What is Local SEO?
Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of activities to attract local businesses by improving your site’s search engine visibility, mainly targeting brick-and-mortar locations.
Your Business profile’s organic traffic, which is the traffic that comes automatically from a search engine, improves gradually via local customer searches if you practice local SEO.
The Search engines mostly count on indications such as local content, profile pages, links, and citations so as to facilitate the locals with the needy information.
You can use Local SEO to largely position your products and services among Local customers.
How to have an Local SEO Strategy that Works for Business ?
1. Optimize for Google My Business
Listing in Google My Business helps your Business profile meet most of Google’s requirements.
For proper optimization, all you need to do is create and verify a Google My Business page, add Google posts to your account, facilitate your customers for online review sharing, give authentic responses to reviews and also specify a location.
Once Google marks your Business as authentic, your business is rewarded with a coveted sidebar space in Google local search by the search engines.
2. Engaging in Social Media and adding posts to Google My Business
In modern days, sharing your business profile on Social media has been considered to be an important aspect of businesses.
Hence, it’s recommended to align social and organic search by sharing your Google My Business page on social media.
3. Ensuring consistency of Name, Address and Phone number(NAP)
You must ensure that your customer, as well as search engines, reach you easily by setting up your NAP as a crawlable HTML text only.
This means the NAP must be in the header or footer of your business profile and not within the images as images are not crawlable by search engines.
4. Optimizing online directories and Local Citations
Citations, that is, online mention of the NAP of your business profile which occurs on Local business directories help your business to reach local businesses thus affecting local search engine rankings.
You should ensure consistent citations across the most trusted data aggregators or map data providers like Express Update, Neustar Localeze, Foursquare, and Factual.
5. Remove Duplicate business listings
Removing Duplication and discrepancies such as misspellings, abbreviations, lack of suite number, or malicious phone numbers don’t let Google authenticate your business which might obstruct your business from getting displayed in local searches.
6. Performing local SEO audit
A local SEO audit or inspection of your business would give you a rough idea of the points to be worked upon for achieving your goal.
Local SEO Audit includes :
- Appearance and authenticity of your Google My Business in SERPS
- Crawlability of your site
- SEO elements on your site for higher ranking
- checking Citations
- Matching up your site with your target in terms of inbound links
- Content designing and positioning
7. Improve your internal linking structure
Internal Linking improves your website navigation, assists with information architecture and website hierarchy, and distributes page authority and ranking power among pages.
8. Optimize URL, Title tag, Header, Meta description, Content
In order to organize geo-targeted or location-based content, you must use high-volume keywords in URL, title, header, meta description, and body and grab a new opportunity to get tracked in Search Engine Result Pages(SERPs).
9. Add Location Pages to your Website
If your business is spread over various locations, you need to create Location pages avoiding duplicate content and each containing your NAP along with a Google Map of your business profile, store hours, unique store descriptions, parking details, and testimonials from satisfied customers
10. Create Local Content
Your site must contain local or industry news, educational content, and promote local industry gatherings so as to attract local audiences.
11. Ensure mobile-friendliness of your Website
As 61% of the google searches are performed on mobile and people look mostly for reviews and “near me” searches, you must ensure the mobile-friendliness of your site.
12. Get Relevant Inbound links and Authority
Achieving inbound links via Sponsorships and Guest Blog posting would intimate Google about the legitimacy of your business and also raise your business authority
13. Take part in your local community
Participation in the local community, partnering with nonprofit campaigns, sponsoring an event online or offline, and appearing on local media facilitates you with press attention, brand awareness, and inbound links.
How Local SEO tools can help in Local SEO Strategy?
Local SEO tools help you improve your Local SEO Strategy by managing, tracking, and optimizing your Local SEO efforts.
These tools not only improve your presence but also engage your audience.
These tools track rankings, provide competitor’s insight, assist in identifying and also building Search engine optimized keywords, and analyze the business performance.