SEO FAQs With A Cumbria Twist

There are huge numbers of SMEs and microbusinesses which operate in a fairly small area, be that a town or a particular corner of Cumbria or the Borders. Local SEO is tuning the business’ website content in just to searches looking for their service or products in that small area.

Effectively you are signalling to Google and the other search engines that you are the business to look for when someone searches for crime scene cleaners near Carlisle for example. One of our clients has a strong presence for just this specialism in Cumbria and the Borders. His content is explicit about the areas he serves with this highly specialised cleaning discipline. This is also reflected in the text used in the page’s title tag and meta description.

These two entities are the same. Keywords are the phrases that people type in to search engine software or speak into voice assistants. Sometimes they are obvious and used regularly. The phrase “plastic surgery” is used at least 22,200 and “mole removal” is typed in perhaps 18,100 times per month in Google’s UK database. However, these are quite hard to rank on the top of the first page for, because everybody is trying to show up for them. Both have a Keyword Difficulty rating of over 75/100.

However, a local variation of the keywords such as “mole removal Carlisle” is only searched for 50 times a month. This is a keyword that is useful for a local clinic to show up for because it is much more likely that someone will call them if the clinic ranks for it.

When SEO professionals and search marketers talk to business owners about “ranking”, they are talking about the position of the business’ website in search results. Most businesses are familiar with the notion that they want to be at number 1 in the results. Here’s part of a typical search result page for “LPA guidance Cumbria”.

This isn’t as frequently used a phrase as some and it refers to a general area. This produces a fairly simple SERP with no ads, mostly simple organic listings and  a “People Also Ask” box.

For most businesses it’s important to “rank” on the first page of the search results in order to attract some of the clicks to your website. Ideally, your business will rank for many search terms rather than blindly trying to focus on just one single high volume phrase.

The local pack is the set of 3 (usually) results with a map listing which mostly appears at the top of a SERP where local intent is clear.

Here – the searcher wants teeth whitening… and they want it in Carlisle. So Google serves up this map result with locations that offer this and usually picks the three nearest to the searcher, particularly if the search is done on a phone.

Notice also that Google has been forced to display links to other search providers which is another reason for getting local citations up to date. At the bottom of the Local Pack the arrowed link takes you through to an extended set of Google Maps results known as the Local Finder. Below that, come one normal organic search link and then a People Also Ask section. So the Local Pack is an integral part of the SERPs.

 

The SERPs are simply the Search Engine Results Pages and nowadays they come in a bewildering array of formats.

No… and it’s unlikely to disappear for many more years yet!

SEO in digital marketing is really the foundation of anything you do online to sell more services and products through your business. Marketing, despite its evolution through many technological revolutions, remains the art of positioning your “unique” offering in front of the right people, making it attractive enough to attract their attention and then arouse them sufficiently that they buy into your particular product or service.

Digital marketing simply takes this online to media like websites, social platforms and digital assistants. SEO marketing is simply building a sound basis to allow search engines to match your content with the people searching for what you offer.