The internet is an awfully big place, with the number of websites running into the 1 with a lot of zero's behind it, you are thinking how on earth does anyone find me and my Preston based business!

Well here's the thing, this was in many respects anticipated, so lets go through a few things that will help you in your Preston business, why did I choose Preston, well it is my closest city and there are lots of developers, content creators and seo types all trying to push rank on everyone else, so lets start at the beginning, this is going to be short and sweet, if you need more info, give me a shout out!

If you are a business in Preston looking at a website at the moment, save yourself some time and money and get yourself a content management system, if you intend to do some of the work yourself have a look at Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, you may well ask why. Well as an out of the box website that is open source they all meet current web standards, are mobile friendly and the url routers that are built into the platforms do what they are supposed to and the search engines love them.

The search engines are not mind readers, they need to understand what it is that you do, so here is where content comes in. Write clear, precise and engaging content that your target market with love and then do it again and again and again building up a repository of information that your readers and the search engines will love.

Without doubt the answer here is an unequivocal YES! Whilst Google Plus is still so beneficial, get your Google plus page up and your business registered and authenticated, then facebook, then twitter and then look at some of the others deciding what you feel will work, if you are not sure check on what your competitors are doing. Social media is not a once off "thing" that you do, search out possible engagement zones or areas with other Preston business's and then spread the word.

Also add socialize buttons to your content, lf other people think your content is great, let them "Share" the good news.

 

Your local Preston business is more than likely known by many of your physical clients, however the only way search engines will know that your business is where you say it is in Preston, is if you tell it. There is a specific schema called rich snippet data, Json or microdata  that tells the search engine that your business is a Local Business in Preston by adding suitably formatted code to your pages or preferably the footer of your site. As many people search in question format i.e. tyres+Preston or Tyre replacement in Preston, it The rich snippet data helps the search engines to understand what you do and where you are located. There is a tool to check this in Google console (Old Google websmaster) toolset.

One of the most important facet of your website seo, is this. If you think your website is great, what do others think? If they do, they may well link to your site, effectively giving you what is termed a "Back link". Now this is good, what is not good is when you have the opportunity to add many back links by what is commonly called "Link Farming", back in 2011, JC Penny, the large American department store was found to have so many back links and they were coming up in the search results for so many keywords or phrases, one of the newspapers ran an article on what they had found, JC Penny had been found to have been link farming, well, the search engines sat up and paid attention to this and not long after that, JC Penny all but disappeared from the rankings.

So when you look at this element of your "Off site SEO", play nicely and don't abuse it, or it could come back to bite you.

 

If you are just starting out, or have been running for a while and are still stuck in the area of "Why can't people find me on Google", give us a call.