Local Business SEO

I'm a dedicated newbie in this field and was interested in helping out my father that runs an auto repair garage through optimizing his Wix.com website and also working on his Social media pages.

So far that I've got done was:

Setup the website that is quite visually pleasing and currently building more content for it.
Gain over 350 facebook likes in the past year
built the google business page
got the Instagram to around 100 followers

being a newbie in this I would be interested in some articles to start out in this and how to try to rank his website number one in the local area that seems quite competitive.

I would appreciate any help as I really wanna learn and give back to my parents for what they did for me and me being abroad finishing my degree abroad wanted to still assist them through this and I'm planning to launch my own business after finishing my degree and wanted to gain the knowledge.

Thanks !

Dump the WIX website. You gotta have your own site and domain. If you don't own your site you have nothing, it's the 2nd most valuable asset you have besides your business location.

I would not put too much time in social media site for a local business. The return on invest is terrible. The platforms have complete control of the customers you want to reach and they intentionally lessen your ability to reach those people to motivate you to pay for ads.

Your website and your google business listing should be your primary focus because those are the primary ways your will reach your customers.

randybishop said:

Dump the WIX website. You gotta have your own site and domain. If you don't own your site you have nothing, it's the 2nd most valuable asset you have besides your business location.

I would not put too much time in social media site for a local business. The return on invest is terrible. The platforms have complete control of the customers you want to reach and they intentionally lessen your ability to reach those people to motivate you to pay for ads.

Your website and your google business listing should be your primary focus because those are the primary ways your will reach your customers.

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Hey, Thanks for the heads up and I have already moved away from WIX to WordPress and been working on a Website for my actual main business back home and been researching to carry out some Local SEO for my small Computer repair business.

One question though what do you mean exactly by "your Google business listing should be your primary focus" any hints of what I can actually do or link me to some starting point to build it up as I could not work out how you actually grow your Google Business.

Thanks in advance.

Wix is terrible for loading speed.

Make sure your website loads fast on web and mobile (use GTmetrix, pingtool, google dev)

Facebook likes and recommendations is what you want to focus on when it comes to social media for local SEO.

Use local keywords as much as you can, try to get backlinks from local media, perhaps your local news. Get creative writing something about your industry.

Have a Google My Business page set up properly, and with frequent updates (offers, articles, photos)

Have a budget for Adwords + SEO.

What industry/business are you in?

Eid0zz said:

Wix is terrible for loading speed.

Make sure your website loads fast on web and mobile (use GTmetrix, pingtool, google dev)

Facebook likes and recommendations is what you want to focus on when it comes to social media for local SEO.

Use local keywords as much as you can, try to get backlinks from local media, perhaps your local news. Get creative writing something about your industry.

Have a Google My Business page set up properly, and with frequent updates (offers, articles, photos)

Have a budget for Adwords + SEO.

What industry/business are you in?

Click to expand...

My Father is in the Auto Repair business and I will soon be beginning my journey in the Computer repair business with my business partner.

For Local biz there are 3 most important things (we are talking for starting out):
1. Website - onsite SEO - quality structure, good speed, good keyword research (try to target long tail keywords). Wordpress is a good choice.
2. Google My Business - will bring you a lot of leads. Now you need to check your competition and use the same category, more images then they have (all images should be optimized in size and quality and with keywords in titles - don't stuff them), fully complete profile.
3. At least 1 social media profile - active (at least 1-2 posts per day). And don't write like 90% people do - "Here is our new car part! Call us today"... Be informative, help people solve some problems without asking for leads. You can ask but do in timely manners.

Now on some Local SEO work:

You need citations - with consistent NAP (name address phone number) that will match your Google my business listing. More the better but they need to be accurate.
You need blog posts targeting keywords and supporting service pages.
You need map embeds (that is a little harder) but we always do some web 2.0 for local clients.
Link building can be hard but be 100% sure your onsite SEO is ok, your GMB is ok and social is ready. For link building you will have to do outreach - maybe auto blogs, maybe online auto magazines, maybe online auto publications. To be able to secure that you really need a high-quality article. Be prepared that they can ask $ for publishing or you can try to find someone to post it for free (just because the article is ultra good).

For SEO use more than 1 social network so you can link to your website and pages.

My 2 cents.

Agreed with some of what others said. Focus on your GoogleMyBusiness listing because that's where a lot of the leads come from. Obviously your website needs to be optimized, the basics are Title Tags, H1's, H2's, and keywords in the content. I like to buid links to my GMB profile which has given me some success as well. Local link building in my experience is better than getting powerful non-local sites.