Search engines are designed to give the most relevant results. If you want to get higher positions in search engine rankings, then having a strong local SEO strategy is crucial. Local SEO is the implementation of strategies that are meant to attract search engines to websites related to physical locations.
The implementation of local SEO strategies will help your website rank higher in local searches. The benefit can be significant, so it is important for everyone to learn about local SEO.
Every entrepreneur suffers from the ups and downs of the business world. In fact, it could be said that local SEO is a bit of a roller coaster ride. Sometimes you’re up, spending hours on your computer analyzing traffic, working on press releases, or writing blogs.
Then sometimes you’re down, trying to figure out how to get out of this slump. Either way, if you’re running a business locally, you know that helping the local community with the products and services they need is an important part of offering them your expertise.
Despite being in a competitive space, following tried and tested tips from local SEO experts will lend you the star spot on Google 3 pack.
Let’s get into it!
Top Ways To Improve Your Local SEO
Create a Google My Business Account
If you don’t already have a Google My Business account, you should create one right now. It’s simple to create and update your business information and this is crucial for local SEO.
Having a Google My Business account will help people find and connect with you on Google and other search engines outside of your local area.
Google My Business is one of the most powerful free tools in your arsenal when it comes to local marketing. It’s smart, it’s easy to use, and most importantly, it provides information that can help you better serve your customers.
Although this is not an exhaustive guide, taking the time to set up a business page on Google My Business will substantially improve your chances of appearing in local search results.
Google My Business is a free and highly valuable service that combines all of Google’s local search efforts under one umbrella.
Start by logging into Google Analytics and looking at your top-performing pages. Most of these should be obvious to you, but if not, these are the pages that receive the most traffic from your website, also known as referrer traffic. As a personal trainer, my most popular visitor-created content is going to be related to strength training workouts.
Regular feedback or Reviews from happy customers
Local search is perhaps the strongest aspect of local SEO. Simple tweaks to get regular feedback or Reviews from happy customers To improve your local SEO can boost your Google My Business rankings in seconds.
Whether these great results occur through short-term roadblocks, or over the long haul, only time will tell.
With the increasing competition among SEO service providers, ranking number 1 on Google has become a very difficult task and there are hardly any guarantees of success.
Are you frequently asked about your experience with a firm or agency? You aren’t alone. I ask my clients about their recommended providers all the time, and they are happy to share their opinions.
This is something you should start following if you haven’t already started yet.
Optimize for Voice Search
Is your business optimized for voice search? Even if it’s not, you can use these strategies to optimize for it. Voice search may not be something you think you should care about today if you’re just getting your business off the ground and don’t have a large online presence, but that could hurt your future potential.
It could mean the difference between someone looking for a local business and not finding yours, or finding it and coming in to shop.
Some of the biggest names online are already making changes to their websites to make them speakable, but there are also things you can do now to make sure your voice is search-friendly from the get-go.
We are now in the emerging world of voice search. For instance, roughly 10 percent of local queries are voice-based.
The future looks exciting with the latest innovation of smart speakers by Google, Apple, and Amazon. If you are wondering if your business can benefit from it, here’s what you should know about optimizing for voice search.
Voice searches are becoming more and more popular as Google responds to the needs of consumers. This is a huge shift from pure text-based searches as it opens up a whole new world of organic possibilities for your website.
Write Content Based on Local News Reports or Events
Most businesses want to rank high in Google and the best way to do this is through Local SEO. But to rank well in local search, you need to write content that people search for which is related to your business, and one good way of doing this is through news reports and local events.
For example, if you run a coffee shop, then you could write content about different new coffee shops which have opened up in the area.
So if a new coffee shop has opened up, you can write a blog post about which other coffee shops are close by, or maybe list the top five local coffee shops, etc.
Content-based on local events is always high in demand. However, people would rather read the words of their own, often with strict word limits to boot.
This means that producing high-quality content is important, but can also help you strengthen your SEO strategy in an ever-changing algorithm.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile and Other Devices
Every day more and more patrons are browsing the web from their cellphone or tablet. This means if you have a website, you need to optimize it for mobile device usage.
Getting setup can be tricky, especially if you’ve never done so before. So I am going to show you exactly how you can easily configure your WordPress blog for local SEO purposes.
Search engine optimization is an ever-changing landscape. New techniques are invented or become outdated each day. With the emergence of mobile devices, for example, it is necessary to make sure you are optimizing your website to suit smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.