Nearly a third of online consumers use the internet to find local businesses every day. And another 16 percent do it several times a week.
If your venue’s website doesn’t rank well in the local search results, you’ll never have a chance to reach a large percentage of your potential customers.
Let’s look at how to promote your venue with local SEO.
What is Local SEO for Venues?
SEO is short for search engine optimisation, which is the process of optimising various parts of your website to rank higher in the search engines, particularly in Google.
Local SEO focuses on factors that help your site rank for location-specific searches. For example, “normal” SEO might focus on a search term like “best wedding venue” while local SEO would focus on a term like “best wedding venue in Sydney”.
Why the Google 3-Pack is So Important
The goal of most local SEO campaigns is to get your venue’s website to rank in the Google 3-Pack. This is the list of 3 local results that show at the top of Google when you search for a local business.
These listings stand out from the rest of the results and include details like reviews, your address, a map showing your location, and a link to get directions to your venue.
Getting your website listed in the 3-pack will drive a lot of traffic to your website, especially from people who are searching for a local venue on their mobile devices.
Local SEO for Function Venues – The Most Important Factors
Google takes a lot of factors into account when deciding what sites to place in the 3-pack.
You need to optimise your site for as many of them as you can to have the best chance of grabbing one of those coveted spots.
Keywords
Keywords are the foundation of searching for anything online. The words and phrases someone searches for are how Google determines what results to show them.
Your website needs to include the keywords that someone looking for a venue in your city would be most likely to search for.
For example, if your venue is in Sydney you would want to include phrases like “Sydney function venue” on your website.
But you would also want to have things like “Sydney wedding venue” and “Sydney conference venue” to help your site rank for more specific searches.
Business Information and Schema
Another important factor for local SEO is to ensure your business information is correct and consistent across the internet.
The first step is to claim your Google My Business listing. This is where Google gets a lot of the information it shows in the 3-Pack.
It’s important to have consistent information in any other directory listings as well.
This information is known as your website’s schema and Google uses the information it finds on other sites like Yelp and other directory sites in its ranking algorithm.
If your NAP (business name, address, and phone number) isn’t consistent on different sites, it will impact your rankings.
On-Page SEO
There are two aspects to your site’s SEO – on-page and off-page optimisation. On-page SEO is about various parts of the content and meta information on the pages of your site.
You need to be sure to include important keywords in the content of your pages, the headings on the page, ALT text for images, and in the meta description and title tags in the page’s coding.
If you’re targeting several keywords, it’s better to create separate pages for each of them than try to cover them all in a single page.
For example, you could create separate pages for wedding venues, business venues, party venues, and various other types of functions.
The content might be very similar but each page would focus on a specific keyword for that type of function.
Off-Page SEO
The biggest factor in good off-page SEO is links pointing to your website from other sites. These are known as backlinks in the SEO world.
When other sites link to yours, Google sees it as a vote of confidence for your site.
If there are more sites linking to yours, Google takes that as a sign that the content on your site is valuable and should rank higher in its results.
You can build backlinks in various ways:
- Partner with other local businesses and link to one another’s sites
- Write guest posts for local blogs or articles for local newspapers
- Get listed in local directories
- Post on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter
If you’re posting on social media or writing articles for other websites, make sure you include a bio or byline that includes a link back to your website.
Client Reviews
Reviews are one of the pieces of information Google includes in the 3-Pack listings so it’s important to get your customers to review your venue after they’ve used it.
And when people review your site, make sure you respond to those reviews to either thank them for good ones or to address any problems they mention.
Don’t assume people who use your venue will write a review – ask them to do so. You can even offer incentives such as a discount on a future booking in exchange for leaving a review.
If you offer incentives, make sure you do it for any review, not only positive ones.
How to Leverage Local SEO to Promote Your Venue
Using local SEO to promote your venue is an important piece of your marketing strategy. It’s not complicated but it does take time and effort.
And Google is constantly tweaking its ranking algorithm so you need to stay on top of the latest changes if you want to keep your rankings.
If you’d rather focus on what your business does well and leave the local SEO work to experts, Digital Assembly can help.
Our team of local SEO experts will work with you to ensure we understand your business’ needs and then create an SEO strategy that will help you reach more people looking for function venues.
Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you grow your business.
