™Local business
Website optimization for local businesses
Most local business websites lose people for one of four reasons, and all four are fixable without a rebuild.
By Tomryn ·
Optimisation has come to mean search tactics, but for a local business the useful version is simpler: making the site fast, readable on a phone, clear about what is offered, and easy to act on.
Speed
The single most common cause of a slow local business site is uncompressed photographs, a gallery of camera-original images can be twenty times larger than it needs to be. Resizing and compressing them is usually the highest-value hour anyone spends on the site.
Mobile
Most local searches happen on a phone, frequently outdoors and on a poor connection. Tap targets that are too small, phone numbers that are not tappable, and forms with a dozen fields all cost enquiries. Test the site on an actual phone, not a narrow browser window.
Clarity
- What you do, in the first screen, in plain words.
- Where you work, stated as places rather than a radius.
- What happens next if someone contacts you.
- Who you are, a photograph of the actual team outperforms stock imagery.
Contact paths
Offer a tappable phone number, a short form, and one messaging option if you monitor it. Long forms are the most common self-inflicted wound: each additional required field reduces the number of people who finish it, and most of those fields are not needed to start a conversation.
What to skip
Automatic sliders, background video, pop-ups on arrival, and long pages of keyword-stuffed text about a town. They slow the site down and none of them help a customer decide to call you.