™Entreprises locales
How local businesses can improve their digital presence
Most local businesses do not have a visibility problem. They have a clarity problem and a response problem.
Par Tomryn ·
Cet article n'est disponible qu'en anglais pour le moment.
When a local business asks for help being found online, the first thing worth checking is what happens to the people who already find them. Very often enquiries are arriving and going unanswered for two days, or the site does not say which areas are served, or the phone number is out of date in one of three places.
Fixing that is cheaper than any campaign and produces a faster result.
The order that usually works
- Make the basics correct everywhere: name, address, phone, hours, service area. Inconsistencies do real damage.
- Say plainly what you do and do not do, and where you travel to.
- Give people more than one way to make contact, some will never use a form, others will never phone.
- Answer enquiries faster. Response time beats almost every other improvement available.
- Then, and only then, worry about being more visible.
What a local business website needs
- A clear statement of the services offered, in the words customers use.
- The service area, listed explicitly rather than implied.
- Some indication of price range or how pricing works, even approximate.
- Real photographs of real work.
- A way to get in touch that works well on a phone.
- Enough about the process that a first-time customer knows what to expect.
An honest note about rankings
Nobody can guarantee a search ranking. Search engines decide what to show, and they change how they decide. What can be done is to make your site accurate, clear and genuinely useful about what you offer, which is also what tends to perform well over time.
SEO4i, a product developed by Tomryn, exists to help with the analysis side of this, showing what a site currently communicates and where the gaps are. It does not promise rankings either.