Business owners planning to upgrade their company’s brand design should not overlook the importance of local SEO in their re-design efforts. Understanding how local search engine optimization influences any design tweaks is crucial for brand builders who don’t want to do more harm than good with a website re-design. If you are a business owner who wants to instantly improve your local SEO, make sure you pay attention to the following critical brand design tips.

1) Making your local business easy to find is a core component of effective brand design. You can have the best-looking website among your competitors, but if you haven’t made your website easy to find for search engine crawlers and potential customers, all your brand design tweaks won’t matter. One of the smartest moves you can make as a local business owner is to ensure your Google My Business (google.com/business) listing is optimized for success. Make sure your business’ description is keyword optimized. Don’t add fancy words or additional fluff content to distract potential customers from connecting with your company. Ensure the information you add to Google My Business is the same information that is on your website and on your social media profiles and be sure to verify your business listing once all information is complete. If you want searchers on Google to find your company, doesn’t it make sense to optimize your business listing on Google for discovery? #SmartSEO

2) Not every potential customer will find your local business via Google. A growing number of socially-savvy consumers are using review sites like Yelp as their search engine of choice. To ensure your brand design is maximized for local SEO, add Yelp reviews to your business’ home page. Encourage your happy customers to leave a review of your business on Yelp (and Google Reviews!) and then add the positive reviews to your company’s website. If any of your company’s positive reviews contain keywords you are targeting with your local SEO strategy, make sure those reviews are the first ones potential customers see. When you combine business reviews with search engine optimization, you have a recipe for local SEO success.

3) Do you have pages on your website that include your company’s location in the URL? If not, now is the time to do so. Incorporating your location into an URL is an awesome way to attract search engine crawlers, as is ensuring your business’ name, phone number, and address are present on your home page. If your business has a head office in another location, e.g. franchise businesses, be sure you are using your location and not the location of your head office.

Integrate these three tips into your business’ brand design and you will be impressed at how quickly they influence your local SEO. Ensuring your business’ website not only looks good but offers awesome local SEO benefits is easy if you are strategic in your approach.