Trending SEO factors for Dublin Businesses

What impacts SEO rankings for local businesses today?

If you are a Dublin-based business with an online presence, you probably spend some time thinking about how to expand your online profile. Adding increased visibility to your websites and social media footprint offers you a better chance to compete against your local peers. Ideally, you would like yours to be the first website to come up when local shoppers type in an online search query for products and services in your niche. 

The question, however, is: With so much competition for Dublin businesses, how does a local business enhance their online presence on search engines? The answer is, by addressing some specific trending Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) factors that help local businesses improve their rankings in search queries.     

Local ranking factors that matter

According to Ireland’s Internet Neutral Exchange Association (INEX.ie), the country recently saw significant increase in its internet traffic – over 500 Gigabits per second.  With Google accounting for over 80% of global internet searches, there’s strong likelihood that many online buyers from Dublin are among those querying local websites for goods and services.   

One way for a local business to grab a slice of those searches is by paying attention to SEO factors impacting the results of those queries. Specifically, these are some of the factors that impact the SEO ranking of local Dublin-based businesses:

• Google’s ability to properly crawl through and index your site
• Your sites’ relevance and authoritativeness for your local geography and your niche
• The presence of pages that target local search queries for which you wish to rank 
• The strength and competitiveness of your backlink profile
• Existence of sizable amounts of thin, irrelevant or redundant content
• Enhanced internal links and Call To Action (CTAs) on high-traffic pages
• Efficient internal linking on sites created with relatively flat structures

Some of this might seem overly technical to the uninitiated. That’s why many local Dublin-based businesses chose to work with Ryco Marketing’s experienced digital marketing and SEO teams to address these factors. 

Practical SEO-boosting steps for Dublin businesses

One very powerful tool, available to local businesses looking to raise their online profiles, is Google My Business (GMB). Specifically, here are some GMB steps that digital marketing companies implement to improve client visibility in the eyes of search engines:

1. Creating and managing GMB posts is a great local SEO booster. Your SEO partner can use these posts to drive up traffic, encourage more clicks and foster more engagement with existing clients, prospective customers and casual visitors to your site. 
2. Digital marketers use a well optimised GMB profile as an opportunity for local businesses to interact with Dublin-based prospects who are already in a “buying frame of mind”. They do this by carefully curating the information online search queries visible in your GMB profile. For example, by hosting specific and relevant content about Dublin’s landscape, its community activities and places of interest on GMB, your website ranks higher for local queries expressing interest in those specific topics. 
3. Another aspect of localised GMB SEO power is the Reviews feature. When local patrons visit your business (either online or in store) and are pleased with their experience there, they typically leave positive reviews on your GMB profile. Responding to those reviews, and adding your personalised comments and messages of appreciation, feeds the cycle of positivity that then impacts (positively) your websites’ SEO ratings.  
4. GMB Qs & As are yet another means of boosting your website’s local appeal. Many Qs may be specific to local events and topics of interest: “Will you offer expanded parking on Bloomsday this year too?”, or “Can I order my St. Patricks’ Day merchandise online and pickup at the James Street outlet?”. Timely and strategic responses to these Qs paints your website in a positive light for local SEO ranking.
5. Since the objective is to capture local traffic, both online and in store, make sure you pepper your website and GMB profile with plenty of photographs related to your business and its neighbourhood. By Google’s own estimates, “Businesses that add photos to their Business Profiles receive 42% more requests for directions on Google Maps, and 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses that don’t”

Google uses metrics about the photos you publish and includes them as part of GMB Insights, which helps interested local searchers find your business. The quality, quantity and variety of photographs help create positivity about your business and boosts your websites’ visibility.  

SEO consultant experts use GMB to manage and enhance client’s online presences across multiple Google environments, including Google Maps and Google searches. The powerful analytics and tracking features allow you to take your SEO localisation to a new level with the help of Smart Campaigns that feed off local search results. When integrated with Google Maps, your optimised GMB profile makes it easy for local prospects to find your business, or for you to provide detailed directions to your physical locations. 

Localised SEO beyond GMB

Beyond SEO-enabled GMB profiles, there are several other factors that determine how and whether Dublin online searches result in finding your websites higher-up in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Here are a few of them:

1. Local physical presence: Some SEO experts recommend local businesses establish some form of physical presence in the geography they wish to rank for. A mobile phone and accessory manufacturer in Dublin’s Industrial Estate might, for instance, establish a kiosk or outlet within a heavily trafficked area such as Temple Bar, Ranelagh or Dublin City Centre. They can then target local SEO efforts to rank for those specific areas.
2. Locally-focused landing pages: This strategy works well to target local searchers who are specifically looking for products and services in your niche, and within your geographic area. It helps your SEO local rankings when you create individual location-specific landing pages, especially when battling against higher-ranked domains that do not have a local presence in your area.  
3. Long-tailed keywords: The use of targeted long-tailed keywords, which have high volumes of related keywords is also a great strategy to rank higher in SERPS. The key here is to ensure those long-tailed keywords are specific for local references such as milestones, current events, trending topics and historical places of interest.   
4. Local branding: Building a local brand following can also give your local SEO rankings a boost. This involves working with local communities, charities and fundraising organisations to promote the causes they espouse. Then, post news, photographs and blogs about such engagements on your online platforms to leverage shares, likes and links from other like-minded sites of repute. This not only improves your SEO rankings but also builds a base of loyal fans who appreciate corporate community involvement.  
5. Local community outreach: An adjunct to local brand-building is to sponsor and publicise local events and post local content on your landing page, as part of your local outreach program. So, even if you are not directly involved in local community engagement, your online platforms (website, Social media page, Twitter feeds) will still become a hub of community focus, driving up positive sentiment about your company. This is great for inching higher up in local SEO rankings.   
6. Local link building: A powerful SEO ranking factor is the presence of local links. Getting such links from authoritative sources relevant to your niche can give your website a boost in the eyes of Google’s search algorithm. A factor that will be even more impactful on your SEO ranking is having those links from websites serving the same geography as you, and within the same niche, rather than tangentially related ones such as your domain.    
7. Positive testimonials and reviews: Encouraging local visitors and clients to leave positive feedback about their experiences, whether it is about your website or in-store, is a great local SEO booster. Additionally, since these reviews and testimonials generate fresh 3rd-party content on your website, search engines view that as a positive factor towards rating your site higher on their SEO rankings.
8. Niche content: Make sure you publish comprehensive content on your online presences, whether that be about your product or service or about local monuments or places of interest. Google’s search engine algorithms reward in-depth coverage of a subject by placing such content higher up compared to web pages that offer only scant coverage of the topic. 

By combining these eight trending local SEO factors with SEO optimized GMB profiles, Dublin-based businesses can ensure they remain relevant when prospective clients conduct online searches for local products and searches.   

Making localised SEO work for you

Our Dublin Google AdWords and Pay Per Click (PPC campaign management) specialists also leverage these, and many other, SEO ranking factors to enhance the profitability of your business through improved website visibility.  Through in-depth research, our Dublin content marketing specialists produce engaging localised copy for your websites and social media pages. Our authoritative content attracts backlinks from other local niche players in your domain, which then makes your website more relevant in local online search queries.   

As a results driven SEO Dublin agency, these are just some of the trending SEO factors that we leverage to ensure our clients end up high in SERPs for local queries. The essence of our success lies in our ability to firstly, geo optimise your websites and other online platforms, and then geo target local visitors from specific regions, cities and metro areas across Dublin. 

Google determines local SEO rankings based on a number of factors, including relevance, prominence and distance. By focusing on end-to-end geo relevance of not just the content, but also various characteristics of your website, e.g. adding location-based keywords in meta tags and descriptions, localised URLs, verified GMB location etc., our team ensures that your business factors prominently in local Dublin-based search queries.   

https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/business/record-levels-of-internet-traffic-recorded-in-ireland-990112.html

 https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038063?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en

https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en