Technical Considerations for Your Local Business Website

It's rare to come across a business owner who doesn't want to be found on search engines. Search engines have become an essential means for existing customers to find you—and can be an incredible source of new customers.

Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's content," and to that end they and Bing have built some incredible technology to discover information about local businesses, aggregate it, and return relevant search results that include these businesses.

However, some business owners and webmasters unintentionally put up hurdles to their discovery and ranking by Google and Bing's web crawlers, or fail to put their best foot forward when customers are looking for businesses like theirs online.

Here are just a few technical considerations to think about as you build out (or rebuild) your local business's website to become search engine–friendly.

Is your site indexable?

Sometimes there are strange coding errors or oversights that can prevent or hinder the search engines from crawling your website. To see if your site is crawlable, search Google or Bing with the following string:

site:yourdomainhere.com

Pay attention to the number of results returned for that search. If it looks close to the number of pages you think you have on your website, your site is pretty well-indexed. If it's much smaller, you may have issues with indexation.

Also pay attention to the blue links and text snippets that show up for this search. These are the title tags and meta descriptions for each of those pages—two of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Each page should have a unique title/description combination, which should be keyword-optimized for both what you sell and where you sell it. This will maximize the number of local searchers who visit your website.

If these items don't contain your product/service and your location, you should make it a priority to update them, or contact your webmaster to do so.

Is your site crawlable?

After you've used the site: search to determine if the search engines can find all the pages on your website, perform the following search to determine if they can understand the content on each of those pages:

cache:yourdomainhere.com/pagename

When you view the cache, click "text only version" at the top righthand corner. This will tell you what search engines "see" when they visit various pages on your site. Make sure there's plenty of keyword-rich text for them to read.

Sign up for Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central

Google Analytics is a free service that automatically tracks how visitors come to your website, and what they do once they're on it. Analytics is an entire marketing field unto itself, but get started by installing (or having your webmaster install) a little code snippet on every page of your website that reports back to Google about your visitors.

Google Webmaster Central is a free portal from Google that notifies you of major technical issues with your website. Within the Webmaster Central interface you can upload a sitemap for your site. Sitemaps are basically a list of of all of the pages on a given website. While they're more useful for giant websites with thousands or millions of pages than they are for small ones, they might be a temporary band-aid if your site has major crawlability issues.

Is your NAP in HTML?

Think of your business's NAP (name, address, and phone number) as your digital thumbprint. Including this information front-and-center on your website helps Google associate this thumbprint with your web presence—which can help move the needle on search rankings if it's not something you're doing already.

Many local businesses think their NAP is crawlable by Google (in HTML code) when in reality it's in an image. An easy way to check for this on your own website is to try to select your NAP with your cursor. Do the individual characters highlight one at a time, or can you only select it all at once? If it's the latter, your NAP is likely in an image or otherwise not indexable, and you should talk to your webmaster about rectifying the issue.

Is your site optimized for mobile devices?

Obviously search engines are not "mobile devices," but they tend to like a lot of the same things that visitors on-the-go like: easily discernable navigation, fast-loading pages with a minimal amount of code, and images that are optimized for download speed.

Google offers a free Page Speed tool that can help you assess how well your website performs, where some of the slower-loading elements may be, and gives suggestions on how to speed things up.

Are you redirecting web crawlers properly?

If you've updated your website at any time since you launched, you have probably created new pages and deleted a few old ones. Although visitors will only see the pages to which they can navigate, search engines like Google keep a history of your website.

If you haven't set up instructions for search engine crawlers (301 redirects) to permanently update their indexes with your new pages, you may be hurting the potential of your website to rank, and providing a poor user experience for visitors who land on those old pages.

Conclusion

This is a fairly limited subset of the technical considerations that go into search engine optimization—but going through this basic checklist should help you identify whether your website suffers from any of the most common issues, and is establishing a solid local search foundation for your business.

Keep learning

It's rare to come across a business owner who doesn't want to be found on search engines. Search engines have become an essential means for existing customers to find you—and can be an incredible source of new customers.

Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's content," and to that end they and Bing have built some incredible technology to discover information about local businesses, aggregate it, and return relevant search results that include these businesses.

However, some business owners and webmasters unintentionally put up hurdles to their discovery and ranking by Google and Bing's web crawlers, or fail to put their best foot forward when customers are looking for businesses like theirs online.

Here are just a few technical considerations to think about as you build out (or rebuild) your local business's website to become search engine–friendly.

Is your site indexable?

Sometimes there are strange coding errors or oversights that can prevent or hinder the search engines from crawling your website. To see if your site is crawlable, search Google or Bing with the following string:

site:yourdomainhere.com

Pay attention to the number of results returned for that search. If it looks close to the number of pages you think you have on your website, your site is pretty well-indexed. If it's much smaller, you may have issues with indexation.

Also pay attention to the blue links and text snippets that show up for this search. These are the title tags and meta descriptions for each of those pages—two of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Each page should have a unique title/description combination, which should be keyword-optimized for both what you sell and where you sell it. This will maximize the number of local searchers who visit your website.

If these items don't contain your product/service and your location, you should make it a priority to update them, or contact your webmaster to do so.

Is your site crawlable?

After you've used the site: search to determine if the search engines can find all the pages on your website, perform the following search to determine if they can understand the content on each of those pages:

cache:yourdomainhere.com/pagename

When you view the cache, click "text only version" at the top righthand corner. This will tell you what search engines "see" when they visit various pages on your site. Make sure there's plenty of keyword-rich text for them to read.

Sign up for Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central

Google Analytics is a free service that automatically tracks how visitors come to your website, and what they do once they're on it. Analytics is an entire marketing field unto itself, but get started by installing (or having your webmaster install) a little code snippet on every page of your website that reports back to Google about your visitors.

Google Webmaster Central is a free portal from Google that notifies you of major technical issues with your website. Within the Webmaster Central interface you can upload a sitemap for your site. Sitemaps are basically a list of of all of the pages on a given website. While they're more useful for giant websites with thousands or millions of pages than they are for small ones, they might be a temporary band-aid if your site has major crawlability issues.

Is your NAP in HTML?

Think of your business's NAP (name, address, and phone number) as your digital thumbprint. Including this information front-and-center on your website helps Google associate this thumbprint with your web presence—which can help move the needle on search rankings if it's not something you're doing already.

Many local businesses think their NAP is crawlable by Google (in HTML code) when in reality it's in an image. An easy way to check for this on your own website is to try to select your NAP with your cursor. Do the individual characters highlight one at a time, or can you only select it all at once? If it's the latter, your NAP is likely in an image or otherwise not indexable, and you should talk to your webmaster about rectifying the issue.

Is your site optimized for mobile devices?

Obviously search engines are not "mobile devices," but they tend to like a lot of the same things that visitors on-the-go like: easily discernable navigation, fast-loading pages with a minimal amount of code, and images that are optimized for download speed.

Google offers a free Page Speed tool that can help you assess how well your website performs, where some of the slower-loading elements may be, and gives suggestions on how to speed things up.

Are you redirecting web crawlers properly?

If you've updated your website at any time since you launched, you have probably created new pages and deleted a few old ones. Although visitors will only see the pages to which they can navigate, search engines like Google keep a history of your website.

If you haven't set up instructions for search engine crawlers (301 redirects) to permanently update their indexes with your new pages, you may be hurting the potential of your website to rank, and providing a poor user experience for visitors who land on those old pages.

Conclusion

This is a fairly limited subset of the technical considerations that go into search engine optimization—but going through this basic checklist should help you identify whether your website suffers from any of the most common issues, and is establishing a solid local search foundation for your business.

Keep learning

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