Local SEO can be an invaluable asset in drawing customers close and differentiating yourself from competitors. The process involves optimizing your online presence and creating listings. In addition, building a community of loyal customers and social media followers are part of its goal.
Local search optimization refers to the practice of making Google understand your location through various means, including using local keywords.
Keyword research
Keyword research is an integral component of local SEO as it allows you to target search terms that your customers are actually using. Doing this helps prevent guessing keywords which may result in wasted resources on unprofitable searches and missed opportunities to expand your business. Furthermore, keyword research identifies your competitors and can assist in creating an online visibility strategy to boost business online.
For success in finding local keywords, start by brainstorming a list of services or products your business offers – either alone or with help from a marketing consultant. Utilize tools such as Autosuggest and Related Search to identify those people are searching for.
Step two is to assess user intent. This can be accomplished by reviewing Google’s suggested keywords as well as the search patterns made by users; some searches explicitly target locality while others do not include it at all.
On-page optimization
At the core of local SEO is on-page optimization – which ensures your website content matches search queries performed by your target audience. This involves keyword research and writing relevant, high-quality content; optimizing page titles and meta descriptions as part of this process.
On-page optimization also involves eliminating duplicate content through canonical tags and adding pages with the noindex attribute, to ensure that similar pages don’t rank multiple times for indexing purposes – which would damage your rankings if duplicates of identical material appeared multiple times.
On-page optimization also involves responding to reviews and using social media to promote your business, along with listing it in business directories that help your rank higher in SERPs. Tools like Google Business Manager and Search Console are excellent ways of starting off, as these free services allow you to manage online reputation, identify any serious issues, and enhance SEO performance.
Link building
Local SEO can be an effective tool to help businesses compete more successfully in local markets. By increasing visibility of a business’s website and raising its rank in search engine results pages (SERPs), local SEO allows the company to gain more traffic from local consumers – leading them to increased sales. A strong local SEO plan can also boost credibility within its local community.
To improve local SEO, businesses should focus on building backlinks from relevant sites – whether that’s local news websites, blogs or even review platforms like Ubersuggest – in order to gain backlinks from relevant websites and boost local search engine results pages (SERPS). Google uses backlinks as one factor when ranking websites; as more quality backlinks a website receives, the higher its local SERP ranking becomes and this will ultimately boost credibility and trustworthiness of their brand.
Reputation management
Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an indispensable marketing strategy that can help businesses increase brand recognition, boost conversion rates and foster lasting consumer relationships in their geographic region. This approach involves optimizing websites, creating geo-specific public listings (e.g. Google My Business) and employing organizational review monitoring strategies such as review monitoring.
Online reviews play an invaluable part in local search, with more than 80 percent of people making purchasing decisions based on them. Therefore, it’s imperative that businesses regularly monitor reviews and ratings so they can respond swiftly if any negative feedback arises.
Whitespark provides a powerful local listing management platform, designed to manage NAPW information across the web, recommend sites where to list it, build and monitor citation profiles for improved ranking performance, as well as provide an in-depth SEO report identifying opportunities to optimize your site for local search and increase its visibility on SERPs. In addition, its ORM tools include an intuitive Citation Analyzer that analyzes links, images, CSS script and script from an SEO perspective and Ahrefs to track backlinks.