How To Do Technical SEO For Local Businesses

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Technical SEO practices are responsible for letting the search engine spiders crawl on your website and index your content. This means letting them understand the intent and relevance of it.

The search engines consider those websites more relevant with specific technical characteristics with the most relevant content. These may include having a secured connection and a sitemap, speed optimization, device responsiveness, etc.

Today we will see various methods of doing technical SEO for your local business to ensure a higher search engine ranking of your website. And we are keeping our focus primarily on the local businesses, so these tips can very well be used by their owners.

11 Tips To Optimize Your Local Business For Technical SEO

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1. Develop An XML Sitemap

Google maps help a lot when we want to reach somewhere on time! Similarly, the XML sitemap works as a roadmap for the search engine crawlers and tells them where every page of your website is.

This guides them and provides helpful information regarding the website’s last modification, frequency of updating it, the importance of a particular page on your website, etc.

The advantages of having an XML sitemap of your website

• Reduces the possibility of missing out on the listing of some pages
• Prioritize the relevance of pages on your site
• Inform search engines about the latest updates

Tools to create an XML sitemap for your website

• Sure Oak is a free XML Sitemap generating tool having a brilliant user interface that allows a convenient user experience.
• XML-Sitemaps is one of the most convenient tools to help you create a sitemap without affecting your site's speed.
• Inspyder Sitemap Creator 5 creates the XML sitemap of your website and informs you by sending it to your registered email address.

Here’s a screenshot of XML-Sitemaps:

2. Register Your Site With Google Search Console

Once you have developed the website and done all the work to improve the SEO efforts, it is expected to result in a higher position. And you don't want to miss out on it!

By registering your website with Google Search Console, you allow the search engines to crawl every site’s page without missing them. It is submitting your website to search engines for better indexing.

Advantages of registering your website with Google Search Console

• Easy and better crawling and indexing
• Monitoring the overall performance of the site
• Boosts organic search traffic

Tools To Register Your Website With Google Search Console

• Bing Webmaster Tools You can use this tool to get your website indexed and crawled when uploaded or updated.
• Google Search Central is an extension of Google that lets you submit your website's URL multiple times to get it crawled and indexed.
• Rankwatch is a tool that allows you to check the index status of your website to analyze whether or not it needs recrawling.

Here’s a screenshot of Google Search Central’s website crawl results:

3. Remove Or Fix Any Broken Links

A broken link or two will ruin the user experience and confuse Google bots to think that this is the end of your site and there is nothing more left to crawl and index.

Imagine clicking on a link with high expectations of finding just what you have been looking for, and suddenly a '404 page not found' message pops up. How disappointing will that be! This happens when your site has a broken link.

The Advantages Of Not Having Any Broken Links On Your Website

• Impact other content of your website positively
• Brings the overall ranking up
• Provides a good user experience

Tools to identify broken links

• Xenu's Link Sleuth can be downloaded to find broken links. And not just that, it also supports many SEO practices aimed at improving the overall ranking of the website.
• Ahrefs Broken Link Checker provides a detailed overview of all the backlinks data. It also filters and categorizes them.
• Dead Link Checker is a tool that prepares the report for your link data and emails it to you. You can do this for multiple sites regularly.

Here’s a screenshot of Dead Link Checker:

4. Enable AMPs For Better Mobile Accessibility

AMP is that version of a web page that performs well when accessed on a mobile phone. It makes the page contents so light that it loads unbelievably fast.

All the work is done in the background. The look and feel of these pages are not impacted when their AMP versions are created.

The Advantages Of Enabling AMP Versions Of Your Website Pages

• More people reading and sharing your content
• Gets preference because of the loading time
• Increases the number of backlinks of your content

Tools to create AMP versions of web pages

• AMP.dev is a tool that gives you options to create the AMP versions of your web pages through a 'user-first format' for a better user experience.
• Mobirize AMP is a website builder that already has AMP plugins. It creates the AMP version of every page developed on it.
• Bluehost is a website-hosting site that allows you to develop brilliant websites and gives options to create the AMP versions of these pages.

Here’s a screenshot of AMP.dev providing the steps to create an AMP page:

5. Consider Having A Structured Data Markup

When it comes to having a good page ranking on the search engine result pages, then having a Structured Data Markup always helps. It lets search engines better understand the intent and relevance of a website's particular page by presenting everything organized.

You can do this through schema markups. It structures all the data related to people, places, organizations, local businesses, reviews, etc.

The Advantages Of Having A Structured Data Markup For Your Website

• Supports a convenient onsite search
• Creates a positive impact on the content relevance
• Will get your site indexed faster

Tools to create Structured Data Markups for your website

• Merkle's Schema Markup Generator is a tool that has multiple markups to choose from, and once done, it copies it in just one click.
• Schema Markup Validator is a tool that develops structured data markups or schema markups and is very convenient. It also maintains and promotes these schemas.
• Schema App Highlighter marks the pages with the same layouts and optimizes them to get better results. It also provides customization with advanced strategies.

Here’s a screenshot of Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator:

Read: How to Use Schema Markup Values on Local SEO?

6. Incorporate Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)

Web security is vital these days, especially when all the data and information is on the web. Google also understands this, thus making it compulsory for all the websites to have a secured connection.

SSL creates a link between the browser and server to ensure security. This can be identified by the websites starting with 'HTTPS://' rather than 'HTTP://.' The secured sites are given preference for apparent reasons.

The Advantages Of Having A Secure Sockets Layer For Your Website

• Reduces the chances of cyber attacks
• Keeps your visitors' data safe
• Improves your site's credibility significantly

Some Website Hosts To Develop A Secure Website For Your Users

• WordPress is a website host having a secure sockets layer (SSL). So every website that is built on WordPress will be secured.
• Wix is also a website developer that provides your website with an SSL certificate to ensure security. If not, it can always be enabled later.
• Squarespace hosts websites, portfolios, and even online stores. It provides security with SSLs to every domain that is correctly added.

You can use this tool to check if your website has SSL:

7. Specify Preferred Domain Name

A domain name is a text that the user searches to land on any website. 'xyz.com' is an example of a domain name. It becomes essential for any website owner to specify their domain name clearly to avoid any confusion.

When you have multiple domain names, the visitor may land on the right website, but not the search engines when it comes to the ranking.

The Advantages Of Specifying The Domain Names For Your Website

• Eliminates duplicity that confuses search engines
• Keeps the content unique, thus improving the relevance
• Avoid indexing issues and promotes higher ranking

Tools to create and register domain names for your website

• Domainr allows you to explore and select the perfect and most appropriate domain name for your local business to be used for a lifetime.
• Dot-O-Mator is a tool that lets you select the perfect domain name for your website. It also provides information about the ones that are already registered.
• Domize lets you check the availability of your preferred domain names across the web. It also has a widget that you can install on your website as an add-on for your visitors.

Here’s a screenshot of Domainr:

8. Remove Or Change Any Duplicate Content

One of the reasons for having duplicate content on your website is copying it from somewhere else. But it may also result from having multiple versions of your website.

It is important to let Google or search engines crawl only one best version of your website. This ensures that it finds the maximum relevance there, thus improving the ranking on search engine result pages.

The advantages of not having duplicate content on your website

• Keeps the search engines focused
• Defining the relevance of content clearly
• Gives a good impression to the visitors

Tools to check duplicity of content in your website for local business

• Grammarly is a tool that checks the plagiarism or duplicity in your text and identifies any writing issues based on the set goals and intent.
• Copyscape has its sole focus on checking any duplicate content on your website that may lead you into trouble.
• Duplichecker is a free tool that checks for plagiarized content throughout the website and also provides paraphrasing options to make it easier for you to remove plagiarism.

Here’s another effective tool to check for duplicate content in your website:

Read: Helpful Tools to Do Content Marketing

9. Optimize Speed Of Your Website

When your website does not load fast, it becomes inconvenient for users. But at the same time, more damage is done when the search engines find it difficult to crawl and index your content.

Data shows that 40% of people expect any website to load within 3 seconds, or they will move to another one. This also increases your bounce rates.

The advantages of optimizing the speed of your website

• Reduces the bounce rates
• No risks of losing potential customers
• Increases the traffic and conversions

Tools to identify and fix the speed optimization issues of your website

• Google Page Speed Insights is a brilliant tool that improves the website speed and provides insights to enhance the overall user experience and performance.
• GTMetrix allows you to analyze the performance of your website based majorly on the speed in different geographical regions to get better insights.
• Pingdom provides the analysis and the root cause of the problem impacting your website's speed. It also gives data regarding real-time user monitoring.

Here’s a screenshot of Google Page Speed Insights showing how fast a website loads on mobile devices:

Read: How Site Speed Impacts Your Local Businesses?

10. Ensure Mobile Compatibility

Google has now started to give due importance to website's mobile pages while ranking them. And why not! Today the maximum number of visitors are accessing your website from their mobiles.

Google has made sure that the responsiveness of a site will be considered one of the top factors that will impact its ranking.

The Advantages Of Having A Responsive Site For Your Local Business

• Results in brilliant user experience
• Indirectly brings up the conversion rates
• Give you an edge over the competition

Tools To Ensure Mobile-Friendliness Of Your Website

• Gomez is a tool that ranks your website's mobile compatibility on a scale of 1 to 5. After identifying the issues (if any,) it also provides the solutions.
• Mobi Ready allows you to check the effectiveness and functionality of your website on a mobile phone that is based on general industry standards.
• Browserstack provides the preview to tell you how your website will look when accessed on various devices. This gives you an idea of how practical it is according to the design.

Here’s a screenshot of Mobile Ready’s mobile phone test results:

11. Optimize Images With The Correct Format

Visuals create a significant impact on the visitors. Many websites focus their attention on images, videos, and other graphics.

It becomes vital for the websites to optimize their images and make them as light as possible, technically. It is so because, otherwise, it will take time to load, and believe me, nobody will wait for them to load completely.

The Advantages Of Using Correct Image Formats

• Positively impacts your website's speed
• Promotes smooth functioning of many SEO practices
• Supports your website's overall performance

Tools To Identify And Optimize Images For A Better Website's Performance

• WP Smush is a WordPress plugin used to resize and optimize images for optimum website performance and user experience.
• Optimizilla is used to compress images, and it can work on 20 images at a time. It also has a preview feature allowing you to decide the image quality.
• Kraken is an image optimizer that goes a step ahead and provides advanced customization options. It also preserves the images' metadata.

Here’s a screenshot of Optimizilla compressing an image:

Key Takeaways To Do Technical SEO For Local Businesses

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Search Engine Optimization or SEO ensures the visibility and ranking of your website on search engines. And technical SEO is one of the ways of doing it. So here are the key takeaways about doing technical SEO for local businesses.

Read: Common Technical SEO Issues And Fixes for Your Website

• Develop an XML sitemap to ensure the listing and prioritization of the web pages of your website.
• Register with Google search console for better and error-free crawling and website indexing.
• Remove broken links to preserve the overall content of your website and provide a great user experience.
• Enable AMP versions of your web pages to reduce the mobile loading time and increase the backlinks.
• Have structured data markup for a convenient onsite search and faster website indexing.
• Provide SSL for your website to improve its credibility and gain some brownie points in Google ranking preference.
• Select a fixed domain name to avoid duplicity and indexing issues, thus promoting higher ranks.
• Remove duplicate content to provide relevance and avoid confusion for the search engines while crawling.
• Ensure speed optimization of your website for better SERP ranking, eventually resulting in conversions.
• Ensure mobile compatibility to get an edge above your competitors and increase the CTR and overall ranking.
• Optimize images to support your website's performance and improve the results of your SEO practices.