As you know everyone is competing to be one of those 3 who appears in Google’s Local Ranking Pack or on the first page of SERP. Maybe you have already read many Local SEO Tips to boost up your local rank.
In this post I will discuss why Local SEO is important and how can you boost up your ranking using these 12 Local SEO Tips.
Why Local SEO is important-
Remember how many times you have searched local businesses like Mall near me, computer repair shop near me or whatsoever. There are a lot of chances that you searched a local business in your past 1-2 days or weeks.
In the past Google’s Consumer Insights has stated in a post that a 900%+ increase in “near me/nearby/ tonight/today” searches in the past two years. This report makes local SEO very important for local business.
These are the 13 Steps to Boost up your Local SEO rankings-
Setup Google My Business- The First step is built up your Google My Business listing. As you know it’s totally free.
Do you know why this is the first step?
Because the top local pack results are Google My Business Pages and another reason is according to Moz, Google My Business Listing has a percentage of 25.12% roles in local ranking.
Create a proper Google My Business profile with proper name, address, business hours, and must add photos. Google already stated in a guide about GMB that GMB listing with photos receives 35% more clicks in comparison to GMB without photos. Now Apply for verification after receiving your verification code on your address add this to your listing and get verified. After verification you get access to many attractive features like a reply to customers’ reviews, add posts.
- Mobile Friendly Site- Do you know according to Statista the mobile search users is expected to 221 Million users by 2020. On other hand mostly people searches for local services when they are outside that’s why local search queries are more on mobile than other devices. The third reason to create your website mobile friendly is that major search engines including Google and Bing gives more preference to a mobile friendly website in search results. Here are following things you should consider- Your website must load within 3 seconds, good UX/UI, Use large fonts so that it’s easy to read on mobile. A research clearly shows that approx. 53% of mobile users will leave a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- Create Location based content– If you want to see you site on first page for local searches then you should must create local based content like you can cover your industry’s local news, local charity videos.
- Proper Setup of Important Pages– Most of New SEOs ignore About us, Contact us, Testimonial page. You must need to add and optimize these pages with proper details. You should add your detailed company story, business hours, locations where you provide services, and most important proper business name, address and phone number. If you add you GMB to your site this will be a plus point for you.
- Focus on Local Listings- As you know you are doing local SEO then how can you forget to add your business to local business listing websites. As these are the homes for many local people to find services or products. You can also see that when you search any local business then there are a lot of chance that other business citations also appears on first page of Google. According to Moz, citations contribute a 10.82% in local ranking.
- NAP Consistency- Here NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone Number. These are the one of most important factors in local ranking. Keep same NAP everywhere on your profiles, sites or citations. Because this makes you extra trustworthy. Just suppose you found a business which has different address on website and citations. Do you find out which address is right? Apart from this search engines use this information from different sources and websites as a reference to confirm GMB listing.
- Find Local Keywords- Keywords are backbone of SEO. While considering your site for local seo you must need to find local keywords like keywords having location name in it. After that optimize your site according to these local keywords.
- Dedicated Pages for Location based keywords- Take an example that you are running a fashion store in a metro city. You have 2 or more stores in different areas of that city. In this case you can’t cover all areas keywords on your homepage or any single page. So what’s solution for that? You should create a group of areas keywords and create dedicated pages for every store or area location.
- Get back links from local sites- The mistakes most of new SEOs (including me) made are that putting links on irrelevant sites. You must need to create a list of local sites which are related to your niche and start them approaching with a amazing pitch. According to Moz, local links plays a role of 16.53% in local pack and 27.94% in local organic rankings. Hope you understand the importance of local back links.
- Be Social Online and Offline Both- Most of SEO are debating about does Google consider social shares and engagement as a ranking signal or not. Just forget about this. Social media is a great way to influence people and communicate with them. Make use of it. Having genuine business profile on social media increase trust on you. Keep posting useful content for your customers & audience. It’s also important for local business to be social in offline too.
- Encourage Customers to Post Genuine Reviews– So you want to buy abc product from xyz company. Do you want to know what other people are saying about that company and that product? What is your answer? For sure yes. Here reviews come. Google also use reviews as very important ranking single in it’s algorithms.
“Don’t fake it. Earn and make it.”
Because Google is very smart and knows the difference between fake and real. Encourage your customers to post genuine reviews consistently.
- Do Local Events– Do local events related to your industry or charity events. The question is why? When you do local events a large number of people check-in on your listings. This gives google a signal that people are coming and loving you. Here the point is you can also ask them to write a review on your GMB. One more reason is many local sites and news sites cover events and this is the great way to get back links from local sites which will boost your local rankings.
- Add Location Schema on your Site- You should add location schema for your main branches or locations. So that Google can understand your store pages and rank these in a better way. You can also markup your website, social handles, address, phone number or business hours so that if someone searches about these Google can directly show this information without clicking on your site.
Final Words
Local Ranking becomes very important after seeing a boom in local and mobile searches. You never know what would be the next new feature of Google’s SERPS. Local result pack overtakes the organic search results. It’s very important for local businesses to conquer this ranking battle.
Now you have the idea where to start. May be this will take a lot of time even many days of hard work but this will worth it.
Now it’s your turn. If I missed anything please let me know in comment section and share your thoughts.
