Local SEO Strategy is key to SEO now. In this day and age, the average consumer uses Google to make their decision on what to purchase. With this in mind, you have to adapt to this new norm in order to thrive. When people are searching up your product, you better make sure it’s your brand name that shows up next to it.
However, reaching the number 1 search is hard to say the least, so we will talk about some of the best ways to optimize your local SEO, and how you should approach SEO placement in order to get on top of the game.
Page Optimization
Done with your website? Good. Now time to check for everything that’s broken. I recommend that you use a site crawler to make the process less painful, but there is a multitude of problems that can occur. Broken links, missing metadata, and duplicated content are just some of the issues that can arise.
Another thing you have to give attention to is keyword optimization. You need to make a rough estimate of what your target audience is googling in order to build your SEO around that specific term.
Perform keyword searches that can give you a better estimate of what terms are currently trending for your business and industry. It also allows you to get a better perspective of what keywords are most contested. You need to optimize your keyword like you would optimize your windows shortcut usage.
It should be a no-brainer but keep your contact information always up to date. If you run multiple sites or social media, it’s vital that the information is consistent throughout the internet.
If your social media information doesn’t match your website’s information, you are losing out on potential customers. If you ever end up relocating then make sure to update the address information on every platform as well.
Google My Business
Google My Business, or GMB for short, is a network that is used to feed search engines local content in context that relates to your business.
There are multiple ways of improving your GMB listing, and here are some notable ones:
- Fill out all of the information required for your GMB listing. You can start without it being completely filled out, but this would be a horrible mistake. So make sure that you have it absolutely completed
- Pick a captivating high-res picture that will stand out, you need to choose an image that will get people’s attention and lead them to click your content
- Make sure that the uploaded image is named with the attributed keyword
- Choose primary and secondary categories so that visitors can easily understand what your business does
- Use Google Posts to give details about your company and about future events that you will (hopefully) be hosting, alternative links, and downloadable content
Encourage Reviews
If your services are exquisite and your customers are happy – encourage them to make their feelings public. One of the first things a potential customer is going to look for is your ratings. The better the ratings, the more customers you will attract.
Encourage your satisfied customers to spread the word about you, whether it be in real life or online. Stimulate leaving reviews for your website, even if some are negative, you want to always have a clean variety with mostly positive comments that will prove your genuineness.
Produce Local Content to Further Optimize Your Local SEO
One of the issues with SEO is that it usually doesn’t relate to your local business, so you need to pour in more effort to make it work (or just produce non-local related content).
While it can’t hurt to reach out to a wider audience and have more website interactions with foreigners, this shouldn’t be your goal.
Create local content that can somewhat tie into your local SEO so that you can have more high-quality interactions. Quality over quantity.
Don’t Disregard Mobile Users
Your website must be compatible with mobile users. Mobile users are becoming more and more frequent for SEO searches. According to Eric Enge, Mobile devices drove 61% of visits to U.S. websites in 2020, up from 57% in 2019.
Desktops were responsible for 35.7% of all visits in 2020, and tablets drove the remaining 3.3% of visitors. This is a massive customer pool that is searching things up every. single. moment. Just let this statistic sink in, and the possibility of your website not being mobile-friendly.
You effectively shut yourself out from more than 50% of all searches, which is devastating for any business.
And I’m afraid that this trend isn’t going to stop any time soon, so better get used to it. Adapt for smartphones, because your competition certainly will.
Maximize Local Keywords
A local business should strive to implement as many local keywords as possible in order to maximize outreach. This allows you to spread out your area of effect into diverging areas, if these other keywords are uncontested then it’s a bonus!
For example, if you are a baker from New York, then you would want your business to be correlated with a variety of local keywords, like:
- Bakery in New York
- New York bakery
- Best bakery in New York, etc.
Even though these keywords won’t be extremely sought after, they do offer a clean variety that will connect you to the person doing the searching.
Backlinks
Backlinks in SEO are seen as pure necessities for traditional SEO, and not very sought after for local SEO. In reality, they can be very useful for local SEO.
They improve a website’s credibility and domain authority, and both of these factors are important equally for local businesses. You should, however, have a different approach with local SEO.
Instead of just focusing on getting a higher local search engine position, you should aim to improve your internet traffic and customer base on the local level.
Making quality backlinks has proven to be a challenge for many small business owners, so try to get yourself known in the community in order to boost numbers.
Hosting and sponsoring local events is one way of achieving this, just make sure that it’s for the relevant cause that can improve your credibility and offer a higher quality local backlink.
Bottom line
That would be it for today, after seeing a few neat tricks for improving your local SEO, you can start improving your website traffic and improve your exposure in your local community. Till next time!
