Local SEO is important for small businesses: four out of five customers use a search engine to find local data, which means if your company isn’t properly optimized for local search, you could be missing out on 75% of your potential lead consumers. In short, local SEO is vital if you want your business to stay consistent.
To improve your local SEO optimization for your business, we’ve compiled a comprehensive guide, which will cover the best local SEO tips and tools.
By the end of the article, you’ll have a strong understanding of how to optimize your business to approach potential consumers who use local search to determine which products or services they’re going to purchase.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO helps companies promote their services and products to local consumers. To collect information for local search, search engines depend on signals such as local content (articles, videos, images, etc.), social media profile pages, links, and citations to present the most relevant local search results to the user.
The Best Local SEO Tips:
- Optimize for (GMB) Google My Business.
- Upgrade your internal linking structure.
- Optimize URL structure, meta title, headers, meta description, and content.
- Add location pages (as per the target location) to your website.
- Create local content.
- Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
- Ensure your company’s name, address, and contact number are consistently online.
- Optimize online directories (online submissions) and citations.
- Get lots of inbound links with relevance and higher domain authority.
- Involve in social media (add content) and add posts to Google My Business (GMB).
Create local content
Google proceeds to get smarter than ever, which means content creators and strategists are now able to write for the audience, not for the search engines. But while writing about common topics will pull a wide audience, sometimes it’s more critical to hone your focus and write about news related local or industry to draw a local audience.
Be the local professional for your business by promoting local business gatherings, news, and other informative content on your website blog.
For example, if you’re a local software development company in Bangalore and you’re trying to pull businesses that require services related to software development, build a helpful resource to get these businesses acquainted with your city. Details of software development services could provide value for your business and contain highly important on-page local signals.
Optimize for (GMB) Google My Business.
Google My Business has become the most crucial part of local search SEO — since Google naturally feels most satisfactory sharing content it can maintain and verify. Google My Business (GMB) is their tool to help your enterprise meet Google’s needs. If Google can confirm your business as authentic, the search engine could possibly reward your business with a sidebar space in Google’s local search.
To make sure that you’re optimized for Google My Business, you’ll want to build and authenticate a Google My Business page, use Google Posts within your account, motivate your customers to share online reviews, and reply authentically to reviews, naming the location.
For example, “We acknowledge your feedback on in
Upgrade your internal linking structure.
Although external links leading to your site are ideal, improving your internal linking structure will also increase your SEO rankings.
Why internal linking is important? It does the following:
- Enables Website Breadcrumb structure
- Assists with information structure and site hierarchy
- Classifies page authority ranking among pages
Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
Local and mobile search is closely associated with each other (9 out of 10 smartphone users performs local searches on their devices).
Some of the most basic ways the audience will use your site in a mobile device are to look up customer reviews, find directions to your business location, and seek contact information. Ensure its easy for your potential leads by making your website mobile-friendly.
Add location pages (as per the target location) to your website.
If you have more than one geo-location, create a few geo-location pages. Geo-Location webpages provide the audience with your name, address, contact number, store hours, unique store descriptions, promotions, and testimonials from happy consumers.
It’s also crucial that you should avoid duplicating content across various location pages. For single-location businesses, build a locally descriptive “About Us” page. You’ll get huge bonus points if you add a Google Map to your website on your particular location page(s).
Optimize URL structure, meta title, headers, meta description, and content
When it arrives in content, every latest blog post is a newly indexed page for your website, a new webpage on which to target a specific geolocation search phrase, and a unique opportunity to get found in the SERPs.
Every moment you write a piece of content (be it an article, video, or image), you need to locally optimize the content for search engines by utilizing high-volume keywords in the URL structure, title, header, meta description, and web content. If you’re having difficulty coming up with geo-targeted web content, acknowledge highlighting consumer success stories and success case studies.
Ensure your business name, address, and contact number are consistently online.
You’ve to make it simple for the audience and search engines to locate you. To do this, arrange your NAP, which stands for name, address, and phone number (with area code). This should be incorporated as a crawlable HTML document on your website.
Furthermore, avoid the basic mistake of only adding the NAP within an image — search engines cannot crawl images like HTML text. The most popular location for the NAP is in the header and footer of the site.
Optimize online directories (online submissions) and citations.
For all businesses, every map data aggregators present a huge amount of the map data for Goole, Yelp, Bing, Apple, Yahoo, Trip Advisor, and more. Mistakes like abbreviations, absence of suite number, misspellings, or incorrect phone number can be problematic.
If Google is unable to determine the correct information about your business, it may not display your business on the search engine results page. Additionally, make sure to remove the duplicate listings you find in any directories.
Get lots of inbound links with relevance and higher domain authority
Inbound links are amazingly strong opportunities to enhance your local SEO — each inbound link tells Google that you’re a genuine business, and inbound links can also increase your domain authority. However, here are a few ways to obtain inbound links:
- Partnership
- Guest Blogging
- Scholarships
- Social Bookmarking
- Article Submission
Being a guest blogger can help attract high-authority links. If you’re an active contributor in community discussions, the buzz around you grows as inbound links, media coverage, and social media growth.
Involve in social media (add content) and add posts to Google My Business (GMB).
Google considers the content shared in social media platforms to be more important than any other content. Always make sure that the content you are creating is for the user not for the search engine. Since the latest Algorithm update, Google is now more focused on the contents that are created for users.
Furthermore, once you’ve created a beautiful Google My Business page, share the page on social media platforms. Make sure that you post about your services, products, or any related content in Google My Business Page.
Conclusion
Local SEO optimization is an essential part of an SEO strategy for any local businesses. If you have a storefront, applying local SEO will help your consumers find you when they search online for any related products or services.
With the local SEO plan, you can build out your brand and attract your potential and target audience smoothly. This even boosts the ranking of any website.
