In today’s competitive market, it’s becoming increasingly important for local businesses to have a local SEO strategy.
Customers across various industries are searching for the best products and services near them, and they want answers fast!
Having a good local SEO plan can help your business be more visible in local search results, allowing customers to find you quickly every time they type in any keywords related to your business. If your shop doesn’t show up when someone in your area searches, imagine the number of possible sales you’re missing out on.
It’s also crucial to know the trends and information encompassing local search so you can draw the right conclusions and make smarter adjustments regarding your local search optimization strategy.
Today, many marketers and business owners are using hyper-local strategies like geolocation and mapping-based tools to boost their local search tactics. And, they’re on a constant look-out for the next best local SEO practices or trends to make sure they stay one step ahead of their competition.
If you haven’t improved your local SEO yet, now is the best time to do so. It’ll give your business the boost it needs. That’s because sites that are locally optimized often rank on the first page of SERPs.
This local SEO checklist will walk you through everything you need to know about optimizing your website. Be sure to take down notes!
Optimizing Your Website for Local SEO
Every website needs to be properly optimized, well-structured, error-free, indexable, and mobile-friendly.
Apart from these, however, there are other things you need to do to make sure that your website is optimized for local searches. Here's a checklist (or shall we say, a sub-checklist) of the things you need to do to increase the visibility of your site:
Include a "Contact Us" page that contains your business's complete name, address, and phone number of each of your locations.
Put the NAP of your branches in the sitewide footer element, if you have less than 10 locations.
Update NAP citations on your site whenever necessary and ensure that they're consistent across your website.
Your contact numbers should be clickable via mobile.
Add Schema markup of your location data in your website to help search engine bots understand your location-based structured information. This can help them find your local business quickly.
Incorporate a Google Map into your contact to boost your local SEO and allow customers to discover you easily.
Enlist your business to local directories
Claim your business listings page on Google My Business and authenticate your website.
Post a screenshot of reviews on your website.
Reply to every review, ratings, and feedback on your business page on Google, even the negative ones.
Research local search terms and publish original, relevant content using these keywords.
Audit your site regularly and check for any warning signs.
Optimizing Your Content for Local SEO
Publishing high-quality content regularly on your site is crucial.
It has the power to create a positive experience for your visitors and urge them to return to your site for more. It also helps capture the attention of your prospective customers as you continuously pursue them.
Most importantly, optimized content allows search engines to know what your site is all about, as well as what you have to offer to users so they can rank you based on relevancy.
You need to make sure that your content effectively communicates the purpose of your website. Here's what you need to do with your content to optimize it for local SEO:
Publish original, compelling content your target audience can relate to. Add high-quality links to your blog posts or articles.
Use localized keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions (e.g., “Cat Café and Study Miami” instead of “Cat Café and Study”).
Identify the right keywords based on your target audience's intent and then create content around those terms.
Create content that talks about other related topics. For example, if you sell second-hand cars in LA, you also want to tackle about car maintenance and repair tips in your content.
Do semantic keyword research to help you.
Add local photos and videos in your content to make it more attractive to your audience. Each photo and video should be optimized with relevant keywords.
Fix any duplicate content problems. Duplicate content can pull your rankings down so you need to correct it.
Track your organic keyword ranking.
Optimizing Local Content for Multiple Businesses in Different Locations
If you manage two or more businesses in various places, it’s best to have one stunning website that houses all of them, as it will eliminate confusion. Plus, a single website is easier to maintain.
Offer location-specific advertising to differentiate every location.
Build your content calendar.
Create a content plan.
Plan for expected year-round holidays, celebrations, and seasons, like wedding season, Christmas, Valentines, local holidays, etc. Create timely content that your audience can relate to. Doing this can help you make the most out of seasonal content ranking opportunities.
Plan for unexpected events. You want to leave room for trends and viral topics in your local areas.
Incorporate local current events in your blog posts.
Take advantage of Google trends to know seasonal trends.
Optimizing Your Citations for Local SEO
Citations refer to your business; listings on different sites that highlight your name, phone number, address, and website. Here are a few tips to help optimize your citations:
Use manual or automatic citations.
If you decide to use a manual citation, you have control over your listing, but managing them takes time, especially if you decide to re-brand or move.
If you use an automatic citation, you have less control over your business listings, but you won't have a hard time managing them.
Double check to see if all the information provided in your citations are correct and consistent.
Squeeze in as much valuable information on your citations.
Prioritize which citations you should keep current.
Optimizing Your Social Media to Boost Your Local SEO
Localize your social media accounts and link them back to your website.
Input your NAP+W accurately to every social media listing.
Encourage your customers to leave a review or feedback on your social media accounts.
Post relevant pictures, infographics, and videos regularly.
Use hashtags in your posts.
Reply to every query and comment on your different social accounts to boost engagement.
Aim to get verified on all your social media listings.
Feature user-generated content on your social media accounts. You can even host contests to motivate your audience to submit user-generated content.
Optimizing Reviews to Boost Your Local SEO
Asking for reviews and feedback from your customers isn’t enough. You’ll need to optimize them as well. Find out how below:
Aim to get your business listings verified.
Upload recent photos to your Google My Business profile.
Encourage customers to leave reviews, both positive and negative. Answer the negative ones respectfully and make sure to address them.
Don’t pay for fake reviews or reward people to leave reviews.
List your business on the following sites that review businesses, such as Yelp, Foursquare, Bing Places, and more.
Use a business listing management tool to make your life easier. It can help you optimize your local business data all over the web.
Use customer review management tools.
Optimize Your Actual Business
Lastly, see to it that you also work on improving your actual business. That should keep your customers coming back for more and recommend you to other people.
Regularly train your employees to perform well. Make sure they know your products or services.
Deliver excellent customer service every time.
Befriend your customers.
Pre-empt problems before they even happen and always have a plan B.
Reward and celebrate your employees.
Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
Be consistent.
Are You Ready to Start Ticking Off Things from Your Local SEO Checklist?
In this digital age, having a good local SEO strategy can help your business grow in ways you never thought possible!
If you feel overwhelmed by the number of things that need to get done, don't hesitate to ask for professional help.
At Digital Resource, we can help you create the best local SEO strategy for your business. Contact this Los Angeles local SEO company today to start seeing results in a matter of months!
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