Would you like to connect and engage with customers who are actively seeking your products or services? Then getting your site geared up for local SEO is a must.
With growing competition out there, remember to do more than local SEO. Optimize your SEO. You want to squeeze as much as you can from every tactic.
Here’s a guide to simple things that you can do to get the most from your local SEO, without losing too much time to run your business.
1. A Webpage For Each Relevant Town, County, Or Region
By focusing on each area that you serve, you can put some real power behind your local SEO optimization.
Give each page a unique local flavor while keeping it relevant to your business. Consider writing about local laws, styles, or trends that are particular to that region. Google and Bing will appreciate your in-depth, authentic approach.
2. Case Studies Of Previous Projects
A case study is a great way to set your business apart from others in your industry. Use case studies to show visitors the difference your business has made in your community. Demonstrate how much you value your clients and how you interact with them.
Make the most of the opportunities for story-telling here. Stay away from marketing jargon. You’re writing to connect with customers, not to impress marketing experts.
Talk about how your products or services helped your customers to achieve their goals. Be explicit about the details. This information will help make your business more trustworthy, more helpful, and more interesting.
3. Customer Interviews
If possible consider presenting these as videos, and you will have authentic reviews and testimonials with character. Video interviews appeal to modern web surfers, including the growing number who use smartphones to access the web for information.
Although video is a good way to make your site more dynamic, include a transcript for those who cannot or do not wish to watch a video. A transcript will also help optimize the page for SEO.
4. A Review Page
We all know how important reviews are for local SEO and achieving high rankings in SERPs. If you’re not receiving many reviews, however, consider a landing page with a call to action. You might offer a discount, for example, in return for filling in a review form. This offers potential reviewers an incentive and makes the process easy.
On-page Signals For Local SEO
You can optimize your site for local searches by tweaking what you already do for SEO in general. A few additions can make dramatic changes to your stats and customer engagement.
- You will already be including relevant keywords in the landing page title tag. To optimize local SEO, make sure to also include your city and/or region in your title on the landing page.
- Keywords wrapped in an H1 tag are great for SEO. Since search engines’ bots pay particular attention to these tags, they are an excellent place to include your city and/or region.
- Make the most of your readable URL by including not only descriptive keywords about your content but also your location.
- Mention your location within your site content. You can do this multiple times on one page, but make sure that it looks natural. Any mentions of your city and region should be relevant and should complement your text.
Google will know if you’ve jammed location mentions in just for their SEO benefits. If this is the case, it can have a negative effect on your rankings.
Just as your topic keywords and keyphrases should flow naturally within the text, so should any mention of your business locations. - Image ALT attributes are another good place to add SEO keywords, including your location. Where you are using photography that has been taken locally, this is an ideal opportunity to include your business region. Even if the image was not created in your area, however, there is no reason why you cannot mention your city or region in the ALT attributes if it is part of a relevant phrase.
- On your landing page, embed a Google map that has a business marker pointing to your business. This will help your potential customers find you, both online and on foot.
- Make sure that your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) is on every page.
Use Schema.org markup which helps search engines identify and categorize important information on websites.
Having a consistent NAP, not only on your site but wherever your business is mentioned on the internet, will boost your local SEO efforts. Start by ensuring consistency on your site. Use the following code - updating the text in CAPITALS - to make sure that your NAP has the same details and the same format throughout your site.
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
<p itemprop="name">COMPANY NAME</p>
<p itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<p itemprop="streetAddress">ADDRESS LINE 1</p>
<p itemprop="addressLocality">CITY</p>,
<p itemprop="addressRegion">REGION</p>
<p itemprop="postalCode">POSTCODE/ZIP</p>
<p itemprop="telephone">PHONE NUMBER</p>
<meta itemprop="latitude" content="LATITUDE" />
<meta itemprop="longitude" content="LONGITUDE" />
</div>To make sure that your NAP appears consistently on other websites, try Bright Local. Use this resource to see how many citations of your business there are around the web. Update them, if necessary, so that they all have the same format and details as on your website. Consistency is key to having this aspect of local SEO work for you.
- Finally, make sure that your page is mobile ready. People are increasingly using smartphones and other mobile devices to access the internet. They want to be able to find the information they need quickly and at any time. If they can’t view your site from their mobile device, you're likely to lose out on their business.
Anyone who runs a local business should not only be online, but also make the most of these fantastic opportunities for leveraging SEO. Optimizing your pages for local searches can dramatically improve customer engagement and conversions. These ideas will help you supercharge your site and move your business toward success.
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- The 5 Local SEO Factors That Matter Most
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