Local SEO is an essential marketing strategy for any business looking to draw in local customers. It’s an effective way to expand your clientele and boost sales.
Local SEO refers to optimizing your website and content so search engines can find it easily for specific keywords in your region. The aim is for these terms to appear high in results, allowing you to connect with new customers and expand your business.
Link building
Link building is an essential element of local SEO that can increase your website’s visibility and boost traffic and conversions.
Successful link building campaigns aim to showcase pages that provide value to their audience, niche and community. These can include guides, lists, videos, tools, resources, events, sponsorships, testimonials or other types of content which promote consumer benefit.
While you’re at it, reach out to relevant industry sites via email, social media or direct messages on their website.
When it comes to links, the trick is finding partners with high domain authority in your region. Doing so will give your campaign an enormous edge.
Keyword research
Keyword research is an integral component of local seo, helping you target the correct keywords and create content that resonates with them. Doing this can boost your rankings on Google Maps and bring more visitors to your website.
Keyword research tools offer data on search volume, SEO difficulty and other relevant metrics around your seed keywords. This insight can help you decide if a certain keyword is worth targeting and how difficult it may be to rank for.
You can do some keyword research yourself using the Google autocomplete feature on your browser or a search engine extension like Keyword Shitter. It will suggest various related words and terms; however, you’ll have to quickly filter through them all to find the most pertinent ones.
On-page optimization
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing your website’s content in order to boost search engine rankings. This includes everything from adding internal links and eliminating duplicate material.
Page title tags are essential on-page SEO signals that determine whether your web page appears in a search result or not. They also help assess the quality of your content and its relevance to a searcher’s query.
HTML headers are essential for on-page optimization, as they contain headlines and subheads that help readers comprehend the primary point of a page’s content.
Another on-page factor that isn’t directly a ranking signal is the meta description tag of your pages. While they don’t have as much influence over SEO as title tags do, a well written meta description will help users learn more about your page and encourage them to click through to your website.
Establishing your on-page optimization objectives is critical for any local seo strategy. Once this component is in place, you can then move onto other aspects of the campaign that involve off-page elements.
Social media
Social media plays an integral role in local SEO, improving your backlink profile, online reputation, brand awareness, content discovery and more. While these improvements won’t have as much of an effect on rankings as link building or on-page optimization do, they still make a difference nonetheless.
Google utilizes social signals such as reviews and ratings in combination with precise location to decide how relevant a site is for a search. For example, an Instagram geotag allows businesses to claim a specific location and have it appear in Google Maps during local searches.
Optimizing an Instagram profile for a business can result in more customers and higher rankings in local searches. Furthermore, Facebook allows businesses to incorporate keywords throughout their page for enhanced local SEO rankings.
A business must guarantee its name, address and phone number (NAP) are consistent across all platforms and websites. This includes making sure Google My Business has the correct info and correcting any misspellings or discrepancies that arise.