5 Local SEO Best Practices
For most of us, searching for an answer or product on Google is an ingrained behavior. If we find what we’re looking for within the first few results, we seldomly continue to scroll down the page. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is vital in helping a business position itself as an industry leader on those valuable search result pages.
To elevate your business to the top (of the SERPS, at least!), companies need a comprehensive strategy that encompasses both technical and content factors for search engine optimization. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when optimizing your business’s Organic presence.
To improve your Local SEO, create and optimize your business listings on platforms like Google My Business and Bing Places. These listings let you share important details about your business, like its name, address, phone number, website, and offerings.
When filling out profiles, be consistent and thorough across all platforms. Uniform listing information boosts your chances of appearing in local search results and attracting nearby customers. It also offers an opportunity to optimize for relevant industry keywords.
To optimize effectively, try to think like your target audience. Consider what they might be searching for when landing on your website.
As mentioned above, consistency is key to successful Local Search optimization. Ensuring that your business’s name, address, phone number, and website information (NAP+W) is accurate. The NAP+W details should appear the same (including capitalization, punctuation, and spacing) across various online directories, review sites, and social media platforms can significantly boost your local rankings.
As a healthy SEO practice, audit your NAP+W citations regularly to identify any inconsistencies and promptly address themdown to the individual character level. For instance, do all addresses across all platforms use “South Main Street,” or are some abbreviated as “S. Main Street?” These tiny details can make a big difference!
This meticulous approach to citations not only improves your local SEO, but also enhances your overall online reputation.
Establishing a robust backlink profile is a powerful strategy for enhancing your site’s positioning within relevant search engine result page rankings (SERPs). Backlinks are incoming links to your website from other reputable sites and are a crucial factor in search engine rankings.
You must, of course, know how to distinguish between quality backlinks and unethical. Purchasing backlinks also goes against Google’s best practices.
Instead, focus on creating high-quality content that naturally attracts authoritative websites to link back to your business. By taking this approach, you can secure sustainable growth and boost your local SEO visibility in the long run, proving to search engines that your website is highly relevant to your specific industry.
If you’re wondering how to ensure that search engines understand the purpose of your website, there’s another SEO tactic aside from on-page content optimization that you can employ: Schema markup.
Schema markup is a structured data vocabulary you can embed within your website’s code. This markup language provides search engines with important information about your business, including your address, phone number, operating hours, customer reviews, and other relevant details.
Implementing Schema markup helps search engines better understand and present your business information in Local Search results. This increases the likelihood of attracting local customers actively seeking products or services like your offerings.
In addition to the specific tactics mentioned above, we also recommend focusing on some general optimization guidelines when creating new content. This includes incorporating relevant local keywords, creating unique and informative content, optimizing meta tags and descriptions, and ensuring mobile friendliness.
Securing online reviews from recent customers, particularly Google Reviews, can help improve positioning within Local Map Packs for relevant queries. Remind customers to leave reviews and make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Business owners should steer clear of offering incentives to customers to leave reviews, particularly positive ones, as this not only goes against Google’s best practices but is also illegal and enforced by the FTC.
By adhering to best practices, you can help maximize the visibility of your new content in local search results and attract targeted local traffic to your website.
Local SEO is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to bolstering your brand presence online. As amazing as Google can be, it is not an all-knowing entity (at least not yet). And those who flock to the search bar may only know what they’re looking for once they find it.
It’s up to you to ensure your business is properly represented and positioned to help users find the local products and services for which they’re looking. The tips listed above are an easy and effective place to start.
Have any questions about SEO? Would you like to learn more about how BrainDo can help strengthen your business’s SEO? Contact the BrainDo team here for more information.