To see your hookah shop rank on Google, you must ensure your business shows up whenever a potential client enters the search term “hookah shop near me” or other such location-specific phrases.
The shisha marketing agency in Abu Dhabi you hire for the job will focus primarily on implementing local SEO strategies to help your hookah shop rank higher on Google. Keep reading to learn more.
How Does Local SEO Help Hookah Shops?
Here’s how local SEO can help your hookah shop:
Attracts High-Intent Users: Local searches typically occur when users are travelling and looking to visit a hookah store nearby or when they are searching for an online hookah shop that delivers products to their city. So, visitors you obtain using local SEO strategies most likely already know what products or services they require and when they will need them.
For searches occurring on the go, users often visit the place with a high rank on SERPs within a few hours. Even the ready-to-buy online users take very little time to place their orders once they get the search results.
Ensures Your Store Finds a Place on the Local Pack: The local businesses (usually the top three) that achieve the top positions on Google result pages appear on a map below the search bar. Local SEO will help you secure a spot in this pack of 3 and ensure that you instantly start getting visits, calls, orders, and clicks.
Helps Build Credibility: One of the most common tools used for local SEO for shisha lounge and stores is online reviews. If your business profile has positive reviews and high ratings, your potential clients will consider your business trusted and won’t hesitate to try your products/services.
Makes Beating Rivals Easier: To rank your hookah shop on Google, you must know how to outrank your rivals. Local SEO will let you do that seamlessly. SEO experts handling these projects don’t waste time by competing globally. Instead, they focus on beating only similar businesses in your service area. It can be a specific neighbourhood, a city, or a country.
About Local SEO for Hookah Stores
Here are the three primary factors Google algorithm considers when deciding local rankings:
- Proximity: How close is your hookah store to the user’s current location?
- Relevance: Do your company’s Google My Business profile and website match the user’s search intent?
- Prominence: The kind of reputation you enjoy online (a hookah store’s reputation becomes evident from frequency of citations, content quality, customer reviews, etc.)
Here are a few common strategies experts implement to help hookah shops rank high on Google by creating a perfect balance of the three factors mentioned above.
Creating an Optimised Google My Business or GMB Profile: You must create your GMB profile carefully, as it will serve as your store’s digital identity. A GMB profile that’s not good enough is much like a shop with locked doors.
The common changes experts recommend include:
- Addition of high-quality images
- Updated information on hours of operation
- Appropriately categorising your business
- Use of genuine reviews
Other than the above changes, your hookah store SEO professional will use a series of local keywords such as “best hookah shop in Abu Dhabi”, “best shisha lounge near me”, etc.
Keeping the messaging feature enabled is also crucial to allow potential clients to reach you quickly and easily. Last, but not least, you must keep posting news and information about upcoming events and seasonal promotions to keep your business profile fresh.
Incorporating Location-Specific Key Phrases into Your Content: The SEO experts handling these projects shortlist keywords that are location-specific, low-competition, yet high-impact. If you serve multiple locations, it would be good if your site has a separate page for each of those locations. This will help you avoid keyword stuffing.
Optimising Your Website for Local Searches: Your website should be among the first few local customers come across, if not the first. The first thing you must do for that is mobile optimisation. Recently obtained numbers suggest that more than 60% local searches are done on mobile phones. This makes having a mobile-responsive website mandatory for every hookah shop.
Work with your web developer to manage your site’s page speed. Ideally, each page should not take more than 3 seconds to load. Achieving it shouldn’t be difficult if you follow tricks like image compression and browser caching.
Adding codes that highlight your services, hours of operation, address, etc., is important. If you hire a trusted shisha marketing agency in Abu Dhabi, they will surely have an experienced coding team to do the job on your behalf.
You will get some more brownie points from Google if the site has Google Maps embedded on the Contact Us page. Finally, make sure the meta titles feature the name of the city or neighbourhood you serve.
Maintaining NAP Consistency: Google prefer businesses that maintain NAP consistency. Here, NAP is the acronym of Name, Address, and Phone Number. Make sure you have the same NAP everywhere. These include business profiles you have online, your social media profiles, directories, and, of course, your website. If you are inconsistent with your NAP, it will not only perplex your customers but will also confuse Google.
When you hire a company that specialises in SEO for shisha lounge and hookah stores, the experts representing them will audit your online records across platforms and make corrections wherever required.
Creating Engaging Local Content: You can write blogs about upcoming festivals, post local news and customer stories, create tour guides for the city/neighbourhood your shisha lounge or hookah store is in, and so on. This will make the site appear more relevant for local customers.
Constantly Tracking Your SEO Performance: If the SEO company you have hired is reliable and efficient, they will surely keep tracking the results that various SEO strategies implemented by them produce. Some of the things experts handling your project must check include GMB insights, keyword rankings, the quality of web traffic you are getting from various local sources, etc.
SEO Mistakes to Avoid for Ranking Your Hookah Shop on Google
All your SEO strategies will go in vain if you commit one or more of the following mistakes. The easiest way to avoid these mistakes is by hiring a trusted digital marketing company for your hookah store SEO.
Mistake 1: Not Using Age-Gates: Hookah and everything related to it are age-restricted goods. For instance, for people in the UAE, the minimum age for using hookah and related products/services is 18. So, it’s obvious that Google will have stringent rules governing the buying and selling of these products.
You must ensure the official website of your hookah store features age-verification pop-ups or age gates. Not having these components can result in flagging of the site by Google for non-compliance.
Mistake 2: Keyword Stuffing: While using keywords is crucial for getting ranked on Google, you can be completely ignored by the search engine if you pack your web pages with keywords. Excessive use of keywords decreases the readability of your content, and you may end up being penalised by Google.
Mistake 3: Not Creating Unique Product Descriptions: The products listed on your site must come with descriptions featuring unique information. If you copy these descriptions from the manufacturer’s website or product manuals, Google will consider it plagiarism and flag your site. Your product descriptions must feature all information offered by the manufacturer, along with materials derived from expert reviews, client reviews, etc.
If you are looking for a digital marketing agency that can help you rank your hookah shop on Google, contact Goldman SEO Abu Dhabi. The company is represented by the brightest minds in the field. These professionals use the latest SEO techniques to increase your online visibility and help you rank your store on Google.
Author Bio: The author of this write-up leads a team of SEO professionals at a trusted digital marketing agency in the UAE. Over the years, he and his team have helped hundreds of hookah shops and shisha lounges achieve high rankings on Google.