Local SEO for your Whistler Business Guide

Whistler offers an amazing array of top-quality services and companies. While this is what makes us such an incredible community, it also means that there is a lot of competition for local businesses. Your website allows you to speak to the entire online world, but if you’re offering local services you need to be predominantly targeting potential customers in Whistler. Optimizing your website for your geographical area is essential for boosting your SEO, and for showing customers exactly where they can find you. Here are our top tips on how you can improve your local SEO and generate better traffic through location-based searching.

#1 Get on Google My Business

Registering your business with Google My Business is the first step to optimizing your local SEO. It’s completely free to do, and allows you to manage your online presence across Google’s search pages, including Maps. It asks you to fill in a mini summary of your business that gets displayed at the top of Google’s results pages. This means it is essentially the first impression potential clients will get of your business, before even clicking on your website. It’s also important to update this on a regular basis with new photos, information, hours, etc. As well, encourage your customers and clients to review your business on Google – even a few reviews looks good.

#2 Keep your contact information consistent

It’s crucial that all your information is the same across online platforms. Not only does this make it easy for customers to find you, but also it shows you uphold a reliable business. NAP (your company’s name, address and phone number) is your digital thumbprint, and if this information fails to align across the different online profiles of your business, Google will recognise these inconsistent listings. The more times Google ‘sees’ your thumbprint on reputable websites, the more confident it becomes that it is displaying a trustworthy business in its search results.

#3 Build your online credibility

Even though this one takes time, having a solid catalogue of good reviews on your page is going to elevate your local credibility and improve your SEO ranking. A recent survey found that 84% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Don’t be afraid to sincerely ask customers for reviews, and make it easy for them to do so by offering a multitude of potential review sites to use, such as Google+, Facebook and Yelp.

#4 Connect with other local Whistler businesses

If the Internet didn’t exist, you’d probably have to promote your business through regular networking, or by joining a Whistler business group, right? The truth is, you should still be doing the equivalent of this online. Start liaising with other local businesses and linking them on your site, and this will hopefully encourage them to return the favour. By engaging with respected companies you will show search engines that you are a trusted, reliable source.

#5 Write great content

If you keep producing quality, locally orientated content, then results will naturally follow. Keep your customers interested and engaged to increase their affinity with your brand. This can be via content promotions, polls, or just some interesting posts about what’s going on in Whistler next weekend. Maintaining steady blog posts and social media posts demonstrates your involvement in the local community, and can be a super effective way to increase your SEO.

Check out our tips on blogging to improve your SEO!

If you’re looking to get your Whistler business out there and feature on local search results, we can help. Cloud9 Marketing offers free SEO audits at no obligation.