According to a study conducted by GoGulf, 46 per cent of Google searches constitute local searches. Another survey report by HubSpot states that 72 per cent of people who performed a local search visited the store within five miles radius. Be it a local ice cream shop or an omnipresent brand, it is necessary to make your mark on Google’s search engine result pages to tell the world that your service is at their disposal. It is all about optimising your website so that you appear on local search result pages and thus have more people walking into your store.
In order to ensure that your business stands out, local SEO strategies are imperative. Investing in your local SEO will help you improve your local search rankings and, in turn, increase your exposure. In this article, we will go over the tips for improving your local SEO.
- Make Sure Your NAP is Consistent
In case you didn’t know what your NAP is, it stands for “name, address, and phone number”. To improve your local SEO, you will want to make sure that your NAP is consistent everywhere your website is listed. You can use specific software to keep track of your NAP which will contact the site owner of a domain whenever there is an inconsistency and will request the correction of the inconsistency. NAP is part of an on-page signal, so discrepancies in these details will put off your potential customers.
- Use Google My Business Listing
We would be remiss if we did not admit how important Google My Business page is to improve local SEO. This is one of the easiest ways to show up on relevant local searches and improve your local SEO. Make sure all the information you provide on the platform are up-to-date and accurate. Follow the tips for improving your local SEO using Google My Business:
- Claim or add your listing.
- Verify your account.
- Make sure your business details are up to date – such as the opening hours and the contact information.
- Make sure to link to your website.
- It’s important to upload up-to-date images of your business that are high-quality. Try not to post anything taken on a phone.
- Encourage Customers to Leave Reviews
According to a study conducted by Moz, customer review is one of the most powerful ranking factors. Since most people use reviews to make decisions, it is extremely important to address your reviews and manage them round the clock. The number of reviews, how often you get reviews, the ratio of your positive reviews to negative ones, and so on are some of the most important criteria that will decide your local search rank. Therefore, review management is suggested as one of the best tactics in SEO for local businesses. It is also one of the best ways to maintain good client relationships. Thank people for their reviews and address bad reviews with grace.
- Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
It is a fact that most people perform their searches on phones. This means that most of your website’s visitors will be accessing it from their handheld devices. Therefore, it is important to give them the optimal experience when they do so. Do not compromise in the loading speed, the ease to use, and the overall quality of your website. You can use tools such as Lighthouse and PagespeedInsights to check your website’s loading speed.
- Focus on Localized Content
This is one of the best tactics to improve your local SEO. If area of service has something unique going on, you can tie it up with your content strategy. Talk about local news, activities, and events. Create videos of charity events that you participate in. If you provide services in multiple locations, ensure that you create pages specific to each of them.
- Link Building
Link building is crucial to improving local SEO. While it takes time to build and earn organic links, it is imperative to get to the point where influencers feel compelled to link back to your site. Be sure to create content that isn’t all fluff, so that influencers will want to share your links. Work on collaborations that will get you more exposure. In an effort to backlink, you can help webmasters look for and replace broken links. You can look through the webmaster to see what has broken links and offer yours as a substitute. You can also focus on backlinks from other local websites.
SEO for local business can also entail managing your image and video ranking. You will want to make sure that they are compressed and properly formatted. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get buried amidst other similar businesses. This SEO case study of how to improve your local SEO will hopefully serve you well, so you may get great results in your local SEO.