Local SEO Tips: 7 Actionable Tips You Can Start Today
Although local SEO is now more competitive than ever before, you still have time to jump on the bandwagon and swipe up a piece of the action.
When it boils down to driving website visitors, traffic can get expensive. Free resources are limited, forcing you to spend more on ads, so you can expand your local reach and make more sales for your business.
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For those of you strapped to a minimal budget, traffic costs make it next to impossible to reach your target audience. This is why local SEO is now more important than ever.
If you are a local business owner and still don't have a listing in the Google Map pack, you are losing out on lots of free targeted traffic and sales.
To give you a help in hand and get you off to a good start, here are 7 newbie friendly local SEO tips anyone can use as of right now.
7 Local SEO Tips to Boost Your Google Rankings:
- Verify and complete your Google Business profile in full using all features
- Frequently post fresh content to your Google Business feed
- Add local business schema to your website
- Create local optimised content for your web pages
- Build local citation links
- Get active socially
- Build relevant 5-star reviews
Verify and Complete your Google Business Profile in Full Using all Features
Once you have verified your Google My Business Listing via postcard, you will be able to take full advantage of your Google Business profile. Ensure the name of your business, the address and the contact details appear on your listing correctly in the right format so people and search engines can easily locate your business when searching for you online.
To increase your chances of appearing in the map pack utilize all the features in your profile using full descriptions, service details, opening hours, categories, images, videos and more.
Frequently Post Fresh Content to Your Google Business Feed
Google credits active companies that post engaging, relevant content frequently. To squeeze every inch of impact out of your business listing and improve your reach, you can easily post company updates, special offers or product promos to keep your profile active.
Pictures of staff members, snaps of clients and contractors, video tips and tutorials and the list goes on. To spice things up a little, you can use a free tool like Canva to improve your photos or create flashy promo designs straight off the bat.
Add Local Business Schema to Your Website
Search engines want to know as much data about your business as possible. By marking up your website with Local Business Schema, you make it fast and easy for search engines to identify and locate your website and business. For those of you using WordPress for your website, Yoast is a great plugin to add your local Schema markup.
If you are not using WordPress or you would like to easily create your own microdata to add schema to your website code manually, you can check out Micro Data Generator.
Create Local Optimised Content for Your Web Pages
Another easy way to find some quick wins is to create landing pages within your website for the smaller areas you cover, including the main keywords and area in your page. By conducting a keyword report and listing all the areas within your city, you can identify the keywords people are searching for most.
The smaller areas are likely to be far less competitive, and keywords generating over 100 searches a month are worth adding to your strategy. Create content around these key phrases, quickly throwing together a minimum 500+ words describing the services you offer in the areas you target.
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Build Local Citation Links
At Local Rank Booster, this is our speciality. Local citation building plays a large role in the SEO process. By linking your website to local directories (ensuring the details are NAP consistent) you will start to build trust flow for your website and business listing. These links help Google to determine whether your business is real or not and the more quality citation links you have the better chances you have to outrank your competitors.
There are hundreds if not thousands of citation links available around the web. The problem for you is knowing which of these listings will hurt your rankings and which ones will help improve them.
For local citation building services, our booster packs are among the most affordable in the industry starting from £49.99. For automated services with a limited list of citations you can use companies like Moz Local, Yell, Yext, and WhiteSparkz.
Get Social
Connect with your audience socially across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest, sharing quality content frequently to improve your social signals. Be persistent and use hashtags on posts when necessary. Social media channels make it easier for you to connect with your local audience and fast.
Although social signals right now are not a major ranking factor alone, there are many other benefits you can gain from social media. By posting unique content and boosting your blog post, you will not only drive local traffic to your website, but you?ll also increase the chance of gaining some natural, quality backlinks along the way.
Build Google My Business Reviews
Once you have completed your Google My Business Listing, you will want as many relevant reviews as possible on your listing. Reviews work amazingly for brand reputation and the more online reviews you have the more local customers you?ll win.
In many cases, the reviews left from your customers are sloppy and provide no value to your viewers or your business listings. When requesting reviews from your clients, ask them to be as descriptive as they can about the service you delivered, ensuring they mention your business, the local area and services you provided. This will help you improve the relevancy and trust of your reviews while empowering your Google My Business listing with even more relevant content.
Local SEO Summary
As local SEO gets more and more competitive, many industries and businesses are forced to crank up their SEO efforts to complete on the first page of Google. Although local SEO is not rocket science, it does take time and persistence and should be looked at as a long term strategy for your business. Take these 7 newbie friendly actionable SEO tips and start improving your search visibility today. Alternatively, you can check out our local SEO services for more information.