What is one aspect of SEO that is often overlooked but might turn out to be a superpower for your Business? The answer is: Local SEO.
Most Google searches are looking for local information. If you are not optimizing for local searches, you may miss out on customers who are right around you. But not anymore!
Because today, we want to give you complete details of covering local SEO tactics to get maximum traffic for local searches. It can be the best source for optimizing your products or services to reach potential clients who use local searches for their desired products or services.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO creates more search engine visibility for local businesses, most of those with brick-and-mortar local stores. By working with local SEO, there is a high possibility to improve organic traffic from searches performed by users in nearby locations.
Search engines trust the best local content, profiles, links and citations to offer related local results to the customers to get information for local search. With local SEO, business owners can utilize the position for their services or products to local customers who search for them.
Crucial aspects for Local SEO:
- Practice doing optimization for Google My Business
- You should know how to engage on social media and add posts to GMB
- Never miss out adding address, company name and phone number
- Utilize local directories and citations
- Keep doing local SEO audit
- Try your best to increase your internal linking process
- Ranking impact factors are title tags, meta description, URL, and content
- Never ignore adding location pages for your site
- Local content is also essential
- Your site should be mobile-friendly
- Put more efforts to get inbound links
- Being part of local community can help you
Optimize for Google My Business
Google My Business has turned out to be a cornerstone of local search. As Google gives enough support, checks every aspect, and shares its content, Google My Business is crucial to fulfilling your business needs.
To give a clear picture of optimizing Google My Business, you need to have the following:
Initially, you must create and verify Google My Business page Try to utilize Google Posts in your account. You must encourage your regular and prospective customers to share their reviews online
You should respond to reviews by giving the location. For instance, “We admire your time to give feedback on our services in a particular city. We respect your time and inputs. We are pleased to continue working with you”. Mention your company name at the bottom. If Google can check your business’s genuine approach, the search engine will reward you with a coveted sidebar place in Google’s local search.
Engage on social media and add posts to Google My Business
Google is now considering content that you share on social media. As you have carved out a beautiful Google My Page, you can share it on social media by aligning the social and search.
Try to make sure that your address and phone number should be online. Keeping details available online will make users comfortable, making it convenient to call you to check the details of the products or services.
What does NAP stand for in local SEO?
NAP stands for name, address and phone number with area code. It would help if you made sure that NAP has to be considered a crawlable HTML test on your website for Google to show it better as per the search results in that specific location.
Perform a local SEO audit:
It is essential to have an SEO audit for better understanding. Let’s look at what it includes:
Google My Business Audit:
How will it appear in SERPs? Whether the information is perfect or not?
Google Search Console Audit:
You must check whether your website is crawlable. If not, must you find any errors hindering? Clear it.
On-Page SEO Audit:
Have you done proper on-page SEO, which can help you get ranking?
Citation Audit:
Are your citations in the correct format and present in the best directories?
Competitor Analysis:
It would help if you scrutinized how far your website can match your competitors. Be it inbound links, content, images, design and ranking position and other factors, thoroughly check on and off.
Website Audit:
Are you getting organic traffic? If not, ponder the above factors and fill in the gaps to get a ranking.
Improve your internal linking structure
Getting external links to your website can be a great asset as it can boost your SEO ranking.
Does it matter? Of course, it matters. It can support website navigation and distribute page authority and ranking ability among pages.
Work on optimizing URL, title tags, headers, meta description, and content.
Regarding content, every blog you upload is a new indexed page for your website; it is a privilege for you to have search engine results.
Whatever content you want to write and publish on your site needs optimization for search engines by applying high-volume keywords in the URL, title, meta description, and body. If you face any issues, you must focus on customer success stories and case studies.
Add location pages to your website
Some stores have branches in different locations, so creating other location pages is necessary. Because people search for their local store, thus, creating local pages with your store name, address, phone number and store open and closing hours is also required.
Unfortunately, when stores have different branches in different locations, creating pages with the same content is unhealthy and affects your ranking, as Google considers duplicate content. Unique content is needed to create pages for your other locations. Adding a map will be an asset for your business. It identifies your store quickly for customers.
Create local content
Google constantly updates its nature of the working style, so local SEO professionals should be aware of it and produce more content for customers and appease aggressive search engines. While writing, you must keep in mind local people instead of writing a universal appeal.
As your target is local audiences, they are into different industries, so try to focus on general topics that cover all walks of life and beyond your business.
Your website is mobile-friendly
As people use smartphones, mobile searches are comparatively expanded, so they want to find your services or products on mobile to know more about them. Therefore, your website and local SEO should be mobile-friendly. Whether it is navigation, speed, content, and images must be apt for local users to identify your services.
Boost your local SEO with inbound links and authority
Inbound links are a great opportunity to increase your local SEO. Each inbound link indicates to Google that you are a legitimate organization, and inbound links can increase your domain authority. Then, what are the ways to get inbound links?
With the help of sponsorships and guest Post posting, you can have multiple options to take a leap in your business.
Try to expand your network with the Chamber of Commerce, business improvement, resellers, local vendors, manufacturers and other local traders.
Try to sponsor webinars, meet-ups, and events with people who can build communities and stretch your business. Sometimes, blogs can add advantages to your business.
Participate in your local community
Genuine involvement in the local community can be an additional benefit to getting more digital PR. If you join a non-profit on a campaign, it means a volunteer day in the company, and sponsoring an event can receive immense popularity and increase your brand awareness.
Local SEO Tools
Let’s talk about the tools that can be useful to optimize your business for local SEO. Let’s gaze at some realistic approaches that you can leverage to increase your ranking in the locations that matter most.
A local citation is the local business’s name with its address, phone number and working hours.
It is indispensable for any business to have it online to find by users. And it creates trust. Users might call you and confirm with you. For any business, building trust is an essential aspect.
Screaming Frog
For your website, images, content, CSS, script, backend coding and other aspects should be unique and not copied from others, as web crawlers will check everything. These are the ranking factors for your website. Do you have any 404? Do you need a meta description or H1? Screaming frogs can find up to 500 URLs for free. If you need unlimited, you can go for a paid version.
Moz Local
Moz Local can ensure your business listing is verified on Google and social networking sites like Facebook and distribute your listing on search engines.
Ahrefs
It helps with backlink checking, necessary as these links tell website authority.
It gives comprehensive analysis and keyword research and analyzes other websites’ anchor text when backlinking, pointing to your site.
Buzzstream
It is a familiar tool in search engine optimization for earning local backlinks. It can help you recognize and create relationships with local influencers by finding influencers, tracking conversions and offering reports on your marketing campaigns, your team performance, and other aspects like link placements.
BrightLocal
It is one of the best SEO tools built explicitly for local business needs. It helps you monitor reviews on local websites and find out local search performance, and analyze your nearby competitors.
Increase Visibility with Local SEO
Local SEO is an inevitable part of SEO strategy for local business owners. Local SEO is the most crucial part of your business when users search online near them for your services.
