Today, word-of-mouth publicity and local advertisements are great mediums to attract customers from your local area. However, online search is equally impactful, if not more. In fact, a recent social media Today report highlighted that almost 97% of search engine users search online to find a local business within their geography.
So if you are a business that does not rank in local search results, you could be missing out on valuable traffic and new customers. In other words, integrating local SEO practices in your strategy could be the key to staying relevant as well as competitive while growing your business.
But if you are fairly new to this local SEO game, this guide will help you identify as well as understand some essential local SEO solutions to map the landscape better. So let’s dive right in.
Local SEO: A Comprehensive Guide
To understand what local SEO is, it is important to understand what local search actually signifies. Local search is when your potential consumer searches for your businesses, products, services or any other information relevant to one specific geography. They could be searching for an upcoming concert in their city or other services or stores like bakeries.
For example, when you look up the keyword: concerts in mumbai, you’ll be shown a list of events happening in the upcoming week and month.
Similarly, if you search for the keyword: Bakeries near me, you’ll be shown the nearest bakeries in your area sorted according to their popularity.
A local search is a powerful tool for small businesses. Today 46% of Google searches look for local information. If your business is not optimised for local search, you can be missing out on potential customers who are already searching for you.
In short, local SEO is vital for your business to be relevant in the race. To understand how to optimise your business for local SEO, we have curated a comprehensive guide that offers deeper insights into local SEO.
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Get Started NowOptimise The Google Business Profile
Just like every blog post and content must be optimised, your Google Business listings also require the same attention. Establishing a local listing for every business location is the first vital step to gaining local visibility. However, that’s just the beginning.
Google My Business Listing
Appear in Google maps results and the local results with the following:
- Listing additional categories to your locations.
- Adding relevant local attributes to define the way your business operates along with its characteristics.
- Optimising landing pages with references to the attributes specified in the Google Business Profile.
Similarly, the number of reviews, scores, and engagement with reviews also have an effect on your rankings. Leveraging online directories, including Yelp and Foursquare, is also a beneficial practice to reach a wider audience. These directories act as a great resource to leverage.
Traffic from your local listing can be enhanced through the following activities:
- Promoting business with Google Post
- Answering Questions
- Optimising Google Business Descriptions
- Replying to Reviews
- Updating relevant & quality Imagery
Do Local Keyword Research
Keyword research for local SEO demands a simpler and more straightforward outlook. Some locations and cities are likely to have more competitive keywords than others; there is usually a much smaller competitor pool for local SEO keywords.
A simple formula to brainstorm a list of seed keywords is: [product or service] in [location]
By combining the products and services with the business locations, a seed list can be created.
For example-
It is advisable to focus on your seed list of the actual locations. By optimising your listings, you are conveying to Google the local signals required to show your location to the searcher in the right geography.
Optimise Local Landing Pages
One of the beneficial practices for local SEO is setting up a local landing page for every location. Optimising each page with its set of local keywords and adding NAP information to the content is a good SEO practice. Some of the significant local SEO practices involve
- Writing geo-targeted content for every web page.
- Identifying and utilising the traits to make each location unique.
- Adding success stories from local customers or highlighting positive reviews.
- Updating transit and parking instructions along with other location-specific details.
- Ensuring each landing page is unique and useful.
Update Online Directories And Citations
For local SEO, consistency is the key. So, ensure that all the information in directores is updated. Also, verify the citations wherever necessary. By verifying that all the citations are consistent, as a business, you can ensure that data aggregators distribute accurate and updated information. It is also advisable to check for discrepancies such as misspellings, excess use of abbreviations, and lack of or wrong phone number.
If Google is not able to determine which information listed for your business is correct, the chances are it will not show your business among the searches in search results. Hence it is advisable to remove any duplicate listings in the online directories. And while you’re at it, get a Chamber of Commerce membership in your community to gain an external inbound link specific to your area.
Submit Your Website To Local Directories
Ranking your website on top of the search engine result page and enjoying the traffic that comes with a top ranking, are goals dependent on multiple factors.
One element that certainly tops the list is having as many quality links pointing to your site.
Do you have any idea about what’s making your competitor’s website so popular with the search engine? It’s the backlinks they are getting from authentic sources. This is what it takes to compete with them.
Submitting your site to directories plays a vital part in the overall philosophy of generating quality backlinks that point back to your site. Before you submit your website to the directories, consider the following:
- Make sure that your website is completed.
- Fix all broken links, if any.
- Find the right category to list your website.
- Submit the correct URL of the website.
- Write an acceptable description for your site.
- Make use of the official title of your website.
You can also reach out to top-rated link building services in Mumbai, who can help you build a genuine backlink profile for your business website.
Get More Reviews
Online reviews are an integral trust signal for Google. Reviews, factor in, heavily in the brand’s search engine rankings on vertical search engines like Yelp, Trivago, Glassdoor, and others.
While, as a business, you may not be able to control which reviews are displayed in the SERPs, you can’t just “turn off” the bad reviews. However, you can control the narrative and offer a more holistic view on the local SEO level to ensure that the voice of your happy customers is the loudest.
Every business has a huge swath of happy customers along with a smaller portion of unhappy ones. You can mobilise the voices of your happy customers to dwarf the impact of negative reviews that are likely to pop up.
How to get more reviews from happy customers?
For example-
- Offer your potential customers a call to action to review your business on Google My Business and other review sites.
- Add the CTA on receipts and at the register.
- Get your local staff to ask for reviews, especially when they go over and beyond to serve the customer. All you need to do is ask!
Get Featured On Local List Posts
The more you participate and are visible in your local community, the more digital PR your brand will receive.
Some of the significant ways to get featured on these platforms include, partnering with a nonprofit organisation on a campaign, volunteering for a day in the organisation, sponsoring events, or appearing in the local media will help your brand to earn press, brand awareness, as well as inbound links.
However, these exclusive features pieces should be relevant to your industry, and your campaigns should send the right signals to the domain to gain the right visibility.
Keep Your NAP Information Up-To-Date
An acronym for Name, Address, Phone Number, NAP highlights data related to the business along with the contact data published related to the business across the web. These are also referred to as local citations, as they list information about the business.
Consistency of the NAP data is vital for search engines as it is used to confirm the authenticity of the information shared by the business as well as to verify if the location was accurate, thus declaring it a fit to push higher rankings. While NAP consistency does not hold the same strength in local search or map rankings, it is still worth updating the local citation data to ensure that the business information is up-to-date and consistent.
Key Highlights
- Local SEO helps businesses with the physical locations compete on a local level, even if there are hundreds or thousands of locations.
- Like traditional SEO, keyword research and competitive analysis are vital to building a strong local SEO strategy.
- Auditing and optimising citations help in ensuring consistency across Google My Business, Google Maps, and Apple Maps.
- Local SEO depends on getting reviews, fostering local relationships, and devising local content in a scalable manner.
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Enhance your Business Visibility with Local SEO
Local SEO plays an integral part in any SEO strategy for local businesses. Local SEO helps you in gaining visibility and to be found by your audience when they are searching for you online. While there are plenty of ways to optimise your local SEO, following the above-mentioned local SEO tips will help in gaining better clarity on how to earn more search visibility. With the right local SEO strategy, you can embark on your journey to gain brand recognition and authority.
As a reputed and leading local SEO agency in Mumbai, Capsicum Mediaworks, offers comprehensive local search engine optimization services to businesses globally. Backed by a team of SEO experts, our professionals assist you with conversion-driven local SEO services to ensure that your business listing ranks high in SEO local search queries and helps you achieve your revenue growth.
Did you know that Local SEO is only one part of the huge SEO umbrella term known as Off-Page SEO activities. You can learn more about local seo and how it factors into the grand scheme of things with our comprehensive SEO checklist.
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