The traditional modes of advertisement are good at attracting local customers. However, they are not as impactful as digital ones. Therefore, you need to embrace a method that will highlight your business in the local search engine, and local SEO comes in handy.
You may wonder what local SEO means if you are new to digital marketing. It’s a strategy that optimizes a website to improve its ranking and increase visibility, among many other benefits.
Local SEO strategy benefits businesses in many ways. Local SEO enhances traffic, encourages continuous business growth, and builds connections with other local businesses.
In this article, we look at how to optimize your Local SEO through Google listing, build local citations, create local content, and much more. So, keep reading to learn more.
Any business needs to be visible online, so you must optimize your website and, most importantly, your business listing or profile.
A listing is your business’ snapshot highlighting its best features to enable potential customers to find you quickly, learn about your products or services, and engage with you. Business listing is free, and here are various things you need to know about it.
The first thing to do before claiming your business profile on Google is to get a Google Business Account. Here are the steps to claim and verify your business on Google.
Note that verification of a business on Google is easy and will take a week to complete.
When building a solid online customer base, your website needs more than search engine optimization. The information provided on your listing can make or break your online presence.
Many third-party local listing sites outside your business website lead customers to your site. These sites offer information about your business for free.
If your business listings are missing or incorrect, your exposure in the search result will be poor. Ensuring your listing has accurate and complete information is crucial for the following reasons.
Pictures and reviews significantly influence your brand’s identity and rating. Research by Yelp shows that if your business has at least ten photos and five ratings, it will get over 200 percent user views compared to those that don’t have pictures.
Photos and ratings create the first impression for businesses, and here is how you can use them to enhance your listing.
a)Through photo review
Look through your photo gallery on your business listing and remove inappropriate ones. After that, upload new ones and update your Google and social media cover photos regularly.
b)Show off your business culture
Your website photos should align with your culture to help your potential customers know what interaction with your business looks like. For example, you can upload pictures of your employees at work or at a company event to make your listing more personal.
If you have moved your business to a new location or done some renovations, add the current photos as well. Also, ensure your favorite products and services are well-highlighted so your customers may have a reason to call for inquiries.
c)Use relevant captions
Adding captions to your photos personalizes your business listings dramatically. It allows you to incorporate relevant keywords linked to your field, convey information about what’s happening, where, and who does it, and add value to your photos.
Ensure the captions get written with the proper tone of your business. For instance, if your clientele is formal, avoid being too casual.
A local citation is an online mention of your business name, location, and phone number. You’ll find the citations on websites, directories, social networks, and apps like Yellow pages and Yelp.
There are two types of citations: structured and unstructured. The former only lists a business name, address, and phone number, while the latter contextualizes the business.
Here is the importance of citations for local SEO.
The landscape for citations is broad but keeps on changing. For example, you can get the sources from highly authoritative directories of your local market or specific industries.
Once you have identified your citations, you can manually build and manage them by tracking their status on a spreadsheet. Alternatively, you can hire a third party to develop your citations or use citation management tools such as Endnote, Zotero, or Moz Local. The tools create citation sources, track progress, and alert you when there are changes.
The best way to claim citations is by first determining a good source and identifying citation elements. Also, ensure you choose a good style of citation.
The main advantage of building local citations is boosting visibility, discoverability, and sales in your business. But to reap the benefits, you must create high-quality sources.
Here are the tips to help you create high-quality citations.
While building local citations and optimizing your business listing is essential, there’s much more to a successful local SEO plan. Your SEO strategy can’t be complete without good content. So, you should incorporate content marketing into your marketing plan.
But how should you create the content?
Your business’s web pages should not be the only source of content. You can use blogs as well to attract local customers. Write about local business updates, local trends, and events to attract your local audience. Be creative when writing blogs to increase your local market traffic.
Additionally, ensure your blogs have navigation features to help your audience find more content on your website. Frequent posting also helps keep your visitors updated with the local happenings and enhances engagement.
Another helpful tip is to link it to social media pages once you have created your content. Thankfully, millions of potential customers are already on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Here are some examples of exciting topics that will engage the local target audience:
Local keywords are also important in ranking websites on the result pages. Whenever someone searches for a specific phrase or term, the search engine looks for the most valuable keyword and ranks it higher, thus bringing more traffic to your website.
Here are additional benefits of including local keywords in your content.
Backlinks are hyperlinks from another website. In local SEO, backlinks increase your web page rankings because they make your site look authoritative. Therefore, the more backlinks on your website, the higher its ranking in the search engine.
Backlinking results in Google building trust in your website and boosting consumer trust in your business. Whenever customers see your site links to a website they love, they view your company as a gate for new and old customers, thus increasing referral traffic.
Link building is complex, and marketers can spend time learning how to do it. However, you don’t have to go through the whole complicated process.
Here are some helpful techniques you can use.
a)Social media presence
If your business has a social media page, you can fill it with your information. Ensure you include your website link in your social media page information. It will add up as a backlink, build awareness and boost the legitimacy of your brand.
b)Hold special events to get PR links
Holding special promotions or events is another way of making your business known while looking for backlinks. For example, you can sponsor a local football team, run a workshop, or a charity event. After that, advertise your event in your local news outlet or social media platforms.
Then draft a short press release featuring event details and a URL for the backlink. Remember to include keywords in your draft.
c)Get listed in local business directories
When most consumers want to learn about a new company, they look for a business directory. So get your business listed, so you get opportunities to build local links. Some popular business directories include Facebook, Yelp, Bling, and Google Business profile.
Backlinks are effective when sourced from legitimate sources and used appropriately. However, you don’t have to break the bank to earn backlinks through content marketing.
Here are tips that will help you earn backlinks through content marketing and PR
a)Perform case studies
Feel free to tell the world about your work through a case study. Sharing a case study within your networks and social media platforms adds value and makes it easy to earn links from publications in your industry. You can also find influencers or publishers who can link your content from their websites and share it with their audience.
b)Write long-form guides
This strategy is another perfect way to earn links from quality websites. That’s because longer, well-explained content makes a topic more valuable and has information many businesses want to link to. Besides, visits will spend more time on your website and click on the backlinks.
However, you must understand your audience’s questions before writing long-form guides. You can use Google Autocomplete, Quora, or AnswerThePublic to understand the questions they may be asking in your field. That will give you a tip on how to write your guides.
c)Use new and original data
The online platforms get loaded with information, so you need to stand out from the crowd. Ensure your website features new and original data not found anywhere else. Publishers will not hesitate to link to your content if it’s new and captures their readers’ attention. If your statistics are part of your content, ensure they are unique and valuable.
Since online presence is critical for companies, there is a need to use tools that can analyze and improve Local SEO performance. Here are the best tools for local SEO performance.
Data tracking and analyzing is the best way to improve performance in a company. It also helps you know how consumers relate to your products and identify areas that need improvement.
Here are ways analytics can help you identify areas that need improvement.
Now that you know the importance of local SEO in your business, you should optimize your website for local SEO. Thankfully, we’ll look at the local SEO best practices to help you start.
Here are the tips for ongoing local SEO optimization
Local SEO is an excellent tool in digital marketing. It increases your online visibility and traffic and makes your business known locally. However, for this strategy to be successful, you need to optimize your business listing, build local citations, create local content, and build backlinks. Additionally, you need to track your local SEO performance and analyze improvement areas.
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