It’s no secret that good local SEO is essential for any business that wants its customers to find them online. But how can you improve your local SEO and exactly what is it?
In this blog post, we’ll answer those questions and more, so you can start attracting new customers and driving more business. Keep reading to learn all about how to improve your local SEO!
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website content so that you can attract more traffic from local searches. This process includes optimizing your website, social media profiles, and other online listings for your business. It’s an integral part of any small business marketing strategy.
To get started with local SEO, you can claim your Google My Business listing and start creating optimized content for your website. Include your business’s name, address, phone number (NAP), and business hours on every page of your site. And make sure your site is responsive so it looks good on all devices. Directory listings and local citation building are crucial for improving your local SEO.
Optimizing your website for local searches will improve your local SEO and your visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs), increase web traffic, and attract more customers.
Local SEO can be a bit tricky, but it’s worth it if you want to attract more customers from local searches. If you need help getting started, call the team at Cider House Media. We specialize in local SEO services.
Why Local Search Is Important
Local searches are becoming more important each day. It’s no wonder- as the internet becomes more globalized, people are looking for ways to find businesses closer to home.
Think about it – when you search on Google, the first thing that comes up is a list of businesses near you. And, if you’re searching on your mobile phone, it will even give you directions to the business!
This fact shows just how important local searches have become. If you want your business to be seen by people searching for things in your area, then you need to do local SEO.
Suppose you’re a business that relies on customers from a specific geographic area. In that case, you need to be visible in local search results. A staggering 97% of consumers looked online for local businesses in 2017, with 12% looking every day. Of those who searched, 61% called the business they found, and 59% visited the business they found.
Local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit stores within one day. 78% of local mobile searches result in offline purchases. And 18% of local searches led to a sale within one day. (source: searchengineland )
What does this mean for your business? To attract new customers and grow your business, you need to invest in Local SEO.
1. Claim and optimize GMB profile.
If you haven’t already, claiming and optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) profile should be one of your top priorities. Google My Business is a free platform that allows businesses to manage their online presence across Google Search and Maps.
By claiming and verifying your business on GMB, you’re telling Google that you’re a legitimate business and allowing your business to appear in local search results. A business profile on Google can help you attract new customers and grow your business. Claiming your business profile on Google is a sure fire way to improve your local SEO
To start, go to google.com/business and sign in with your Google account. Once you’ve claimed or created your listing, take some time to optimize your profile by providing accurate and up-to-date information about your business, including:
- Your business name, address, and phone number (NAP)
- A description of your products or services
- Hours of operation
- A link to your website
- High-quality photos
2. Optimize online directories and citations.
Make sure you have completed and claimed all of your online directory listings. These listing sites include popular sites like Yelp, Yellowpages, Superpages, Foursquare, and Amazon Alexa, as well as lesser-known but still important sites like local.com, Citysearch, and LocalPages.
One of the most important aspects of local SEO is having accurate and consistent NAP (or Name, Address, and Phone number) information across all directory listings. Consistency is critical, so ensure that your NAP information is identical on each listing.
As mentioned above, your GMB (Google My Business) listing is vital in local SEO. Ensure that your information across your online listings matches your Google Business Profile.
3. Perform a local SEO audit.
As a small business, it’s vital that you take the time to perform a local SEO audit on your website and Google My Business listing at least once a year. Doing so will ensure that your listing is accurate and complete and that your website is optimized for local search.
To get started:
Google My Business Audit – How does your Google My Business appear in the SERPs?
- Begin by auditing your Google My Business listing.
- Is the information accurate? Check that your business name, address, and phone number are correct and up-to-date.
- Add new photos and update your business description.
- Claim any unclaimed listings for your business and request reviews from customers.
Google Search Console Audit – Is your site crawlable? Does it have any errors that would hinder indexing?
On-Page SEO Audit – Are you checking all the on-page SEO boxes that help to rank?
Citation Audit – Are all your citations up-to-date in the top business directories?
Competitor Analysis – Check out what your local competitors are doing to optimize their websites for local search. How does your site compare to theirs? What are they doing that you’re not?
Website Audit – How well is your website performing?
By performing a yearly local SEO audit, you’ll ensure that your small business is visible in local search results. Good local SEO will help you attract new customers and grow your bottom line.
4. Optimize your site with local keywords.
Once you have a list of local keywords you want to rank for, the next step is to optimize your site with them. This is a longstanding local SEO tip and is just as important for local SEO in 2021 it was five years ago.
Site optimization is, of course, a whole topic on its own, but here are a few of the onsite local SEO basics.
First off, you want to make sure that your home page and any service pages contain the local keywords you want to rank for in the:
- Headings
- Title tags
- Meta description
- Body
- Footer
If you can, you should also try to incorporate your main local keyword into the URL when possible.
When incorporating keywords, make sure that you use them naturally and do not keyword stuff.
5. Improve your internal linking structure.
Internal linking is the process of connecting one page on your website to another. Internal linking can be done by using anchor text (the clickable text that makes up a hyperlink) or using an image. Internal linking is important for two main reasons:
- It helps improve your website’s information architecture.
- Makes your site more user-friendly
- It can help improve your local SEO.
Improving your website’s information architecture means making it easier for users to navigate your site and find the information they’re looking for. Improving the internal linking structure of your website will make your site more user-friendly. A well-structured website will have a hierarchy of pages. The home page is at the top, followed by category pages, sub-category pages, and finally, individual service, product, or blog pages. For the best results, each page should have five inbound links from at least five other pages on the site. A solid internal linking strategy will help Google understand what each page is about and how it fits into the overall scheme of things.
When you improve your local SEO, people will likely find your site when they search for keywords related to your business. One way to do this is to ensure that each page on your site has a good PageRank (PR). PageRank measures a page’s importance as determined by how many other websites link to it. The more links a page has pointing to it, the higher its PR will be. In turn, pages with a high PR will tend to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Thus, by improving the internal linking structure of your website, you can help improve its overall SEO and make it more visible to potential customers searching for businesses like yours online.
6. Take time to build inbound links.
Inbound links are an important ranking factor that can boost both traditional and local SEO.
Building backlinks isn’t a plug-and-play activity, but there are a few tried and tested methods you can implement. One of these is to contact people in your industry with who you have a relationship. These can include contractors, suppliers, distributors, neighboring businesses, partners, and wholesalers.
Start by making a list of these businesses. Then, optimize your process by searching for pages on their sites where you could place a contextual link. From here, you can contact the businesses on your list and suggest the link placements.
Another way you can generate contextual inbound links is through guest posting. If the businesses on your list have a blog, you can offer to create content for them that includes a link to your site.
In some cases, you can also look into building backlinks from larger sites such as Forbes.
7. Look into location pages.
Does your business serve multiple locations? If so, you want to make sure you are ranking in local searches for all of these locations.
The way to do this is by creating location pages. For instance, say you offer services in Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. Instead of having one service page that lists these locations, create a service page for each city.
These pages should be optimized for local search terms. They also need to have unique content. If you use the same content for all your location-based service pages, this will show up as duplicate content on Google and affect your page rankings and domain authority.
8. Manage your reviews.
Another Google My Business tip that is vital for good local SEO for 2021 is managing your Google reviews.
Positive reviews are inarguably good for your business reputation, and they can also boost your authority in Google’s eyes. On the other hand, bad reviews can negatively impact how Google displays your listing and site pages in search.
Of course, there is not much one can do to stop negative reviews from happening besides optimizing your customer service as much as possible. However, one thing you can do something about is the way you manage negative reviews. According to Moz’s study, responding to negative reviews with the object of resolving them is a plus sign to Google.
It shows the search engine that you are actively managing disputes, listening to your customers, and doing your best to enhance their experience with you.
Besides this, responding to negative reviews also gives you a chance to retain customers you might have lost and build relationships. It also shows other consumers that you are committed to making your customers happy.
Along with this, you can also use negative reviews to your advantage by creating content around them and incorporating common keywords in your overall SEO strategy.
In conclusion, make it a point to attend to all reviews, both positive and negative.
Lastly, don’t forget to manage reviews across all platforms and listings. Although Google reviews may have the highest weight with the search engine, it is very likely that it also factors in reviews (and your responses) on other platforms, such as Yelp, Angieslist, etc.
9. Don’t focus only on local SEO.
Our final tip in this SEO guide for 2021 is to not forget about traditional SEO. While local SEO is vital for most physically-based businesses, traditional SEO is still important.
For one, Google itself has confirmed that rankings in organic SERPS are a factor in local SEO.
What’s more, a lot of the components of traditional SEO can derail local SEO if they are not implemented.
For instance, page speed optimization is a key player in general SEO. If a consumer lands on your site through a local search, but the page does not load, guess where they are going to head? Probably off your site and on to your competitor’s.
As consumers move increasingly online, local SEO has never been more important than right now in 2021. Now that you’re armed with these 12 top local SEO tips, it’s time to implement them and boost your business in local searches.
