Word-of-mouth and local advertisements may be a great way to attract customers from your area. But online search can be equally impactful, if not more. In fact, Social Media Today reports that 97% of search engine users have searched online to find a local business. And 46% of all Google searches were seeking local information.
So if a business doesn’t rank in local search results, it could be missing out on valuable traffic and customers. In other words, local SEO could be the key to staying relevant and growing your business.
If you’re fairly new to local SEO, you might have a lot of questions and you probably won’t know where to start optimizing. This guide shows you some essential local SEO solutions and helps you understand the landscape better. So let’s jump right in.
What is local SEO and why do I need it?
To understand the local SEO definition, let’s first try to understand what local search means. Local search is when someone searches for businesses, products, services or any additional information relevant to one specific location. They could be searching for “concerts near me” to find an upcoming concert in their city or “best painting service in [location]” to find a painting service nearby.
In other words, local search is more specific to a certain location compared to general Google searches. And Local SEO refers to the process of trying to optimize your online visibility to show up in those local search results.
Local SEO is crucial because it helps you:
- Boost your online visibility
- Bring in more foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location
- Attract more targeted traffic, which improves your chances of conversion
- Enhance your credibility and build trust
Organic search results vs. local snack pack
One of the ways that local SEO enhances your online visibility is through the local snack pack results. Google sorts out local search results into three sections – sponsored, snack pack and organic. While the sponsored results appear prominently at the top of search results pages with the “Ad” or “Sponsored” label, they cost money.
The snack pack results follow, appearing in a box that highlights the top three business listings related to that particular search. This shows up more prominently than organic local search results, which means there’s a better chance of visibility if you get featured in the snack pack.
And the best part is, not every local search page features sponsored results. So your business could sit prominently at the top of the search results page.
The organic results are further down, below the local snack pack results. So even if you rank on the first page of local search results, you might not show up as prominently as the businesses that manage to get featured in snack pack results.
The goal of your local SEO strategy should be to rank on the first page of organic local searches as well as in your local snack pack. This ensures optimum visibility and improves your chances of attracting targeted traffic.
11 Ways to Optimize Your Local Landing Pages
While it might feel overwhelming to create local landing pages for each of your business locations, you can use the recommendations in this section as a checklist. Once you create one optimized local landing page, creating others will be easy.
1. Incorporate Keywords in Title Tags
Title tags are critical if you want search engines to understand what is on your local pages. A title tag is an HTML element that identifies the title of a webpage. Space is limited, however. Google indexes the first 50 to 60 characters of a title tag. For local landing page title tags, include your business name, location, and a targeted keyword.
- If the keyword is already in your business name, you don’t need to repeat it: “Build-Your-Own-Pizza in Anaheim, CA.”
- If it isn’t, you’ll want to add the keyword separately: “Giuseppe’s — Pizza in Anaheim, CA.”
Below is an image of what title tags look like on Google’s SERP. As you can see, the keyword used in the search is found in both top title tags.
Action item: Think about what your customers are searching for to find your business, whether it’s “In-home caregiving services in LA county” or “Healthy vegan and vegetarian cafe in Orange, CA.” Compose your landing page title tag to reflect that intent.
2. Include Images
Images aid search engines and users in better understanding what your content is about. Images inherently help users visualize the products or services your local business offers. Images can also help your local pages’ SERP ranking if optimized for search engines.
You’ll find an example of one of Jersey Mike’s Subs local landing pages, which includes high-quality imagery.
Action item: Ensure that all images uploaded by local staff or corporate are high quality, branded, and location-specific.
3. Optimize Images for SEO via Alt Text or Tags
Alternative or “alt” tags should be applied to all images on your local landing pages. Alt tags provide text descriptions that help search engines understand the content of your images.
When you use an open-source content management system like WordPress to add an image to a web page, the tool will typically auto-generate a title tag based on the image’s filename. However, alt text is often left blank, making it essential to enter it manually.
Ideally, the text in each alt tag should be different from the other tags on that page. Optimized tags should describe the image accurately and, if relevant, should include keywords you are trying to rank for.
Action item: Add relevant alt tags or text for all images on your local pages.
4. Fix URL Structure
Landing page URLs with a UTM code like www.yourbusiness.com/pasadena%20 can lower your local landing page’s ranking. Having a clean URL — meaning a URL that uses natural language and is relatively easy for humans to read — is vital for search ranking because it:
- Ensures that all of your URLs meet Google’s usability standards.
- Provides a better user experience (UX) for your customers by giving them an idea of what content they can expect from your page.
SEO-optimized URLs for local landing pages should not contain:
- The text “index.html,” once standard on home pages
- %20 and other “special character” codes
- Uppercase letters
- Numbers like “404” or any numerical sequence that would be meaningless to your page visitors
Action item:
- Check through your location pages to confirm that all URLs are clean.
- Note the ones that need to be changed or edited.
- If necessary, modify your URL templates to ensure all URLs are human-readable.
5. Standardize Your Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP)
Local pages are the calling cards for your local stores, making it easy for consumers to get the information they seek. The information found on your local landing page has to mirror that of your Google Business Profile and other local listings. If the information differs, you risk confusing Google’s search index and your page visitors.
Sport Clips does a great job of including helpful business information on its local landing pages.
While including your name, address, phone number, and business hours is essential, having the appropriate schema markup is also necessary. Schema markup helps search engines understand the content on your pages and helps your content get indexed for voice search.
For instance, a telephone number would need the schema markup “telephone” to signify to search engines the business’ phone number. Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool is a great entry point if you’re new to schema markup.
Action item: Double-check to ensure all locations’ addresses, phone numbers, and store hours are current. You don’t want to give your consumers or search engines the wrong information!
6. Review Meta Description
Similar to title tags, meta descriptions can help your SEO efforts. Meta descriptions appear below title tags on search engines. Think of it as a 50-160 character hook to entice the reader to visit your local landing page.
In your local landing pages’ meta descriptions, you can address your location, services and offerings, and how you differ from competitors near you.
7. Be Mobile Friendly
Fifty-seven percent of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. Google’s “mobile-first” index may already be treating the mobile version of your site as the primary version for search indexing purposes.
For these reasons, your local landing pages should be optimized for mobile devices. Responsive and fast-loading sites are best from a mobile perspective but don’t rely on responsiveness. Test your pages on iOS and Android phones, and make any necessary changes to improve the UX.
These are a few UX improvements you can check for:
- The text should be large enough to be readable
- Page content should format itself neatly within the confines of the phone screen
- Navigation tools should conform to the needs of mobile users
Action item: Check if your website is mobile-friendly with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test page.
8. Ensure a Fast Loading Time
As mentioned in the previous section, fast load times are essential. Think about it: consumers are used to having everything they want instantly and will go elsewhere if your website takes too long to load on mobile or desktop.
Your local landing pages must load quickly. You can improve page speed by compressing images, caching your web pages, and reducing redirects.
Action Item: Google’s mobile speed testing tool, powered by WebPageTest.org, provides a good indicator of the overall speed of your site. Check your speed and review the recommendations for improvement.
9. Collect Plenty of Customer Reviews
According to the Moz study cited earlier, review signals also play a critical role in your local search and snack pack ranking. So having plenty of authentic reviews, particularly positive ones, could work wonders to boost your visibility in local search in addition to enhancing your reputation. That means you need to work towards collecting more authentic customer reviews for your business.
Maintain your focus on sites where Google would expect businesses to have reviews. So in addition to your website and your GMB listing, it’ll also collect reviews from consumer directories and social media. That means you should focus on collecting reviews for Facebook, Yelp, Thumbtack, Foursquare, Angie’s List, etc. depending on which ones are relevant to your business.
10. Focus on Local Link Building
According to Moz, link signals such as linking domain authority and quantity are among the top factors that influence your ranking in local searches and snack pack results. So just like with regular SEO, local SEO also requires link building to boost your link profile. However, the linking domains should be more relevant to your target location.
That means you should target authority websites in your target region. This could be anything from licensing bureaus and trade associations to the Chamber of Commerce or even .edu sites.
Partnerships, scholarships, guest posting, etc. could be excellent ways to gain valuable backlinks from local sites. For example, you can see the Connecticut College website linking back to several local establishments from its “Attractions” page.
11. Ensure NAP/Citation Consistency
Moz also found that Google considers citation signals such as citation volume and NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency in local search results. This means your information should be on major citation websites; besides GMB, think Bing Maps, Yelp and Facebook. Focus on directories that have higher domain authority than on smaller listing directories.
More importantly, make sure your business NAP is consistent across all platforms and websites. Look out for any misspellings, address and phone number discrepancies, duplicate listings and resolve them to improve your local SEO.
Ready to get local?
These are the essentials on how to take your local SEO efforts to the next level. Keep in mind that your local SEO efforts can span across various locations. And you can even apply these ideas in your SEO for multiple locations if you’re targeting more than one area. So make the most of them to enhance your online visibility in local searches and grow your business.
