Focusing your SEO efforts on local markets helps bring down your scope to something more manageable; smaller audiences tend to trust and support local businesses more readily than large ones.
An essential aspect of local SEO is optimizing your online presence through Google My Business, citations and listing management on other websites and directories. Online reviews also play a crucial role, with 81% of consumers reading reviews before making purchasing decisions.
Keywords
Keywords are an integral component of local SEO as they allow businesses to appear in geographically targeted search results. To identify keywords relevant to your business, start by considering how people would search for products or services you provide; conduct online research using tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest; or look at competitors’ websites and Google listings for ideas.
Once you’ve identified some local keywords, it’s time to optimize your website around them. Make sure that both your homepage and other pages contain these terms along with geographic modifiers (like city name or region), which will help search engines recognize that you’re local business and connect you with potential customers in your region.
Local Business Listings
Local business listings are online portals where you can register your business and provide details such as your name, address, phone number and website – plus images and descriptions of services or products offered. They’re essential components of a local SEO strategy as they allow customers to easily locate you; also important is making sure all business listings are accurate and up-to-date.
Listing your business in multiple online directories is an effective way to boost its local SEO. While these directories may not provide backlinks directly back to your website, they can still help boost its rank on search engines by showing that your company is reliable and accurate. Furthermore, local business listings provide an ideal place for including keywords that your target audience might use when searching for businesses similar to yours.
Local Website Optimization
Local business owners seeking optimal results should optimize their websites by crafting an About Us and location pages that raise search engine antennae, are mobile friendly, free from errors or malware and meet other criteria.
Encourage customers to leave reviews for your business as part of your local SEO strategy. Remember that people tend to trust businesses with high reviews more, so encouraging positive ones with signage and follow-up emails is crucial for customer trust and business growth.
Additionally, if you own a website, adding schema markup should help Google better understand and display your information during relevant searches. Hall Analysis offers an invaluable tool that will walk you through this process; once complete you should add it to the Location and About Us pages as well. Lastly, establish relationships with local business associations, Chamber of Commerce websites, or.edu sites by building links from them.
Local Content
Every piece of content produced by local businesses provides them with an opportunity to establish a connection with the communities they serve, whether that means website pages, blog posts or evergreen pieces aimed at satisfying searcher needs in their neighborhood or near them.
Offsite content marketing includes interviews or features of your company on third-party sites; video is another effective means of showing off the quality of the business.
Events held locally provide another avenue of locally relevant content, while stories that appear in local news provide yet another. Responding to reviews – both positive and negative – is another component of local content strategy which can build trust as well as improve SEO rankings. Just don’t go overboard by offering incentives or asking people for reviews in bulk – that could backfire and damage rankings instead of showing that your service cares about its community.