With ongoing alterations happening to the most prominent search engines, entrepreneurs and small business owners must optimize their websites and improve their local SEO strategy if they’re to trump the competition.
If a business is to maximize its visibility on the SERPs, business owners need to work on their local search engine optimization (SEO) game plan especially if they have a physical store or business operating in a fixed locale. Doing so ensures the target audience in their area can easily find them.
Outperforming your competition is a given.
Below are eight effective ways to improve your local SEO strategy and get a leg up over your competitors.
1. Invest in top-quality link building.
As is for everything SEO, link building is a core component of one’s SEO arsenal, especially when targeting a local audience. However, one should avoid peppering their content pieces with random links. Instead, it’s now imperative to focus on quality links that are relevant to your target market. Reputable websites, local directories, or partnerships with other businesses in your area should be the sources of the links you want to embed into your content. By building links that are not only useful but come from relevant and reliable sources, you can bolster your website’s credibility and authority on the local SERPs, maximizing your chances of ranking higher and, ultimately, increasing your following and conversion rate.
2. Capitalize on social media and social search optimization (SSO).
Social media is a big part of everyone’s daily life now. These days, most people are on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Now, social signals are as key to your marketing campaign as any other local SEO strategy; leveraging these platforms increases your website’s visibility and increases your chances of getting potential customers into your marketing funnel. Whenever people interact with your content by liking, sharing, or following it, it sends a signal to search engines that people perceive your brand as popular and trustworthy.
Social media presence will help gather clients and connect with them.
This, in turn, can bolster your website’s SERP ranking, increasing your visibility. Thus, it cannot be overstated that having a strong presence on social media and continually creating engaging content is key to boosting your brand’s reputation and visibility online.
3. Create and maintain well-optimized content to strengthen your local SEO strategy.
Simply having a nice website or active social media isn’t enough to stand out locally anymore. Most businesses have those things now. To stand out, you need a strong local SEO strategy. One of the requisites for having an impactful SEO game plan is regularly producing original and engaging content that’s geared toward your target market.
High-quality content on your website’s pages that discuss your locale and what you can offer is crucial for this. This also necessitates that you use keywords that are related to your location, niche, and services. These are all pivotal to your goal of attracting local customers as these make it easy for search engines to understand what your enterprise is all about and, consequently, how it’s relevant to the populace.
4. Always make it a point to produce content that’s not only engaging, but useful.
The uninitiated in the world of SEO might not be aware of the saying that “content is king.” It is, however, renowned in the SEO industry, more so after Google’s Hummingbird update in 2023, which focuses on top-notch content.
While it’s understood by most online marketers and SEOs that having quality content is a prime requisite for having an optimized webpage, having the end goal of landing on the top slots of the SERPs necessitates that you provide well-optimized content, meticulously crafted, is relevant to your target market. Producing content that people want to not just read but share, should be your goal week in and week out.
So, when you’re crafting your local SEO game plan, there should be a greater focus on creating high-quality content that’s relevant to the populace. Ultimately, wherever content pieces you produce from this strategy will maximize your chances of climbing the SERPs, and hence, attract more potential clients.
5. Your contact details should be the same across all digital platforms like directories and social media sites.
Your contact details must be the same on your website, social media platforms, and local directories. Having inconsistent details will not only your ranking but also your branding.
These contact details should always include your business name, address, and phone number. To make it easy for you, use a master directory as this can make it easier to update your information in one go; it saves time and not only makes it convenient for you but for your customers as well.
6. Make your website and your landing pages mobile-friendly.
Mobile optimization is as crucial as having good content. If content quality is like the food, mobile optimization is like how you serve it. How people view and use your content matters a lot. Nowadays, most people use their phones to do it.
Always remember that everyone is using mobile these days, and your website should adapt to their convenience.
Pexels.com photo by Bruce Mars
That’s why it’s important to have websites that work well on mobile devices. Your pages should be easy to read and navigate on smartphones and tablets. Plus, search engines like Google prefer mobile-friendly sites, so they rank them higher. That’s why including mobile optimization in your local SEO strategy is essential. It helps your website perform better in search results and gives users a better experience when they visit your site on their phones.
7. Get backlinks from reliable and real websites.
Backlinks are links on other websites that lead to yours. This SEO tactic has been around for a while, but how we do it has changed. Still, backlinks are important for your SEO.
Nowadays, you need backlinks from trustworthy websites. To get them, you need to create really good content that helps people and adds value to your industry.
You don’t want to force backlinks. Instead, focus on making content that people love and ones that businesses want to share. If your content is top-notch, other sites will naturally want to link to it. This helps boost your credibility and ranking in search results.
8. Voice search optimization—it’s a thing!
As technologies like Siri and Alexa become more popular, it’s important to think about optimizing your website for voice search, especially in your directory listings. Voice search may not have been popular several years ago, but these days, as smartphones remain an everyday item, search engines have begun placing greater emphasis on their importance.
The popularity of the smartphone and how search engines have reacted to it matters for local SEO. When people use their phone’s mics to search, they use a wider variety of words and phrases compared to what they type when they search using the phone’s digital keyboard. To optimize for voice search, you need to use keywords and phrases that match this wider variety of search phrases.
This necessitates that when you create content, you should consider how people use words, placing more emphasis on colloquial terms rather than how they would type the same queries. This will help you reach more potential customers.
Comprehending Local Search Algorithms for a More Impactful Local SEO Strategy
In the world of digital marketing, nothing is more important than the local search governing how search engine result pages work. These decide which websites people see on the SERPs when they search for businesses in their locale. Knowing the ins and outs of these algorithms is crucial if businesses want to have maximized visibility in their area. Let’s dissect the fundamentals of local search algorithms and how you should mold your local SEO strategies around these.
One of the factors that local search algorithms study is relevance. They dissect what they consider as core components of content pieces like business niches and keywords to see if a business has what a user is searching for. For example, if someone searches for “blue blouses for sale,” the algorithm looks for businesses that discuss clothing shops that are situated near that particular user. They also place greater importance on businesses that sell blue clothing.
Another core factor algorithms consider is distance. They scrutinize the distance relevant businesses are from the person searching. They give higher ranking to those that are nearer; this is especially true for searches with words like “near me” or the name of a city.
Also, popularity is a core factor. Various indicators of how well a business is being regarded by the locals like reviews, mentions on other websites, and how many people link to the business’s website matter. Well-known and dependable businesses have a propensity to rank higher in local search results.
To maximize their chances of ranking higher on the SERPs, businesses that cater to locals need to use diverse SEO tactics that are geared toward local search. Here are some of them:
- Claim and optimize your Google My Business (GMB) listing: Google My Business is a powerful tool for local SEO as it allows businesses to list pertinent details about their business on their Google listing. Needless to say, enterprise owners should check if their GMB profile contains complete and accurate information about their business, including their business name, address, phone number, and business hours.
- Use location-specific keywords: Since you’re trying to cater to the locals, it’s particularly important to include location-based keywords in your website content, meta tags, and headings. This is to ensure that search engines identify your business as being relevant to the populace.
- Build local citations: To bolster the above, you should check if your business is listed accurately on local directories, review sites, and social media platforms. Accurate NAP (name, address, phone number) information across these platforms is key to a successful local SEO campaign.
- Encourage customer reviews: As has been discussed, dependable and well-known businesses tend to rank higher so do what you can to encourage customers to leave you positive feedback on various platforms like Yelp, Facebook, and Google.
- Create localized content: Develop content that is relevant to your local audience, such as blog posts, articles, and guides tailored to local events, trends, and interests. This helps establish your business as a trusted authority in your community.
- Optimize for mobile: With the increasing use of mobile devices for local searches, ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly on smartphones and tablets.
By understanding the key elements of local search algorithms and implementing effective SEO strategies, businesses can improve their visibility in local search results and attract more customers from their target area. Keep in mind that local SEO is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring and adjustments to stay ahead of the competition and maintain a strong online presence in your local market.