Irvine businesses which put a lot of emphasis on local commerce face challenges that are distinct from enormous national brands. That means that some of their SEO techniques must by necessity look a lot different than what the Amazon website is doing, or Home Depot, or Target.
Auditing local sites to create a strong SEO foundation is something that your company needs to know how to do. It’s either that or you need to bring in an agency for the same reason. One way or another it has to get done, because if you neglect local SEO, then you’re going to miss out on business that instead will go to larger companies that are more prominently placed due to their visibility and ad budgets.
In this article, we’re going to look at what you can do from an SEO standpoint to make sure that your Irvine business gets the recognition that it deserves.
The Off-Page Audit
The off-page SEO audit for a local business is probably the aspect of optimization that is most neglected, so it’s worth mentioning first. Off-site signals help build authority for your brand, and you have more control over them than you might think.
NAP Information
NAP, also known as name, address, and phone number, is one place where you’ll want to look for consistency as it relates to your business across all of the web. It’s easy for there to be some misinformation out there if you get the phone number changed or your business moves physical locations at some juncture.
You need there to be no uncertainty about where your company is physically located because this allows the search engines to rank your business more easily. These signals also allow for better placement on maps. You need that to be accurate if you’re the subject of a local search, which is how many small businesses get the majority of their foot traffic.
Citations
When it comes to citations for your Irvine business, you can take advantage of services like Moz Local, BrightLocal, Whitespark, and Yext. If you don’t use them, then the process of making sure all your business citations are accurate is too time-consuming.
By using these services, you stand a better chance of the changes you’re making taking hold faster. The search engine crawlers will start reporting back accurate citations to Google and Bing in less time, which will give you more authority.
On-Page Optimization
As far as on-page SEO for your Irvine small business, you should probably start with correcting any potential server issues. You need to be sure that your site’s hosting platform is reliable and that you know as much about it as you can. Don’t just randomly choose a hosting platform. Pick one that has features that make you feel comfortable and that you can master with as little difficulty as possible. Don’t be afraid of making a change if you’re encountering consistent problems with the server.
GSC
GSC, or Google Search Console, is an excellent barometer for how your site is performing. GSC acts as a line of communication with Google. If GSC is having all kinds of problems with your site, then it is a foregone conclusion that the search engine is not going to award you a high rank.
See how Google is crawling your site by looking at the highly detailed analytics reports that are available to you now. You can quantify any SEO theory that you have by looking at the console, so you no longer have to guess what kind of engagement you’re getting, or not getting. It’s all right there for you to see and interpret.
Look to see what errors the crawl bot has picked up, and work to fix them. If you do not have the expertise to do so yourself, bring in an SEO agency to do it. You can’t just ignore problems on your site, or your online visibility is going to suffer, and the better-maintained websites will dominate you.
Markup Implementation
Proper markup implementation is also vital for your Irvine business website. This is the code that gives you the opportunity to provide the search engines with more detail about what it is that they are crawling.
If you improve your markup implementation, then you can be sure that the crawlers are making no mistakes about the content on your pages. They’ll be able to see where each of your products is located, and customers will therefore be able to find them as well.
You want to look at how the code is being used on your site. There are three questions you should ask. What page contains the location information? What sort of local markup is being used? And is there any way to improve and make additions to the data that is being delivered?
Take some time to focus on this part of the site. The better job you do, the more explicit Google can be about what is located on each one of your pages. Keep in mind when it comes to this area that your strategy is going to differ slightly if you are a single-location business or whether you have multiple locations.
This is also where all of the keyword research that you’ve done will come in handy. Using those keywords as part of your markup will do even more to help Google with page intent identification.
Local audits are something that every business in Irvine must regularly do. It’s this sort of painstaking SEO that is going to allow you to emerge from mediocrity to take a stand alongside the larger, better-recognized companies.
Don’t be intimidated by them because they’re bigger than you. They all had to start somewhere, and efficient optimization is how you compete with them. Just because you begin with a concentration on local commerce does not mean you have to remain in that mindset. If you want to expand, you can do it, but that means you can’t neglect critical aspects of your SEO.