If you run a business with a physical location aiming to gather customers, Local SEO is what you need to take charge of the local search rankings and increase online visibility. It’s essential that you constantly be updated with the best SEO techniques. To help you achieve your goal, here’s a list of 9 useful secrets.
- Building a Citation Profile
It’s important to build a strong citation profile in order to be listed on quality industry and city specific citation sources. Before compiling your citation profile, research the common keywords associated with your industry and location as well as the organic results recurred for business listing sites. Once you’ve obtained this info, reach out to the listing sites to get your business listed. From there, make your business standout by creating citations based on the research you did on keywords associated with your location and industry to attract your audience. When creating the citation, highlight the value of your services, core values and what distinguishes your company from the competition in order to make your business sound irresistible.
- Update your Citations
It’s always important to keep the data on your listings consistent in terms of structure and information. Also, strategize ways to earn links from local websites to increase your local relevancy. This greatly increases the chances of improving your local rankings, citation and trust flow. Try to avoid using abbreviations as this will lead to confusion with Google.
- Engage with viewers
One of the best ways to engage viewers is to respond to their reviews regularly. Reviews can increase your local visibility too, therefore encourage visitors to leave reviews. By doing this, you can create an ongoing relationship with repeated visitors by thanking them for their feedback and prompting them to use your brand. It’s important to be proactive when interacting through reviews, both positive and negative, in order to address complaints and establish customer satisfaction is your #1 priority. Remind customers to review your company through email, placing signs around your store, and setting up review landing pages. Don’t post false reviews since they’ll have a negative impact on your local search visibility once it’s revealed to be fake.
- Make the review process easy
In order to secure reviews easily for customers, create a URL to redirect them to a review form under your domain as well as include as a link in a friendly email request. Utilize resources to secure offsite reviews and generate useful citations to increase exposure and enhance your Google Business listing via Critic reviews. These appear on local search engine result pages, therefore providing you a competitive edge and produce click-throughs to boost your ranking.
- Creating Engaging Content
To improve your local SEO, your content must be extremely engaging while incorporating relevant keywords. Creating engaging content will increase your local rankings, especially with correct internal linking to your main pages. It’s important to have high-quality pieces of content throughout your website to increase traffic and SEO.
- Easy Link Opportunities
The first step to linking local building campaigns is by pinpointing opportunities with existing relationships, local sponsorships and volunteering opportunities to link with and win within search engine result pages. It’s important to have a strong base of easy-to acquire local links, however don’t have them all point to your homepage. Have them link to specific pages on your website that you want to increase traffic to.
- Understand Your Audience
It’s crucial to understand who your audience is and how to endlessly attract them to your website. Without an audience, there’s no one to promote your business and its services through social media or their website. Whenever someone on the internet finds intriguing content, they can’t help but share the material with their friends, family or website followers. To maintain your audience, you must understand them
- Conduct a Gap Analysis
To bridge the gap between your competitors and yourself, it’ll be helpful to conduct an analysis in order to optimize existing content, developing new content and expanding content on existing links. The analysis will help you determine which keywords have been used the most and the range of its specific usage.
A useful tool for gap analysis is SEMRush for its Domain vs. Domain. To conduct the analysis, first export the keyword lists belonging to a selected local competitor. You can repeat the process to get an export of another local competitor as well. Next, export the keywords associated with your local business. Afterwords, determine the areas you need to improve on with SEO.
- Local Means Local
Keyword of Local SEO is Local, meaning you’re postal address must be located in the actual area you want to rank in on search results. Most people assume their site will still rank within a radius of 50 miles in an area they’re not present, however it won’t work and may receive negative feedback based on the fact that you’re not in the location.
