5 Important Tips to Improve Your Local SEO Optimization

Local SEO is significant to small and medium businesses that are competing with bigger brands. It requires targeted and strategic measures to ensure your business has visibility for searches in your location.

Whether your business has a physical location or it’s virtual, optimizing your local search is one of the ways to stay ahead of the competition. In fact, according to a 2017 study by RewiewTrackers, 35% of all searches are local. With all that traffic, still more than half of the small and medium businesses are not optimized for it.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a strategy of increasing your online presence and visibility in your geographic location and consequently rank high on the search engine results.

While general SEO focuses on optimizing your website and pages to rank on national search results, local SEO targets SERPs of a specific location. This strategy works to market your brand and products as well as raise awareness of your business to the local customers.

Difference Between Local and Organic Results

Both local and organic SEO improve your rankings on the search results.

What’s the difference?

Local results are results of a search in a certain location. When a user searches for a product + location, the search engine knows the user is interested in that particular location and will, therefore, output the local, optimized results of the search.

However, the search engine may also assume local intent in some searches. For instance, if you search ‘coffee shops’ the engine will assume local intent and output local results.

Organic results, on the other hand, do not have a demographic location. When you’re searching for information like ‘how to make coffee’, the results you get are not location-based. Search engines use many factors to rank sites including keywords, internal and external links, among others.

Search engines include Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Internet Explorer among others. However, most searches are on Google which has more than 85% of the market share.

Benefits of Local SEO

• Increases traffic, leads, and conversions of your business
• Results appear above organic results giving you more visibility
• Helps connect your business to clients who are looking for your products around your area
• Local searches have been found to end up in the customer purchasing your products compared to organic searches
• Reviews left by other customers establish credibility
• Cheaper compared to paid ads
• Builds your business’s online visibility in your area

Initial Steps of Building Your Local SEO

Make your website mobile-friendly

For starters, you need to make sure that your site is easily accessible by mobile users. That’s because more than 75% of local mobile searches result in in-store shopping, according to Acquisio. You can check if your site is mobile-friendly using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Create a Google My Business (GMB) Account

For your business to gain visibility in the local searches, you have to optimize your Google listing, that is, your Business Profile. You do this by creating a Google My Business account here then optimize your profile from there.

You’ll be required to provide your address, exact location, the category of your business, phone number, and website, then verify your listing.

Optimize your profile further by providing your working hours, more categories, a photo (usually taken on your business premises), and any other relevant information.

Most Effective Practises

After setting up the basics, you can now continue to implement these most effective local SEO practices.

Optimize the Local Keywords

The keywords you use should be relevant to the local searches. When researching for keywords to use, you can use tools such as Google planner, look up for ideas on Craigslist, see what keywords your competitors are using to rank, etc

Local Citations

These are local online mentions of your business. They usually show the business name, address, and phone number, a.k.a NAP.

If your NAP information is consistent, it will verify the one on your GMB and help rank in both local and organic searches. Ensure it is correct and build more relevant citations in your local business directories and community hubs.

Content Optimization

You will need to optimize your content by using the best SEO practices such as keywords in the meta title, H1, and catchy descriptions.

Your other pages such as the landing pages, homepage, and sales page should also be optimized. Try to structure your site in a way that it will rank in your local landing page searches and while you’re at it make sure your content is relevant and attractive. Read about page SEO practices here.

Building Quality Backlinks

According to Moz, links play a major role when it comes to local results ranking. Characteristics of both the inbound and the outbound links can greatly affect your site’s ranking.

Therefore, you should engage in building quality backlinks to your site. Links from sites with high domain authority are priceless while those from suspected spammy sites will drag down your site rankings. You can build links by link intersecting and guest posting.

Great Reviews

Encourage your customers to write reviews and make sure you reply to them including those on other platforms like Facebook.

How to Avoid Mistakes in Local SEO

You can avoid rookie mistakes by:

• Setting up a GMB account for your business
• Researching and using the right local keywords and avoid stuffing
• Ensuring your content is high-quality and optimized
• Ensuring your NAP information is correct.
• Setting up your website to be mobile-friendly
• Providing quality service to your customers to avoid bad reviews
• Link building

Other Important Information

Local SEO is not a one-time thing. Google ranking algorithms change with time and your competitors continue to improve theirs. To keep your site ranking and visible, ensure your SEO is up to date by performing a local SEO audit.

Conclusion

Local SEO is an important process in your SEO strategy. To keep your business visible and help your local audience find you, keep your local SEO optimized.