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8 Ways You Can Outrank the Competition in 2020
With the ongoing changes occurring in top search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, any bright entrepreneur and small business owner can appreciate the importance of optimizing their website and business strategy in order to adapt to those changes seamlessly.
If you want to stay on top of the search results, or more importantly, if you want your business found easily through local searches, then search engine optimization (SEO) and local SEO should be a significant component in your digital maintenance process.
If you run a brick-and-mortar business or B&R that operates on a single geographical location, then investing in local SEO should be a priority for you, especially if you want to lead your target audience right to your doorstep.
The following are eight effective ways to improve your local SEO strategy and gain an edge over your competitors in 2020.
8 ways to optimize your local SEO efforts
- Invest in top-quality link building.
Link building can make or break your SEO strategy, especially when you’re trying to narrow it down to a local target audience. Incorporating random links into your content just isn’t efficient or practical, not in this day and age. Any reputable SEO company, web developer, or digital service provider should be proficient enough to avoid such amateur tactics and dated strategies.
- Capitalize on social media and social search optimization (SSO).
Social media has become a major part in the day-to-day activities of almost every individual. Regardless of your market or the industry you’re in, it’s more than likely that your customers, your target audience, are in some kind of online social network, be it Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Social media presence will help gather clients and connect with them.
Due to this fact, social signals have become just as important as any other SEO strategy when it comes to page rankings and driving potential customers to your door. Every time a person likes, shares, or follows a particular post, video, or image in social media platforms, it sends a signal to search engines, which will help your brand gain credibility in third-party websites.
- Create and maintain well-optimized local content.
You can’t expect to stand out from your local competitors just by simply having a nice-looking website or a well-maintained social media page. Most businesses nowadays have their own websites and social media accounts. A good local SEO strategy should deliver relevant and well-maintained local content.
Creating local content involves adding top-quality local landing pages with relevant content to help optimize searches. It also involves optimizing keywords around your specific niche, your services, and most importantly, your location. Having good local content is one of the most important things you can add to your local SEO strategy to improve optimization and boost your website in the local search rankings.
- Do better with the quality of your content.
The phrase “content is king” is very popular among SEO service providers, website developers, and digital companies. In fact, ever since the last few updates in Google’s search algorithms, that particular phrase has become one of the guiding principles of any professional working in the digital media marketing industry.
Nowadays, the key to optimizing any web page is through content. But if you want a successful optimization process, a local SEO strategy that can really push your website to the top of page rankings and get you found easily by local customers, then you don’t want just any content; you want content that is properly optimized, well-developed, and relevant to your target audience. This means content that your followers would actually read and share with their friends.
- Make your business contact info consistent across all platforms and directories.
When it comes to local SEO, keeping your contact information consistent is very important, especially if your brand is present in many different platforms. This includes your own website, your social media page, as well as any local directory your business is listed in. This effort will not only help improve your SEO, it keeps your branding accurate as well.
Your company’s contact info should always include the name of your business, physical address, and phone numbers. It’s advisable to use a master directory listing to make changes or updates easier and more efficient.
- Make your website and your landing pages mobile-friendly.
Mobile optimization is just as important as content quality. If content quality is the dish, the mobile optimization process is the presentation. How your target audience consume content is very important. And now, more than ever, the primary means of content consumption is through mobile devices.
Always remember that everyone is using mobile these days, and your website should adapt to their convenience.
Pexels.com photo by Bruce Mars
This means having websites that are designed with a mobile-first mentality. Landing pages that are easy to read and navigate through using smartphones, tablets, and so on. And when it comes to SEO, search engines tend to place mobile-friendly web pages higher in the rankings. This is why mobile optimization has become a staple in any SEO strategy.
- Get backlinks from reliable and real websites.
Backlinks are links that are posted on other websites that point or lead to your own. This particular SEO strategy has been around for a long time, although its execution may have evolved over the years. And believe it or not, you still need backlinks in your SEO efforts.
The difference now is that you need backlinks from real and reliable websites. There are a few effective methods to actually get backlinks from good websites, and the most fundamental is to produce high-quality content that is helpful to consumers and the industry as a whole.
Look, you want to get backlinks organically, not by force. And the best way to do this is to develop content that people will want to read, gain knowledge from, and businesses will actually want to associate with. If your content is good enough, reputable websites will want to associate with it by adding links of your pages to theirs.
- Voice search optimization—it’s a thing!
With the likes of Siri, Alexa, and other similar AI technologies emerging, it’s not far-fetched to consider optimizing your website for voice search, especially your directory listings. Up until a few years ago, voice search optimization was not a thing. Today, however, it’s a different story.
Nowadays, more and more people are using their voice to conduct searches online. This is quite significant when it comes to local SEO. The idea with voice search optimization is that the way people normally talk is different from the way they type. So in order to optimize your listing or your web pages for voice search, you need to adapt your content to accommodate more voice-friendly keywords and phrases.
This means that when creating content, the writer will have to stop thinking in textual terms, but rather focus more on natural speaking patterns when optimizing content and web pages for voice search.
