Been represented online is important in three main ways:

Be found. People must be able to find your business easily.

Accurate Data. Your opening times, location and contacts must be correct and up to date. Out of date or wrong information will adversely affect your search ranking and your company online reputation.

Active. Stimulate your visitors and the search engines by updating and adding new content to your social platforms.

Places to be to promote Search Local:

Google business is a great place to publish your location, opening times, COVID updates and what’s new. Google account holders too can add reviews.

Facebook is the most active of all the social platforms for most businesses. Again here you can add your opening, location and attract reviews. Posting at least once per week will keep your online reputation looking good. Depending on your industry you may have to post more often to keep up with the competition. Remember to use hash-tags.

Twitter is nice and simple, fast to update and quickly looks professional to represent your company well. For most sectors, it’s not really very active but I always suggest a Twitter account, keep the account active to help with the overall reputation and it helps with search too.

Directory Listings

There are about 40 recognised directories suggested to list on. These include Bing Maps, Foursquare, Manta, Brown Book and Show Me Local. Listing on all the directories can take some time initially and keep up to date and I can’t imagine you will see a huge response or uplift in traffic, but I do suggest you list on all the main recognised directories; helps with search local and overall search results. You will notice directory listings are starting to pop-up at the top of search results when searching locally, your company needs to be there.

A way to communicate with search engines to tell them which pages you want looking at.

Sitemaps are something most of our clients are not aware of. Sitemaps help search. Sitemaps are free and easy to add, they are simply a way to communicate with search engines to tell them which pages you want looking at to help make the search engine crawl (a robot clicking through your website) easy and accurate. They help produce a SERP Map too, a multi-link search engine result on Google and Bing.

A sitemap file is hidden from human visitors, but search engines like Google and Bing can see it. The sitemap helps search engines easily see all the content on your site in one place.

Why do you need a sitemap?

Without one, the only way for those bots to find all your content is by following links on your site. So, if you have any pages on your site that aren’t linked to often, or it takes a lot of links to reach a certain page, there’s a chance that Google won’t find those pages and they’ll never end up in search results.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Sitemaps are something most of our clients are not aware of. Sitemaps help search. Sitemaps are free and easy to add, they are simply a way to communicate with search engines to tell them which pages you want looking at to help make the search engine crawl (a robot clicking through your website) easy and accurate. They help produce a ”SERP Map” too, a multi-link search engine result on Google and Bing.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters (the person who looks after your website) to inform search engines about pages on websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. So a more often updated website will be more attractive to search engines.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

Using the XML Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides help for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It’s a markup language similar to HTML, but its main purpose is to organise data.

How to set up a site map

You can generate a site map from your host provider or admin panel. WordPress for example provide a site map automatically now. A site map link looks just like a website address with .xml on the end. Then submit it to a search engine.

WordPress provides a sitemap as standard now (5.5.1). If you already use an SEO tool to boost your website traffic, no action required.

Category: SEO

Search Local

We turn to our phone first to search local. Is the local chemist open? When does the pizza shop open? What sort of reputation does the local car repair garage have? – all quick searches online.