How To Optimize For Local SEO
This is your goal with local SEO efforts. What you are doing is targeting your neighbors and their friends with this SEO strategy. In other words, you are reaching out to your local community who are busy trying to find businesses near them. This is why you must learn how to optimize for local SEO.
This means you have to change your SEO strategy just a bit to make sure you are getting your message to your local audience. To help you do that we have put together this handy little local SEO guide.
It gives you tips, strategies, and factors to consider and implement into your local SEO strategy.
Local SEO Factors – How To Optimize For Local SEO
What these factors do is tell you which ones are used to help your local ranking. Keep in mind that while there are differences in these factors in comparison to regular SEO factors, you still need to have links and good on-page SEO habits.
- My business signals – Categories, business title keywords, location.
- External Loc. Signals – IYP, NAP, Citation consistency.
- Link signals – Inbound anchor text, linking domain authority, etc.
- Review signals – Number, speed, diversity.
- Social signals – Google+, Twitter followers, Facebook likes etc.
- Behavioral signals – Click-throughs, check-ins, etc.
SEO For Local Businesses
One way to boost your local business is to make sure you are practicing good local SEO strategies for local businesses.
Here are some good tips and strategies that show you how to optimize for local SEO presence:
1. Using Internet Company Profile Services
These services include creating a page on Google My Business, Yellow Pages, or similar websites. Just make sure your information is correct and up-to-date. You want to make sure the local people can find where you are. A service such as YEXT can help you do this with ease and comes highly recommended.
After you double-check your vital business information, then create top-quality content to attract people’s attention. Make they are curious about your business and products.
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2. Homepage And MetaData
Make sure your homepage and meta tags, descriptions, and titles are all upgraded to meet good on-page SEO strategies and tips. It doesn’t matter if these items are used in ranking criteria or not. They still can impress your visitors and get them to click on your listing.
3. Create Separate Pages
Forget trying to put a lot of information on as few web pages as possible. It won’t work and probably confuse your visitors. Create separate pages for each of your products and services. That way your visitors can find what they want easier.
Also, if you have multiple locations for your business, make sure each one has its own page or website. When looking for a business near them, they do not want to read about your location in another town far away
4. Name, Address, Phone Number Consistency (NAP)
It does no one any good if you have different contact information on different web pages and websites. Inconsistent information is a turn-off and will not attract the right visitors to your website. This will also confuse Google as they expect all of your information to be correct.
It is not hard to write the code for this but if you still do not want to do it, make sure your webmaster does it right.
5. Social Media Presence
If you haven’t already done so, find the best social media outlets and create a business page. This helps your local community find you faster and can bring you more reviews and likes to help boost your rankings.
You do not have to post a lot of information on these sites or do it frequently. Just as long as you have a presence you are helping locals find your business, services, and products.
6. Build Local Reviews
The more good things local people say about you the better. You cannot improve on word-of-mouth advertising. It is one of the most effective methods of helping your business be a success.
Of course, you want to make sure you get more good reviews than bad. Those reviews can be found on Google, Yelp, Facebook, and other internet sites. Providing instructions on your website to help your customers leave good reviews is a smart move to make.
7. Build Your Local Link Sector
The more local links you have the better your internet presence. Each link does not have to be found on authoritative websites only. You can use those websites that talk about your interests as well.
Don’t forget to get local citations either. These will help make you and your website a trusted place to go for products, services, and information.
8. Avoid Spam
The return on your investment (ROI), is just not worth the effort. You may also turn off quite a few locals and they will avoid your business like the plague.
9. Improve Your Local Content
Show that you have an interest in your community. Provide top-quality local content so your neighbors can build trust in you and your business. Upgrade keywords to help bring people to your website and your local pages.
10. Write For Humans
Search engines, SEO strategies, etc., are not going to come to your business and spend money. Write your content for your target audience and make it interesting. You are doing local SEO, so you want your content to attract local interest.
Make sure your local SEO strategies focus on dealing with the searches, issues, and products your neighbors are looking for and needing answers to. It is your neighbors that will come into your store and spend their money, make sure you are giving them what they need.
Some Final Words
Using local SEO tactics and methods just takes a little fine-tuning of your website. It also takes a little adjustment to where you do your on and off-page SEO. These adjustments are not hard to do and take only a little amount of time to create and implement.
But making these adjustments to your SEO campaign will pay off in the long run. With a little patience and good customer service, you should see an upswing in customer traffic. Targeting your local audience is a sure way to provide a good foundation for your business and Internet presence. How to optimize for local SEO and rank in the local Google map are ways to improve the traffic to your website and brick and mortar.
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