Local SEO is an important component of any business’ digital marketing strategy. It’s especially critical for businesses that operate in a single geographic location or serve a particular region. But even if your business doesn’t have physical locations, you can still benefit from local SEO if you have a website that ranks highly in organic searches.
There are a few different types of local SEO strategies that you can use to get your business ranking higher in search results. The main ones are improving your Google My Business profile, optimizing your website content, getting cited in local directories, and collecting customer reviews.
The Google My Business profile is a central hub for managing your business’ online presence across multiple platforms. It’s where you can manage your business information and online listings, including your Google Maps listing and Facebook page. Having a well-optimized My Business profile will help you rank higher in search results and attract more customers to your business.
To optimize your business for local search, you need to include relevant geographic keywords in your site’s content. This includes the title tag, header tags, meta description, and body copy of your pages. To find the right keywords to target, you can use Google Keyword Planner. It will provide you with a list of relevant search volume and competition data for keywords that are specific to your area.
Another way to uncover and capitalize on local intent is to create individual product pages for each of your products or services. This will allow you to add information like store hours, parking/transit information, promotions, and testimonials from satisfied customers that are specific to each of your locations. This will also help you optimize for the “near me” search queries that are often made by prospective customers looking for a specific product or service.
While on-page SEO is a vital aspect of local SEO, it’s also important to work on off-page SEO as well. This involves getting cited in local directories, social media, and other third-party websites. This can be done through PR outreach, partnerships, scholarships, and guest blogging. It’s important to get high-quality citations from websites that are trusted by Google.
In addition to citations, another key factor in local SEO is having consistent NAP (name, address, phone number) across the web. This means making sure your business information is correct and consistent on all of the major citation sites like Yelp, Bing Maps, and Facebook. Google will look at your NAP consistency when ranking local search results, so it’s crucial to make sure that your business information is accurate and up-to-date on all of these platforms.