Small to Medium size businesses use local SEO to get on search engine result pages (SERP). With countless of ways to get traffic, ranking on google organically is one of the best ways to get free traffic. Local SEO focuses on appearing on SERPs in a specific location. For using this marketing strategy, your brand, products, and services will be served to local customers and leads. Essentially, local SEO is all about optimizing your online presence to captivate more business from relevant local searches. With that in mind, we will go over the top 10 local SEO tips to use to help your business be found on local searches.
1) Google My Business
This is one of the sacred and well known local SEO tips that can help your business right away. The easy way to start is with visiting Google Business Profile setup and following directions to create your profile. After you select manage now, we will share the following steps with you to setup a Google My Business profile in the next steps:
Step 1: Add a Business Name
On this step, you’ll have to add your business name into the input box. When you type in your business name, you may notice that you already may be in google listings. You will have to check the address and see if the listing is accurate to where your business is located at. Once you confirm that the address and business name is yours then you click on “claim this business” to manage this listing as your own. However, if you are not listed on Google then you click on “create a business with this name”.
Step 2: Choose Your Business Type
After you “create a business with this name”, a new window will be prompted which will look something like the image below.
On this step, Google wants to find out what kind of business you manage. If you have an online e-commerce website where people can purchase products then you select online retail. Local store selection is when you have a store that people can visit your business. For local store selection, this can be a restaurant, hair cut and salon service, or any business that provides services and products in person. Last but not least, service business is for businesses that make visits to customers. With this selection, it can be anything like plumbing, home repair, or any business that handles scheduled visits to customers. Some businesses like plumbing can be both a service business and a local store so you can select more than one option.
Selecting Online Retail
When you select online retail then Google will prompt you to enter a website.
Once you enter you’re online store then it will send you to enter a business category.
Selecting Local Store and/or Service Business
Whether you select local store or service business, you will be sent to business category. On this step, you simply select the category that best describes your business. For example, you may select plumber as a service business that goes to customers to fix their plumbing problems. You can select plumbing supply store if you have a local store that sells plumbing supplies to customers. Go ahead and press next to move to the next page.
Enter Your Business Address
Entering your business address is necessary for customers to visit your business in person. Your business will show up on Google Maps which will be helpful for customers to find your business.
Where Do You Serve Your Customers?
This step is optional and you can change and add more locations later. You’ll want to fill in where your target audience is at and what locations you will work at. Once your done with this step, you can go ahead and press next.
Add Business Phone Number
Adding a phone number is critical for customers to contact you. This includes your website as an option so you don’t have to worry about it if you don’t have one. Once your done adding a phone number, then you can go ahead and press next.
Put Your Business on the Map
This step is an agreement to terms of service and privacy policy of Google. By continuing, you will be discovered on the map by people in your area. Also, you can respond to reviews for your business. Lastly, you can manage your business details across Google.
Verify Your Business
On this step, you’ll have to enter your mailing address to verify your business. Google will sent you a physical postcard with you verification code. All you do is visit the link on your postcard, sign in to your Google account, and enter the verification code. Once you complete this step, then your business will be verified and your customers will find you on Google and Google Maps.
2) Grow You Customer Reviews and Stars
For local SEO tips, this one important especially in Google reviews. Once you have a Google My Business setup, then you have access to Google reviews and the ratings you get from customers. Besides Google, there are Yelp and Facebook reviews that. More often than not, most people have a tendency to go with a business who has a higher star rating and positive reviews. People read reviews and your reviews are one of the local SEO factors that will influence if you can make it to the top 3.
For the top 3 Mexican restaurants, you will see over 400 reviews and all of them are 4.1 stars or above. To live up to local SEO goals, you will have to ensure that you have many reviews and a higher star ratings than your competitors. Creating a rating and reviews for your business website can also give you more credibility. When you sell something online through your website, you can send out email reminders to customers about submitting a review for you.
3) Mobile Optimization
One the important tips for local SEO is to create a website that’s mobile friendly. You won’t go wrong with a website that has a favorable font size, margins, padding and limited white space on mobile. In fact, most local business rely on having a fast and responsive website. You can visit PageSpeed Insights to get a good idea on how fast your website ranks for performance and SEO for both mobile and desktop. For performance diagnostic, you will get a comprehensive evaluation and what opportunities you can take to speed up your website. Things like reducing server response time and eliminating render-blocking resources will help increase your page speed.
4) Find Local Keywords
This tip needs to be a reminder for all local businesses that finding the right keywords is critical for SEO. When you write content and use keywords on your website pages, your first step is to use keyword planner or SEMrush. An important tip to consider, find keywords that have a lower keyword difficulty. Keyword difficulty will give you a metric on how difficult a certain keyword is for ranking in the top 10 results of Google. With that in mind, you need to find keywords that have a lower keyword difficulty.
Now again, the best SEO techniques are understanding the basics of on page optimization. To start writing the content, you need to use these local keywords strategically around your home page, product pages, service pages, and articles. For example, a plumber in Chicago would only write Chicago plumber in all his service pages with enough content.
5) Collect Backlinks
Backlinks are an off-page SEO strategy that’s highly effective for growing your business online. With that in mind, your business should create quality content so others will want to link back to you. The best practice to collect backlinks is to reach out to webmasters for guest posts. Another strategy is to find broken links on websites and email them about fixing the link with one of your own articles that’s relevant to their article.
As a local business, you use your social media to engage with influencers so they can link back to you. Another example, if you are running a service business like being a plumber then you can reach out to plumbing stores. Reaching out to a plumbing store for partnership such as installing pipes and fixing plumbing problems is one of the ways you can earn a backlink to your website. Another great way to collect backlinks is to find NAP citations. For structed citations, these types of NAP citations will list your business’s name, address, and phone number. Directories such as Yelp or Facebook business are typically structured NAP citations.
Collecting backlinks will help you rank for higher keyword difficulty search terms. For example, if you’re looking to rank in the top 10 for “SEO techniques” then take a look below.
By using ahrefs keyword difficulty free checker, the estimate of 329 website backlinks are needed to rank in the top 10. To put it simply, this is one of the hardest keywords to rank for so you’ll need to start somewhere between 10 to 60 keyword difficulty.
6) Include Website Social Media Sharing
One of the most important tips for local SEO is for your business to be active on social media. This includes sharing content and promotions with your followers and customers across Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and many other social medias out there. On top of that, your website should also include social media sharing buttons so visitors can share the content themselves. Most of all, your social media helps to create a communication channel for your business and customers. All things considered, your business website should have a huge presence on social media. Ever since social media became prominent, Google and many search engines have used social media in their SEO algorithms.
7) Local Business Schema Markup
Local business schema is an important local SEO factor that will influence your rankings on local searches. With that in mind, let’s cover the basics for structing your business with schema markup. To help you get started, you should check out structured data markup helper to guide you on your schema markup. From the list of selections you see on enter tag page, you can choose local businesses or products to get started.
After you press next, you will be prompted to tag important information about your business. Information like name, image, telephone, address, days of week, opening time, closing time, reviews and more if you have this information provided on your website. Selecting the markup will help Google crawl identify important notes about your business. This data you selected will be later featured on Google search results. Once you finish tagging all the data on your specific website page the you can press create HTML. In the next page, you will select JSON-LD. Then you will copy and page the script in the head section of your HTML.
8) Add Your Service Locations and a Map
Here are two tips to optimize your business website for local SEO. First, you’ll want to include all your service locations on your contact us page or service area page. For customers, this will be convenient for finding your business around the areas you service. Next, it will help Google crawl your page and identify the physical addresses. The next tip is to add a Google Map with a marker to all your physical locations. Not only will this help with user experience. But it will also boost your local SEO with Google indexing your locations on search engine result pages.
9) Optimize for On-Page Optimization
One of the most important tips for optimizing your local SEO is to create on-page optimization. For example, the title tag is one of the most important factors in SEO rankings but sometimes it’s left behind in your SEO title. For example, let’s go ahead and type “SEO techniques” in Google to find out all the results.
As you can see, there are about 65,500,000 results for the search term “SEO techniques” on Google search. However, if we type in “intitle:” and “SEO techniques” then we will have a different result count.
As a result, you will see a much smaller result count for SEO techniques coming in at 1,680 results. What this means is that there are about 1,680 results on Google that have “SEO techniques” keyword phrase included in the SEO title tag. When working on SEO, you want to ensure that your keyword is included in SEO title. On top of that, it should also be included in your meta description, keyword density of the content, URL permalink, image alt text, and headers. Additionally, you’ll also need to do some internal linking. By having a strong on-page optimization, you will have a chance to overtake competing websites on Google.
10) Optimize for Mobile Local Voice Search
In this case, you’ll have to prioritize conversational language in your content. Target question keywords and other long-tail keywords. Optimize your content for mobile so your content can rank on mobile search engine result pages. By targeting question keywords and providing an answer, your content will be on Google featured snippets. As a result of people using their phones to use voice activation to search on Google, you’ll have to ensure that your content is good for voice search.
Local SEO Tips That Make a Difference
By fallowing these local SEO tips, your content should rank high on search engine result pages. What you need to remember is that it takes about 3 to 6 months to see measurable results. Sometimes the content will rank quicker and that will ultimately depend on how many backlinks you have. You’ll want to start by doing an SEO audit to find out what areas you can improve on and then you can use this guide as a resource for local SEO. To get a team that understands local SEO, then you should contact My Digital Marketing Help to get you on your way. You can book a call with us so we can go over your website and highlight the steps that we can do right away.
