If you run a business with a physical location aiming to gather customers, taking charge of your Local SEO is what will help you gain local search rankings and increase online visibility. In this digital age, it has become essential to constantly be updated with the best SEO techniques. To aid you in achieving this goal, we’ve put together a list of 9 secrets for perfecting your Local SEO.
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Build a local 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 of business listing sites where they appear.
Once you’ve obtained this info, reach out to the listing sites to get your business listed. From there, make your business stand out by creating citations based on the research you did on keywords associated with your location and industry. Targeting the right keywords is essential for attracting the appropriate audiences. When creating citations, highlight your business’s core values, the value of your services, and what distinguishes you from the competition; the goal of these citations is 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. Many consumers may learn about your business through these citations, so keeping all information up to date is vital. You should also strategize ways to earn links from local websites to increase your local relevancy. Having multiple resources reaffirming your reputation will increase the chances of improving your local rankings, citations, and trust flow.
Pro tip: Avoid using abbreviations, if possible, as this will lead to confusion with Google.
Increase engagement with online reviewers
One of the best ways to engage users is to respond to their reviews regularly. Reviews can increase your local visibility too, therefore encouraging more 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—this should be your #1 priority. Remind customers to review your company through email, place signs around your store, and set up review landing pages. One big mistake some businesses make is posting false reviews; these will end up having a negative impact on your local search visibility once it’s revealed to be fake.
Make the review process easy
In order to secure customer reviews more easily, create a URL to redirect them to a review form under your domain. You can include this URL as a link in a friendly email request as well. 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 with a competitive edge and producing click-throughs to boost your ranking.
Create engaging content packed with keywords
To improve your local SEO, your content must be extremely engaging while also incorporating relevant keywords. Creating engaging content will increase your local rankings, especially with correct internal linking to your main pages. To increase traffic and improve SEO, it’s important to have high-quality pieces of content throughout your website.
Take advantage of easy link opportunities
The first step to linking local building campaigns is by pinpointing opportunities with existing relationships, local sponsorships, and volunteering opportunities. Building on these relationships will help you acquire multiple links and increase your chances of placing higher on search engine result pages. While it is important to have a strong base of easy-to-acquire local links, don’t have them all point to your homepage. To get the most benefit out of links from other sites and businesses, have them link to specific pages on your website that you’d like to increase traffic to.
Understanding your audience is the key to reaching them
It’s crucial to understand who your audience is in order to ascertain 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 friends, family, or website followers. To maintain your audience, you must understand them.
Conduct a gap analysis to discover areas in need of improvement
To bridge the gap between your competitors and yourself, it’ll be helpful to conduct an analysis to optimize existing content, develop new content, and expand content on existing links. The analysis will help you determine which keywords have been used the most and the range of their specific usage.
One useful tool for this is the keyword gap analysis on SEMRush. To conduct the analysis, first export the keyword lists belonging to a selected local competitor. You can repeat the process to get an export for another local competitor as well. Next, export the keywords associated with your local business.
Afterward, determine the areas you need to improve on with SEO.
Finally, remember that local means local
Local SEO means Local, so your 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 may actually receive negative feedback based on the fact that you’re not in the location.
Local SEO can be a major contributing factor to increased traffic and conversions. Follow these tips to improve your Local SEO, and let us know in the comments what worked best for you.
