The dream for any business is a steady stream of leads who are guaranteed to be interested in their products. Search engine optimization (SEO) provides these leads. SEO, in short, is the art and science of getting you to the top of search engine results when users are looking up terms relevant to your business.
Local SEO is a type of SEO that directs local traffic to your business – searches like “restaurants near me” or “mechanics in Saanich” are great examples of local searches.
Victoria is an interesting place for SEO – unusual, in part, because there are a number of cities in the Greater Victoria Area you’ll want to target. We’ll give you advice on how to handle marketing to cities like Colwood as well as neighbourhoods in Victoria proper, among several other free, highly actionable, effective tips. Here we go!
#1: Claim Your Google My Business (GMB)
This is tip #1 because it’s the most important tip. If you get nothing else from this article, please claim your GMB. It’s easy to do (just click that link and follow the steps). For a more in-depth look, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to optimizing your GMB in Victoria.
#2: Focus on NAP Citations
We’ve done a whole guide to local citations, which you can read if you want a very in-depth look. Here it is in point form:
- NAP means name, address, phone number.
- Anytime your business NAP shows up on the web, that’s an NAP citation.
- Claim your free Yellow Pages listing, and make sure your NAP citations are accurate on sites like Yelp.
- Include your NAP on the footer of every page of your website.
In the Greater Victoria Area, it’s important to keep your NAP consistent – if you’re in Saanich, mark your address as Saanich. You get the idea!
#3: Do Keyword Research
SEO is about showing up near or at the top of results when users are looking for relevant keywords. How do you find out which keywords are relevant? Do keyword research.
There are a lot of ways you can go about this. First, brainstorm things you think people in Victoria might search for that are relevant to your business. For example, if you run a HVAC business, “heat pump victoria” might be an excellent key phrase.
You can also use keyword research tools to find good keywords and phrases – you want to find keywords that have a low difficulty, but a high number of searches every month.
#4: Look at What’s Ranking
Now that you’ve done your keyword research, search for the keywords and phrases you want to rank for. Take a look at what content comes up. You might see blog posts on a particular topic, infographics, videos, or a wide variety of other things.
Take note of what’s ranking well, and make the same type of content – but better. Search engines are great at figuring out intent – in other words, at determining what kind of content their users want to see for a given search. Don’t fight against the tide in this case.
#5: Create Quality Content
Now that you know what you want to rank for, and what kinds of content are doing well, it’s time to make your own. The easiest way of going about this is to have a blog you update a minimum of once per week – you can embed content into your blog with ease.
When you’re trying to improve your local SEO, your content needs to be both location and industry-relevant. Let’s look back to our HVAC example. If we were trying to rank for the term “heat pump victoria”, we might end up writing an article titled “Should I Get a Heat Pump in Victoria?”. You could also write an article titled “Should I Get a Furnace or a Heat Pump?” and simply make reference to Victoria’s climate.
Quality content helps you get people on your site (when they search for relevant keywords), and guarantees they’ll stay on your site for longer. These are two of the most important factors search engines will check for rank.
#6: Make Location Pages
You want to make a separate page for every location that you serve. That means a page for Saanich, a page for Colwood, and a page for any other location you deliver to or serve (if you’re in the service industry).
You can also make location pages for neighbourhoods! They’re especially useful if you actually have a number of physical locations.
#7: Get Links
You’ve got content. You’ve got the right keywords. There’s something else you can do to boost your SEO – get other websites to link to yours.
Search engines have a hard time knowing what makes for good content – they don’t experience things subjectively, after all, so good and bad are hard for them to deduce. That’s why search engines use other websites they trust to determine if they should trust your website.
You can use this authority checker to determine how much authority a website has. You’ll want to, if you’re trying to improve your local SEO, find authority websites in Victoria. Getting a link in a paper like The Times Colonist is excellent, if you can.
#8: Get Social
Posting your content on social media is a great way of spreading links and providing your followers with interesting, entertaining, and informative content. Post every day, and use analytics to determine what posting times are best and what content performs well. To excel in the domain of local SEO, join or create industry-related groups on Facebook.
#9: Speed up Your Website
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to find ways to improve your site’s speed, and make sure your site is responsive. That’s not just a great idea for Victoria SEO – it’s good for SEO in general!
If none of this makes sense to you, that’s okay – it’s quite technical. Talk to your web developer, or to us!
#10: Get Rich Results
The final step is to improve the search results you can get from Google. There are results called Rich Results, which incorporate things like images and reviews. You can test if you’re eligible for rich results with the Rich Results Test. Should you fail the test, you’ll need to add structured data using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.
Follow all of these steps, and you should see yourself near the top of search results for relevant queries. With proper Victoria SEO, you’ll get a lot of qualified leads, so be sure you have the capacity to convert those leads to sales!
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