Google is dominating every type of business that has a brick-and-mortar appearance but wants to build their digital presence in Geelong or Melbourne. How? The search engine algorithms contain ranking factors that only favours businesses valuing local searchers.
People who are finding services or products in close proximity to their current location are increasing day by day. And for this case, optimising your website for “near me” searches is indeed a solution to impress both the search engine and the target audience.
If your business has a physical location in Geelong or Melbourne, paying attention to local SEO efforts is the key to reaching customers at the right moment. Whether you are handling it yourself or considering a professional SEO and web design agency in Melbourne, this blog uncovers various ways to use effective “near me” strategies.
1. Create a Google My Business Profile
A Google My Business (GMB) is a business listing tool on Google. It allows every kind of business to make and optimise their business profile. You can add all your business information, ranging from full address, contact details, website, services, to operating hours, landmarks, reviews, ratings, and other additional information.
Creating a business profile on Google is not enough, though. You have to optimise the listing in following ways:
- Complete details in every section.
- Use high-quality photos and videos to enhance your business visibility.
- Use geo-specific keywords with “near me” phrases in each of the alternate text, title tags, and descriptions in multimedia.
- Include your business in the right category. If you want, you can even look for SEO services in Geelong.
- Ensure your business information is accurate, up-to-date, and comprehensive.
Remember, you are competing with hundreds of Google’s business listings in your specific location as well. To think in a clear direction, it is important to encourage positive reviews from your customers. More positive but honest reviews get your business higher rating and a chance to appear on top near me searches.
2. Update Social Media Profiles
Social media is still the most overlooked medium in local SEO strategy. Despite many benefits of creating a social media presence, you end up making a social media profile and never touch it afterwards.
As a business owner, it is certainly important to optimise your social media, be it on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or others. A web design agency in Melbourne offering social media marketing can be of great help.
However, when publishing posts or blogs on Instagram, place location-specific keywords in the captions, or use near me tags on facebook. All these efforts make your business shine bright and prominent in the search engine result pages. Social media links do well on business listings and attract traffic to your social media pages as well.
3. Add Schema Markup
Schema Markup is another great strategy to attract local leads. Local visitors in Melbourne or Geelong more often look for additional information. But the relevance of using structured data has to be given to search engines. That is because Google values content that provides a little extra information that is true and correct before indexing it.
You can hire SEO services in Geelong to add schema markup when optimising your website locally. But if you are marking specific content of your web pages as schema data, helping Google to understand the context is the need. This makes it easier to get your business featured in local snippets.
Understanding its process is easy as well.
- You need to sign in to Google’s Schema generator tool that lets you add the specific data.
- Place the URL of the web page.
- Tag items that you want to markup.
- Preview and create HTML.
- Source the code to CMS or download the file to let it work automatically.
4. On-page and Off-Page Optimisation
Ultimately, On-page and Off-page website optimisation are also a driving force for ranking your site on near me searches. Talking about both types of SEO, a web design agency in Melbourne offering SEO services can help. The experts look after optimising URLS, title, header tags, image alt text, footer, and overall content with localised keywords and near me tags.
In addition, the professionals also consider building local links that directly link your website to popular blogs and mediums. Consider adding location-specific pages to your website if you are spanning multiple locations for better rankings. This is again an effective and popular link-building process to earn backlinks while also targeting your local customers.
Final Words
We hope you found this blog useful. Ultimately, optimising your website for near me searches through various strategies like GMB profile, social media, schema markup, and On-page and Off-page SEO optimisation is the key. If you need, you can hire a professional agency offering SEO services in Geelong or Melbourne.
