Get found locally by following these 10 local SEO tips. See more website traffic and get more customers in-store to grow your business.
Businesses of all kinds need a strong online presence to optimize their success. Customers seek information online even if they plan to visit a physical location near them for the products and services they are seeking. That’s why these local SEO tips are indispensable.
Using local SEO, businesses can appear in relevant search results in their area to drive in-store traffic. Small businesses looking to get found and grow their business should review these SEO steps to stand out and gain more organic traffic both online and in stores.
As you read through these tips, you might start feeling overwhelmed. Relax and take it easy. You don’t need to do all these items at once. Choose to do one per week to work toward a better online presence by year’s end or work with an expert who can help lighten the load in attracting local traffic.
If your business is already listed on Google Maps, you’ll need to claim it. Otherwise, you can set it up on Google with a Google My Business listing. Here, you can outline your business hours, contact information, specials, updates and more. Try to make your profile as complete as possible for best results. Including photos and proof of your business will validate it for potential customers considering solutions for their questions.
First and foremost, you must list your business address on your website. Ideally, it should be in the footer so that it is available on every page. That address should match your Google My Business listing to make it simple for search engines to connect the information.
Now look for natural ways to incorporate your location into your website. For example, your page title might be “Chicago-style Pizza in Fort Lauderdale.” Or “10 Tips to Roofing in Boise, Idaho.” That way, you’re getting long-tail keywords on your website that specifically relate to your community.
Don’t overdo it though. Some businesses use their city name on every page in multiple places. This is the equivalent of keyword stuffing and something you’ll want to avoid.
Lawyers in a specific city know those laws and regulations like no one else. Accounting firms in rural areas are skilled at helping farmers manage complex financial situations. Now you need to showcase that in your content.
Tailor content to both your audience and your area. For example, a roofing company wouldn’t write content in Fort Lauderdale about how winter weather impacts roofing materials because they know that content would only be relevant to more northern customers.
Including your city name or state name where relevant can help strengthen your local SEO while serving your customers.
High-quality backlinks are so valuable for SEO. But when you’re optimizing your website for local SEO, you’ll also want to consider finding local backlinks. Including your business address and phone number can further enforce that information to boost your SEO. Consider directories and local listings to help boost your visibility. Plus, those links will drive traffic to your website when people in your area are looking for businesses related to your products and services.
The higher and better your reviews are, the better your rankings will likely be. And good reviews will help instill confidence in prospects when they do find you online. Consider sending follow-up emails to customers requesting a Google review. You can accept reviews on many websites, such as Yelp or Facebook, but other platforms tend to throttle reviews based on whether you’re paying for ads, which means those reviews might not be as valuable.
When encouraging reviews, you should also be out on those platforms responding to the reviews. That way, you show how much you care about your customers and their needs.
Mobile optimization is essential for SEO in general. So, it’s no big surprise that if you want to win at local SEO, you need to optimize your website for mobile traffic. Evaluate how well your website shows up on devices of all sizes.
Run speed tests for mobile devices to see how quickly your website loads and how smooth the user experience is. Do your best to use conversational language and natural keyword usage.
Evaluate whether your text scales and stacks well on mobile or if crucial elements are lost in the process of shrinking the site down. You want to be sure you’re welcoming all visitors well and not just those on desktops and laptops.
Schema markup or structured data markup provides more context for search engines about your website. Using this will help communicate your business location, hours and other crucial data to search engines. It also gives information about your products and services. That way, you never miss out on an opportunity for visibility.
Social media is an essential element in SEO now. Google has shared that it evaluates the content that businesses post on social channels and uses that information to understand expertise within that business’s industry.
Make sure your social media is updated regularly. Creating a content plan can aid in avoiding downtimes on your social channels.
Internal links serve many purposes, including website navigation, clearer hierarchy and distributed page authority throughout your website. Evaluate whether your pages have clear links between them and add links where needed to optimize this aspect of your website.
For businesses with multiple locations, having a separate page for each will help provide clarification about why you have multiple addresses listed for your website. On your location pages, you can also clarify information about parking or what the user will find at each store if you keep different inventory or have various experts available at different locations, such as in the case of law firms with multiple locations with differing lawyers available at each.
The most important thing to be aware of when creating location pages is to avoid duplicate content. So don’t just take one page and copy it and update the address on that page. That will make search engines suspicious of this content. You want each page to be very specific to the community it serves.
Adding a Google Map to your location pages can help too as it further reinforces the information presented there.
Businesses seeking help optimizing their local SEO should turn to New Light Digital. The experts at New Light Digital have helped others accomplish similar goals and are ready to aid your business in completing the necessary steps to start seeing more local traffic. Schedule a free consultation now to get started.
Further reading:
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