Google map of your business, then, will often help your website to rank in that locale.
If you would like to work with Proctor Digital strategists to help develop a powerful SEO strategy to build targeted website traffic for your site and grow your brand, call us at 773.664.5819. We’d love to help!