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Marketing & Sales

A Guide to Improving Local SEO for Your Business

Ritu Sharma 6 Stories

Monday June 08, 2020 , 5 min Read

A huge percentage of searches for businesses online are local searches. What does this mean for your business? It means you should start putting a lot of effort into finding the right local business SEO packages to ensure you rank highly in local SERP.

It will take a combination of well thought out strategies to get your business where you need to be to attract the attention of people looking for businesses like yours within the location that you operate. Coming up with the strategies may be the hard part, but with these tips, it should become a lot easier. You can use them as a foundation for your local business SEO packages that will ensure you see positive results.

List on Google My Business

There is no better place to be found as a local business than on Google My Business. This is a tool that lets you distribute the equivalent of a business card to anyone that may be looking for your service. On GMB you can add your business name, the physical address, and phone number. But that is just the basic stuff, there is a lot more you can add to the listing including driving directions, hours of business and pictures that may be relevant. You will need to keep on updating the information here in case there are any changes. Give as much relevant information as you can to ensure you get the best of the tool.

Verify Your Name Address and Phone Across all Platforms

If there is any place online that you have entered your business name, address, and phone, you need to verify them for consistency. You cannot afford to have conflicting addresses or numbers since that will just hurt your local SEO. Sometimes you may find someone else may have listed your business on a different site like Facebook or LinkedIn and used the wrong NAP or one that has changed. Correct these details. You can find useful tools that will help you find any place that your business may have been listed.

Optimize Tags, Content, and URL for Local Search

This is necessary to give Google your location. You will need to add your city or town where you operate in the URL, content as well as meta descriptions. Treat your location like a keyword and add it where you would a keyword as well as within page keywords. This will help in indexing the page so that you can not only show up in local searches but also be ranked for these searches.

Encourage People to Write Reviews About Your Business

There are particular sites that can drive better local SEO if you have a number of reviews. These reviews will also influence Google's ranking of your business and its website. Your business will also benefit from having positive reviews since research shows that a number of people make buying decisions based on what they read in reviews. Some of the sites you may want to have your reviews posted include Foursquare, Yellow Pages, Trip Advisor, Yelp and Yahoo Local. Do not limit yourself to just these, there are plenty more you can find. To know more, click here.

Utilize Google Posts

This is a recently added feature to Google My Business, which enables anyone with an account to post information regarding their business in GMB. You can compare it to a Facebook post. These posts will appear in the search results page along with your GMB information. The user can even interact with your business while still in the results page. It is wise to think strategically when coming up with posts since you want them to attract and not repel visitors.

Schema Markup

There is a free tool that you can use to generate special codes which will guide Google to understand your website and determine how it presents it in search results. When you are generating the Schema codes, you need to include details about location, this will ensure that you appear in local search results. You may need to read some more about marking up your website, though it is not very challenging.

Embark on Local Link Building

This is something that may take a while, but it will pay off in the long run. There is no way you can do SEO without building relevant links. Beware of the shortcuts in this endeavor. It may be tempting to try and get links quickly, but usually, those are just bad and irrelevant links that will only cause you trouble. Take your time and build relevant links.

Monitor Performance

The last advice is to keep on tracking the performance of not just your site but even the competition, see how local searches are doing and make changes to perform even better. There are a number of tools you can find to do this and you can make a choice according to their relevance.