Local SEO is the procedure of increasing your business’s existence in local search to tempt more customers or clients.
Several guides show you how to do local SEO from start to finish. But they can be daunting, as it’s a difficult subject. For this reason, you can always choose Atlanta Local SEO Company for your business!
So, in this guide, we’ll keep things simple with eight tips to stimulate local rankings:-
Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile
Every business can assert a free Google Business Profile, which is a local listing with information about your business. Once claimed, the information you add to your business profile can turn up in Google’s web search outcomes and Google Maps.
There are lots of components and optimizations you can put together here. So in the interest of keeping things simple, let’s take a look at, arguably, the five most significant optimizations you should make:-
Choose the right enterprise type
Google divides businesses into storefront, service-area, and hybrid businesses. The information you enter on the “Info” tab illustrates how Google sees your business. If your business serves clients at your business address only, as is the case for a barber or cafe, set your address and leave the service area field empty. If your business only delivers to customers, as is the case for a plumber or hairdresser, clear the address and set your service area(s). If your company does both, add your address and set your service area(s).
Choose the right business category
You have lots of alternatives here, and some of them are identical (e.g., accountant vs. chartered accountant). Take a minute to sift through the alternatives and choose the most appropriate one for you.
Add business hours
People won’t visit or call your business if they think you’re closed, so it’s important to list accurate business hours. You should furthermore do this for holiday hours so that folks know if and when you’re open during public holidays.
Add photos
Businesses with photos acquire 42% more requests for steering directions and 35% more website clicks, as per Google. So make sure to add some.
Add your website
It’s stunning (and frustrating) how many business proprietors don’t do this. Don’t be one of them.
Do local keyword research
Knowing how local customers search for the products or services you deliver is the foundation of local SEO. If you understand your industry and customers well, then you may have some idea how they do this. But it’s still wise to perform keyword research to extend your scope.
Note that the search volumes in Keyword Explorer are national, not local. In other words, they show the assessed monthly number of searches in your chosen country.
However, that’s not a huge deal because people generally search for things in the same way from city to city. And what you’re looking for here are the distinct ways people search for what you offer.
Optimize local landing pages
If you’ve found that people are searching for the precise products or services you offer, you likely need to create dedicated landing pages for them.
It is important to have landing pages for these services. But how do you get them to rank higher in searches?
Let’s first tackle the unfair way to go about this: keyword stuffing. This is where you repeat the keywords you want to rank for as multiple times as possible on the page, directing to quite unnatural copy.
You still see this a lot on local business websites, and it’s never a good idea. It doesn’t help SEO and likely simply serves to alienate potential customers even if it did.
Instead, you should “optimize” landing pages by comprising information that matters to searchers. Much of this is common sense.
But even if you know your industry and clients well, you can overlook significant details. For that reason, it’s useful to look at what other similar pages are indexing for, as these keywords often relate to i
Get local citations and links
Local citations are mentions of your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) online. They were voted the fifth broadly vital ranking factor for local queries in 2018.
They’re likely a bit less significant these days, but they’re still worth getting for two reasons:-
They help people find your business
Local SEO offered in different Local SEO Packages is not just about optimizing for Google, but also other search engines people may employ to find your business, such as Yelp, Bing, Facebook, Apple Maps, and any industry-specific directories.
They may still assist you to rank
Even though they’re less significant than they once were, they may still assist you to rank.
These services feed their data to numerous other websites and directories, so getting citations on these services can often lead to citations elsewhere without any extra work.
You may also want to seek these other major players:-
- Bing
- Apple Maps
- Yelp
- Yellowpages
- Dunn & Bradstreet
- TomTom
Beyond this, it’s primarily worth focussing on industry or location-specific citations. Most of these citations include a link to the business’s website alongside its NAP information, the effortless way to find pertinent opportunities is to look for common links to other identical local businesses.
Get more reviews
How can you get more reviews? Just ask.
You have to be a little cautious with this because it’s against Google’s terms to offer incentives to customers in exchange for reviews. However, there are ways to improve the likelihood of a customer leaving a review without breaking Google’s terms.
Judging by the number of pictures in the other reviews, it looks like this approach worked well with other customers too.
Keep your site healthy
Having an unhealthy site can lead to all kinds of SEO issues. This is true for both regional and national SEO. If Google can’t efficiently find, crawl, understand, and index your content, you’ve got problems.
You can keep an eye on your site’s health with Ahrefs’ site audit which you can schedule to regularly wriggle your site for 100+ issues.
Here are just a few mistakes it scans for:-
- Broken pages (4XX)
- Missing or empty title tags
- External broken links
- Orphan pages (i.e., pages without internal links)
You can see a whole list of errors and issues influencing your site in the All Issues report. It even exhibits changes between crawls so that you can see which problems are getting better or worse.
