Best Practices to Improve Your Local SEO Right Now
Local SEO is a crucial part of SEO or search engine optimisation for smaller companies that work on a regional, as opposed to a national level. While national SEO concentrates more on ranking in searches across the country, local SEO emphasises appearing on SERPs in a specific location. This approach is based on marketing your brand, products, and services to local leads and prospects.
Following best practices to improve your local SEO drives more website traffic, leads, and conversions since the approach is more suitable to your local customer base. From the latest research, it appears that 46% of all search traffic is local. Without local SEO, your business could be missing out on a notable amount of traffic.
Here are the top best practices to improve your local SEO right now.
1. First create a Google My Business Account
Improving your Google listing or your Business Profile is maybe the most effective way to rank higher on Google Maps as well as increase visibility in Google Search local results.
To upgrade your Business Profile on Google, make sure that you:
- Create the Google My Business account and confirm ownership of the business
- Give correct and up-to-date information
- Add your logo, hours of operation, adequate payment methods, the product or service you market, and high-quality images
- Invite users to review your business online
- Reply honestly to customer reviews
- Publish posts like announcing products, events, and special offers to your Business Profile employing the Google My Business dashboard.
2. Receive Regular Reviews from Happy Customers
Convincing your customers to leave enthusiastic reviews for your business doesn’t just improve your Google My Business presence. It also encourages more local consumers to buy from you. Studies show that 85% of customers take into consideration online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Here are some suggestions to inspire customers to leave reviews:
- Ask for the review in person after you close a sale
- Send a post-purchase email or text inviting clients to write a review. Do this only after you’ve selected them via an internal survey to assure you’re not addressing disgruntled customers
- Reply to existing reviews professionally, thanking reviewers and addressing complaints in not-so-favourable reviews
Note: Some review sites like Google states it’s fine to ask your customers for evaluations while others like Yelp discourages it.
3. Refine for Voice Search
Voice search will advance rapidly in the coming years. Hence, in local SEO, it’s essential to refine how people ask questions when they talk to their devices, as opposed to how they type their searches.
Your customers utilise more long-tail keywords when doing voice searches compared to written searches. In this case, you’ll also need to adjust the SEO of your content to match the more conversational tone of someone talking. For instance, you’ll need to consider the usual question starters like who, what, when, where, why, and how.
It’s also crucial to analyse user intent when optimising for voice, as these queries are most often made when the user needs a particular piece of information.
4. Produce Content From Local News Stories or Events
Don’t underestimate the power of authoring content that addresses or relates directly to a local problem to grab your local buyers’ attention.
Some tactics include:
- Creating blog posts based on local news stories, activities, or events
- Producing videos about charities or causes that your business supports
- Designing location-related pages on your site with high-quality local content if you market in different parts of a region
5. Optimize Your Business Website for Mobile
A study for mobile vs. desktop trends observed that the change to mobile is happening faster than expected.
Another study concluded that traffic from local searches can be incredibly productive, with a striking 75% of all mobile searches that display local intent producing in-store, offline visits within 24 hours.
This proves that you have to optimise your website for mobile to be a notable player in local SEO.
Here are some pointers to accomplish this:
- Make sure your website loads quickly, in three seconds or less
- Employ bigger fonts that are clear to read
Include images and copy with moderation, incorporating only vital information - Guarantee intuitive UI for great UX
6. Focus on Local Keywords
Your keywords should be relevant to local buyers. Google’s Keyword Planner helps you filter keyword searches based on your location, so you can see the popular search terms for a specific region. This enables you to build a list of locally relevant keywords to hone in. Once you have them, they should appear in your site’s meta content, copy, and URLs.
Also, insert indications about region-specific landmarks and hotspots in your content.
7. Update Location Pages or a Location-Specific “About Us” Page
Location pages are a necessity if your company has more than one location in an area. These pages must provide the following:
- Store hours
- Name, address, and phone number
- Customised descriptions
- Testimonials
- Promotions
- Parking availability
- Google Maps included on each location page
Be careful when you have multiple locations because you have to generate unique content for each page.
If you operate in just one location, building an “About Us” page that concentrates on local, relevant information is crucial.
8. Leverage Online Business Directories
Hotfrog, Brabys, Freefind, and YellowPages, known as online business directories, are websites, and there are many more.
Getting your business name, address, and phone number into these directories will improve visibility, but it’ll also boost your local SEO.
Your company listing should cover the following basics:
- Official business name, address, and phone number consistent across all directories
- A backlink to your website
- A detailed description of your business
9. Focus on Link Signals to Get High-Quality Backlinks
A Moz’s study indicates that link signals are the most important determinants for local pack or snack pack results and localised organic results, respectively.
It’s essential to get links to improve your local SEO, but their quality is also crucial.
Here is some advice on how to get high-quality backlinks:
- Produce high-quality content on your website, so other sites want to link to your content
- Guest blog on prominent sites with a high domain authority
- Collaborate with local influencers to get them to link back to you
10. Design a Dedicated Webpage for Each Product or Service You Provide
While it can be tempting to just gather all of your products or services together on one big page, resist this temptation. Instead, dedicate one page to each product or service you provide.
Your local SEO isn’t as powerful if you cram everything into one page because search engines will not perceive your brand as an authority in one specific area. This decreases your ranking possibilities.
If you’re a business that doesn’t have different products or services but owns multiple locations, just utilise location-based copy for each page.
Local SEO Is Now More Important Than Ever
SEO develops quite swiftly. You can never know when Google will include new features on its SERPs for local searches, but you can be sure that these changes are coming.
That’s the reason why it’s imperative to always be ahead of the game in local SEO. By following these ten best practices, you will ensure that your business takes advantage of lucrative local searches and has a strong basis when new SEO features are updated.
And if you don’t have the resources to make these adjustments, don’t hesitate to contact us to become your trusted SEO service provider.
