How to Get 1st Page Google Rankings for a Local Company?

[nanton]

Hi guys,

I'm owning a London removal company - Mega Removals and wants to achieve 1st page rankings on Google UK for keywords like: "removals London", "removal company London", "house removals London" but have no success so far. I need professional advice on how to do it. Should I hire an SEO or should focus on content? I will be very grateful for your help.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

This is a great challenge you have here because it's 100% achievable. These are some things to consider- it's not exhaustive by any means.

1. Set up your google my business profile and get it all optimised with the right categories & seed the Q&A part and offers with a good introductory offer and some frequently asked questions

2. Watch this: https://moz.com/blog/local-businesses-need-websites

3. Seriously consider changing the name of your company to London Removals - as this will really really help things.

4. Start collecting google reviews (not from the same office as they won't show up)

5. Add Schema markup (local business) in the datahighlighter

6. Set up all your keywords and content inside Moz or your favourite SEO tool and start watching the rankings

7. Optimise your homepage with London removals in the name of business, permalink, first paragraph, one of the H1's, meta description and image Alt.

8. Start writing content based on the main local keyword topics.  Don't focus on keywords but on one topic for each article.  Think about creating the best article you can that exhaustively covers that topic and make it 10X better than the current one on google.

9. Speak to your customers and find out what information they want to know and write about it

10. Set aside two hours a day learning from Youtube and Moz about SEO strategies and possibly speak to or follow Joy Hawkins, she's the queen of local search (sorry other queens and princesses of local) I learned local SEO in about 8 months this way and was able to rank locally for everything in Liverpool.  London is different.  Perhaps you should focus on a London Borough to make it easier.  So call the business Removals North West London or Removals South London.  There are enough people in one Borough to give you plenty of customers and make the job of SEO a little easier.  Remember that the most important signal is LOCATION!.  So you'll do much better being mega removals Westminster or Mega removals Southwark etc.  I'd say the volumes are easy enough (about 500/month for removals north London) Then once the business grows you can buy another unit in another postcode and rinse and repeat.

That should give you plenty to be going on with. Good luck!

[MiriamEllis]

Dear Nanton,

Ed has given you an excellent list. I will add that if you want to tackle this in the most organized possible fashion, look at the results of the Local Search Ranking Factors 2018  survey of local SEO experts. Create a strategy based on the factors which experts are saying have the most impact on both organic and local rankings + your own knowledge of your unique market. Be as intentional as possible in your efforts and be sure you have analytics in place to measure the outcomes of specific campaigns. Hope this helps!

[Libra_Photographic]

Superb answer Ed!

[JohnSammon]

Hey Miriam,

I want to commend you and the staff on this research! Super helpful!!

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Thanks all - and everyone listen to Miriam, she is another local search power hitter.  While I'm here I forgot to mention local citations.  I outsourced my citations to a guy actually on this forum.  I won't mention the business because I don't want to come across like I'm spamming the forum but you might be able to figure out who it is.  He is a lovely Russian guy who has a large citations business and their audit really helped me save a bunch of time and they got all our citations out and perfect in a week or so.  That's one less thing to do and something that for a few hundred you can safely outsource if you're short on time.

I am a firm believer that life's too short for citations. And I'm bad at making typos so it's a dangerous game for me to be in!

[MiriamEllis]

Thank you for the kind comment, John! All credit goes to Darren Shaw who organizes this massive survey. It's such a big job and he did an especially great job this year to make it easier for the respondents to take the survey.