Recently, a friend and local business owner came to me troubled about his website. He had spent a ton of time and energy redesigning his website in order to try to generate more traffic. He had started a blog and was posting at least once a week. Traffic was up, but business was not.
I took a gander at his website and immediately knew what the problem was. It took me a good 5 minutes of browsing and searching his website before I found what is probably the most critical piece of information for any local business’ website. WHERE HE WAS LOCATED!
How can you expect to get more business from your website if visitors can’t even find out where your business is? The answer is simple…you can’t! Here are three tips I gave my friend that are relevant for every local business with a website.
Include Your Location in the Header and Make It BIG!
As I said before, a businesses location is probably the single most important piece of information you can include on your website. For this reason, it should be one of the first things a visitor sees when he comes to your site. If I have to go on a treasure hunt to find your address then you’re doing something wrong! Humans are impatient by nature and the longer you make them search for how to contact you to more likely they are to simply visit one of your competitor’s sites and buy their product or service.
Put the City and State in the Title Tag and Meta Tag
Search engines are becoming better and better at returning location relevant results to searchers. Putting your city and state in the title tag and meta tag help the search engines determine where you are located. It is also a great way to stand out from the competition. If your website has your city and state in the page title, someone searching for your service in that same city and state is much more likely to click on your page when it shows up on the search engine results page.
Include Your Location in the Footer of EVERY PAGE
It’s not enough to have your business’ address on the home page of your website. Not everyone comes through the front door, and it is very likely that someone lands on one of your website’s inner-pages without ever having seen the home page. If this is the case you want to make sure that they can still easily figure out where you are located. The easiest way to do this is to put your address in the footer so that it shows up on every page.
If you already had these taken care of great! If not, making these changes should take you an hour at most. Hopefully you found these tips useful. If you have any suggestions for local businesses out there trying to get found please leave them in the comments below.
