Local SEO is something that helps local businesses and companies grow regionally. This will help them concentrate on generating traffic among local customers.
In comparison to the standard SEO, local SEO practices give you visibility in local searches like “shops near me”. When someone searches such queries, Google usually presents a map with the local businesses located on them with a three-pack- 3 business listings.
Apart from the MNCs, local businesses must concentrate on local SEO to get customers online and offline. If you do not plan on optimising your website for local SEO, you might be missing on more than 70% of the customers. When users search for a local inquiry, it is most probable that the customer would visit the store if it is in a circle of 8 km.
Here are a few tips and tricks to help the business with local SEO, which can, in turn, increase the return at the end of the day.
Google My Business: The basics
The first and most important step towards achieving a space on search results for local businesses is to create a Google My Business account and optimise the same.
Google collects information about the business listings from these accounts and presents when someone makes a query.
This is important because of all the statistics and studies show the importance of GMB and how much Google likes these profiles as they consider them the most authentic.
Complete as much information as possible on the account. Provide your name, logo, and pictures. Pictures are a must as they have very high chances of being selected by the customers. Opening hours, mode of payment, etc give more authenticity to your business. Also, using keywords can also be useful. Descriptions, info, etc that would contain information about you can also contain the important keywords as you do on a website. Eg: If you have a business in Bangalore and you want to search for digital marketing services, when you search for digital marketing companies in Bangalore, chances are website with good local SEO, reviews will appear in the result.
Local content
Content that will actually help the local audience is going to make a great deal in local SEO. There is no point in creating content only for the sake.
There is nothing more attention-grabbing than talking about local news or local issues. Being a solution to a problem that people see with their own eyes makes the company trustworthy.
Content that will actually content images, videos, infographics all are important in getting more engagement in your pages. This will be noted by the webpages and will help you in ranking higher.
Backlinks
As everyone knows, SEO is known for its heart factor, the links. Links are also used to the maximum in local SEO. Try to gain maximum external links from local business websites.
Also, internal links are also important as they will give the search engines more information on the structure of the websites. It will help them categorize and provide hierarchy to the pages.
Reviews
Try to get maximum reviews and opinions about your business from your customers. Thy must be added to your website which will add your trustability in front of the public.
Being more genuine and true will attract more customers, increasing traffic and gaining more ranks. This will act as a cumulative effect.
Adding location page
On your website, try to add a separate page that will give your location. You can also add the location details in the about me page. Making already existing pages more based on location can help the bots crawl easily and get information regarding the location to display them in the search results.
Ensuring the website is mobile-friendly
Most of the times, local websites will be searched from mobiles and hence, mobile SEO and local SEO go hand in hand.
It is important that you make your website mobile-friendly, making the search engines find your websites easily.
Also, it is important that you make adaptations to load your pages as fast as possible. Avoiding redirects are a way to make this happen. Also, images used should not hinder the site from loading faster.
The meta tags, title tags, and alt tags must have the keywords used to optimize the sites for the google searches which can bring traffic to your page.
Maintaining consistency in NAP
NAP is the name, address, and phone number. Maintaining consistency in these across the website, Google My Business account, social media posts are so important for getting your SEO done right because search engines value consistency.
This will help the search engines identify you over all platforms and provide the user with the relevant information and providing the user with all the handles that you have.
An inconsistency can confuse the user and cause him to search for another business instead of clarifying this. This can reduce customers.
Optimising for voice searches
Voice searches are gaining popularity these days and will be taking over a part of the search queries in the near future.
So, it is important that your website contains information for the question that might appear in the voice searches. Optimising your websites to match such needs are important.
Basic queries like who, what, when, where can be exected via voice searches and answers to them must be available.
In short, with local SEO, you would be able to increase the organic traffic for specific keywords to your website. With naturally incoming traffic, you would want to spend less on paid advertisements too.
This will save a lot of money, and help you especially if you are in the earlier stages of your business. With local SEO, your business comes up on Google and Apple Maps, helping local customers find you.
Being searched frequently on a local basis can take you to the next level of standard SEO where you can expand your customer base.
There are different tools that will help you in this regard. Local SEO might require few strategies apart from the standard ones which can easily be done with the help of an experienced digital marketing agency.
Local search engine visibility is rising every day due to the tremendous advantages it can provide us with. So, do not delay in ruling your local market with the best usage for Local SEO.