SEO Hint for Small and Location-Based Businesses

Internet and map search is how most people find services or businesses they’re looking for, but many small businesses don’t show up, why is that? To appear most prominently in the search results, the more information about a business’s location on a website moves the results higher in the rankings and increases discoverability. The easiest way to increase their presence is with the images on their website using metadata.

Metadata is an editable data attribute that every JPEG file has. It can contain location data (geotag) of where the image was taken, descriptive keywords and descriptive text for accessibility, as well as licensing and copyright information. All of this information is read, collected and used to determine results by search engines and map software.

So, if you own a small business, adding location information as well as keywords about your business to the images on your site will improve your search results. There are many free tools for doing this such as GeoImgr and Darktable, or more comprehensive tools like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom.

Location data uses GPS coordinates instead of addresses, i.e. 40.741895,-73.989308 (latitude, longitude). To find this, use a tool like GPS-Coordinates, just type in a street address and it will give you the correct address.

In choosing a good relevant keyword you can check out UberSuggest. Enter a search term and check out the recommended related terms.

Also the name of the image should be as descriptive as possible. You want search engines to know what the image is about without even looking at it, so use your focus keyphrase in the image file name. It’s simple: if you’re writing a blog post on your business and you use an image showing one of your products, the file name shouldn’t be DSC4536.jpg. A proper file name would be Name_of_My_Business-Name_of_the_Product.jpg.