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local seo
Sabine Wolf · September 12, 2019 ·
Local SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to local prospects and customers.
Local SEO is vital for a local small business to drive people to its e-commerce website and increase store foot traffic.
For Google and other search engines to collect information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.
Do you have Google My Place in good shape? What about your NAP’s? Do you know?
Let me help.
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone Number. The NAP listings are essential for businesses and local businesses wanting to rank favorably in the local organic search results because search engines like Google take the data into account when determining which companies to show for geo-targeted searches.
Digital marketing including local SEO services evolves rapidly impacts businesses all over the world. It doesn’t mean, however, that online marketing channels apply to international businesses only. They represent a great way to reach local customers and attract more consumers to your stores.
According to the report, almost half of all Google searches are looking for local information. It’s a clear sign that you need to invest in the best tools and techniques that can help you rank higher in location-related searches in Google and other engines.
In this article, we will explain the concept of local SEO and present you 10 hot digital marketing advances that impact local SEO and search. Let’s look!
What Is Local SEO?
Local SEO comprises several factors that help you address your local audience by better rankings in search engines. It’s a critical business strategy that can bring several awesome benefits to your organization, including:
Perhaps this sounds like a little bit too much, but local SEO is having a tremendous impact on physical stores and sales results. Many studies prove this point:
The figures are staggering and they reveal the influence local SEO might have on your business, but how can you make use of this strategy and give your company a brand new boost?
There are many things you can do to optimize content for local searches and we prepared the list of 10 suggestions for you.
Create a Google My Business Account
The first rule of local optimization is to create an account on Google My Business. Given the fact that over 90% of the entire traffic comes from search engines, it is essential to make your account on this platform and allow the largest engine.
Local SEO and Google go hand in hand. To display relevant information about your business. This includes features such as phone numbers, addresses, opening/closing hours, etc.
Begin by typing in the correct business name such as ABC or XYZ. After that, you must enter a business address which includes the country, city, street, and ZIP code. You can also tell customers whether you deliver goods or services within a certain distance. Other details you need to fill in include:
Google reports that businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions to their location, so work on this feature.
You can add a logo, a cover photo, or additional images highlighting the benefits of your business. What is important is to upload high-quality images with a resolution of at least 720×720 pixels and a JPG or PNG format.
Optimize Titles and Descriptions
What are the first things users see when they conduct online searches? The right answer is titles and webpage descriptions. Therefore, make these elements keyword-rich and straightforward to grab the attention of your audience instantly.
We recommend you to include the name of your city and the business you are dealing with. For example, an SEO-friendly title could be something like: “IKEA Kitchen Appliances – Phoenix, Arizona.”
If you need help figuring out the most relevant headline for your webpage with this nice SEO tool, we encourage you to try CoSchedule Headline Analyzer.
The platform shows you the so-called headline score, so you can determine the quality of each title. It highlights power words and emotional phrases that make the biggest influence on readers, but there is also the length, keyword, and sentiment analysis.
Create Quality ‘Near Me’ Type of Content
Do you know that over 80% of smartphone shoppers conduct ‘near me’ searches? This is a big signal which proves how important it is to create ‘near my’ type of content of the highest quality. Such a tactic will earn you more traffic and help you distinguish your business from the whole crowd of niche rivals.
But what does it mean to write a top-level local content? It means two things:
The only way to do it is by creating long-form posts focusing on local affairs, people, and events. Given the fact that 72% of consumers who perform a local search visit a store within five miles of their current location, it would pay off to invest more time into the creation of the ‘near me’ type of content.
Promote On Social Media
Although social networks don’t influence search ranking, they can help you boost the number of website visits. The idea is simple – you just need to create a few social media accounts and write thorough business descriptions.
Jake Gardner, a content creator at NSBroker, says Instagram bios or Facebook page descriptions can help followers to learn more about business: “They can include the same details as Google My Business accounts, so you can expect more people to discover your store this way.”
Of course, you don’t have to waste energy administering dozens of social media accounts. It’s enough to concentrate on two or three platforms that attract most of your audience. Here’s an overview of social media audiences:
Add a Listing to Business Directories
Business directory listing and NAP are critical to your local SEO efforts.
Another very useful tactic is to create listings on relevant business directories. There are hundreds of interesting sites to consider here, with some of the popular options being Yelp, CitySquares, and Merchant Circle.
You should, however, try to find directories that fit your niche. This also includes local business directories you might consider relevant for your company.
The main reason to do it is that you can increase website traffic. Consumers search for local stores on business directory websites, so it’s easy to grab their attention and enable potential customers to discover your company online.
Second, business directories represent backlinks leading to your site. If you know that Google and other engines highly appreciate backlinks as an SEO factor, it’s fair to say that business directory listings can maximize the discoverability of your site.
Besides that, directories help people to find physical stores and encourage consumers to leave online reviews, thus taking care of your online reputation.
Follow Online Reviews
The online reviews can boost your local SEO rankings.
Speaking of online reviews, don’t forget that customers’ testimonials can make or break your professional reputation even if you are running a physical store in a real-world environment. As much as 97% of consumers read online reviews when looking for a local business.
Therefore you need to follow customers’ online comments using some of the best digital reputation management tools like Podium or Review Trackers. Such tools allow you to monitor and analyze dozens of online review websites using one platform only.
With digital reputation management software at your disposal, you can grow the number of user reviews quickly and boost positive comments. It will be easier for you to identify new comments, reply to users’ messages, and improve customer loyalty in the long run.
Take Advantage of Snippets with Local SEO
Featured snippets are valuable to search engine elements that allow you to display relevant information about your business in comprehensive forms. Snippets can include details such as addresses, URLs, product images, and many more.
Keep in mind that snippets come in three different formats because it will help you create content according to the expectations of the local customers. The three types of featured snippets are these:
If you are using WordPress to power a website, then we recommend you to try Schema. It’s an easy-to-control plugin that you can install quickly and use to create eye-catching snippets. In doing so, you should be able to drive user engagement and convince potential customers to visit your site.
Prepare for Voice Search and Local SEO
The number of people who use voice commands to look for local businesses is exploding.
Studies even reveal that 50% of all online searches will be voice-based by 2020. In such circumstances, prepare for a voice search avalanche by creating content which answers business-related information.
If your content can answer the most common questions (remember 5W+H: who, what, where, when, why, and how), you won’t have a problem attracting new visitors to your website.
However, keep in mind that you need to be straightforward and use a conversational style of writing because it matches users’ voice search habits.
You should find and use as many keywords, synonyms, and search phrases as possible, but avoid highly eloquent terms and expressions because it’s not the way average persons speak.
Optimize for Mobile Experience
Most users now browse the web through smartphone devices, so you need to take it into account and optimize a website for the mobile experience. Mobile-first indexing means Google uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.
If you want your local business to be visible in local engine searches, then you should rely on a responsive template that makes your site look good on many devices – mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. Local SEO is a must!
Speed It Up Google Likes Fast Sites
The last SEO tactic on our list is rather technical but extremely important. Website visitors hate waiting for a site to launch, which means you must improve page load speed.
It’s easy to do it with Pingdom, a page speed tester and optimizer which identifies loading issues and helps you to solve them.
This platform lets you know how long it takes to open any given page on your website, while its thorough analytics helps you to figure out the shortcomings that slow down the site. Here’s what you get to learn:
Wrap-up on Local SEO
Are you running a local business with one or more brick and mortar stores? If yes, you have to invest a lot of time and resources and help potential customers to find out about your company.
In this post, we showed you 10 hot digital marketing tactics that strongly impact local SEO and search. There are SEO tools for local SEO like MOZ Local, Whitespark, and BrightLocal to name a few.
We’re listening about local SEO.
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General FAQ’s about Local SEO
Local SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to local prospects and customers. For Google and other search engines to collect information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.
How much does local SEO service cost?
Pricing for local SEO services starts at $499 per month and includes Google My Business signals, Backlinks, On-Page SEO (including NAP), Citations, Reviews, and more.
What factors improve my local SEO ranking?
Although the ranking factors are always a moving target, the main ones are pretty steady. The top 5 are Google My Business signals, Backlinks, On-Page SEO (including NAP), Citations, and Reviews. We can help you with all of this. We can’t guarantee rankings, no one can, but this should put you on the map…literally.
What is a Local SEO citation?
What are local SEO citations? A citation is an online reference to your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP). Like links to your website, Google uses them when evaluating the online authority of your business to help boost your ranking.
What is NAP stand for?
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone Number.NAP is essential for businesses and local businesses wanting to rank favorably in the local organic search results because search engines like Google take the data into account when determining which companies to show for geo-targeted searches.
Local SEO Marketing Company: How to Digitally Grow Your Small Business with a Local SEO Marketing Company
Ashley Andersson · April 5, 2018 ·
Your local SEO marketing company can help you build a great SEO strategy.
Partnering with a local SEO marketing company that offers local SEO servicescan help any small business to drive more high-quality web traffic.
If you’re like most small businesses, your success depends on attracting local customers, whether they’re in your town, country, region, or even state. We will discuss helpful steps you can take to attract more local customers to your website and improve your business’ local SEO.
You can learn how to leverage your business’s marketing strategy to make it easier for customers to find your business online. A localized approach to SEO is a perfect get your business before the eyes of your next and current customers.
If you do not have the time or confused by schema markup language or site structure and link architecture, look for good local SEO services from a digital marketing agency. How can a local SEO marketing company help? The truth is they don’t have to be in the neighborhood to help.
What is Local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy that businesses of all sizes can use to appear in potential customers’ searches.
Local SEO helps searchers find businesses near them, making them more applicable for brick and mortar locations than e-commerce sites.
The biggest difference between local SEO and organic SEO is the searcher’s intent. Google does a great job providing the searcher with information based on what he or she is looking for, we all know that.
But for your small business, it’s important to remember how good Google is at finding local results for searchers. Moz thinks of local SEO as the intersection of organic search, Google Maps, and third-party local directories.
You need a combination of all three to appear in your customers’ searches. It may sound complicated, but local SEO is not as hard as you may think. We will discuss simple ways to get your website found by searchers in your area.
What is local SEO marketing?
Local SEO Marketing (Local Search Engine Optimization), sometimes referred to as local search engine marketing, is an incredibly effective way to market your local business online, as it helps companies to promote their products and services to local customers at the exact time they’re looking for them online.
Check out the screen capture below. It shows the result of this article. If you want to be found in “[enter your business’s services] near me” searches, implement some of these tips!
URL Indexing With Google and Bing
If you want search engines to find your website to display to your potential customers, the search engines’ bots need to find it.
Your local SEO strategy needs to have a clean URL structure for better SEO indexing.
So, be proactive. One way to do that is to index your URL in Google or Bing’s database. Indexing an entire site means that the search engine scans your site and decides what type of content it contains. You can submit your site for indexing.
Depending on your website platform – it can take under 10 minutes to have everything submitted! After you submit your information, it typically takes 24-48 hours for Google to process it. Google provides all the information you need to index your site and a link to index your site right here.
The easier it is for search engines to crawl your site, the more likely your business will rank in potential customers’ searches.
You can do the same thing for Bing. Here’s a link to submit your URL, and here’s a link for indexing your site with Bing. Indexing your URL is the first step to getting your business recognized by local customers (after you have created your website).
Google My Business for Your Local SEO Strategy
You are very familiar with Google My Business from a customer perspective. If you have ever searched for a “coffee shop near me” or for the hours of your favorite Vietnamese restaurant, the below images may ring a bell.
Google My Business helps your business stand out from all the other search results on Google and improves your ranking on Google searches.
You can add or claim your business in a few easy steps to reap the benefits of Google My Business.
First, create a Google My Business account, and your business’s information will populate in Google so potential customers can see your address, phone number, name, and hours all without having to even visit your website.
Local Search Engines (aka Influence Engines)
Google My Business is great for people who use Google to search for things, but there other online search engines where you should register your business.
Registering your business in other search engines helps your Google ranking because it enables more people to find your site. Examples of business listings include:
Creating business profiles on social networking sites like Facebook, Yelp!, TripAdvisor or Foursquare can also help boost your local SEO efforts.
In fact, Yelp and Facebook are local consumers’ most trusted review sites, according to a 2014 survey by BrightLocal. Many of these local search options are free, but others may charge you to update or add your business information.
Ratings and Reviews
People love ratings. A rating tells customers about the quality of services and products a business has to offer. 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
Reviews and local SEO citations with help with your local SEO strategy.
Consumers read an average of 7 reviews before trusting a business. Getting reviews can be difficult as many people just won’t take the time out of their busy day to file a review without being asked. But, by making it easier for your customers to find a place to leave reviews, you’ll be on your way to ranking higher!
Your Local SEO Marketing Company and Copywriting
Keywords are both the art and science of a good local SEO strategy. The Art: Every word you use to describe your business or service should be chosen. Your local SEO marketing company will have the tools but may lack the context of those words. So be careful.
Use tools for local SEO, like Google tool suite, Ubersuggest, and Moz.
Just like every brushstroke in Monet’s Water Lilies. Google is your canvas, choose your words wisely. Ready for the science?
It can be as simple as writing your location before or after your business or service. For example, the “Denver Digital Marketing Agency” leads to Matrix Marketing Group on Google. Use keywords to get recognized locally.
How do you beat out thousands, often millions, of search results when your customer asks Google a simple question?
Optimized keywords in well-written, quality content (also known as Content Marketing). If you have received the same question from your customers over and over, write a blog about it.
Most likely, they are not the only ones with that question. Providing potential customers with answers to their questions gives you a good reputation and builds credibility with your target audience.
How you get your writing to show up on the first page of Google is the hard part. Read on to learn more in the next section!
Use Keywords in Content for Your Local SEO Marketing Company
Your Local SEO Marketing Company will research the head and long-tail keywords so that you get found. Be sure to share your thought on your keyword your projects use in Google search.
If you write content, it is important to understand that, in order for the content to be effective, it needs to be targeting something specific.
At the very beginning of anything you write, you’ll have an H1 Title tag. This is the title of your piece and it should include your most important keyword. If you were trying to rank for the keyword “skiing,” you’d want to put the word “skiing” in the title.
Now, you might think it’s a good idea to sprinkle in the word ‘skiing’ as much as possible throughout your post, but your goal is to use the word strategically.
Don’t try to over-optimize your site for keywords. I call this “keyword stuffing” and may cause you to get penalized by Google and other search engines.
Search engines rely on keywords to generate the best content for their users, so they don’t want you to game the system.
So, when you cram the same keyword throughout your article an unnatural amount of times, top search engines may suspect your site of cheating and could make it impossible for you to achieve top rankings. So rules of thumb:
Just write to your customer. Quality content gets recognized, not spammy blog posts with the keyword mentioned every other word.
Create an Interconnected Site and Your Local SEO Marketing Company
A local SEO marketing firm can help develop the right link structure.
Just like the quality of beams holding a house together makes for a better living situation, link architecture matters for better SEO. Make your website interconnected so search engines have an easier time finding it and customers have an easier time using it.
Most websites have a navigation bar that typically allows people to go from any page on the site to the homepage, blog, contact, or maybe pricing web page, which is great to help users find what they need.
Taking this a step farther, every blog post or every page should have a link to another relevant page.
This will create a series of interconnected links that will improve SEO because it provides a clear path for your readers and for search engine crawlers (which crawl and index your site to help Google determine your value).
Backlinks as a Local Business Marketing Strategy
The best way to increase your search ranking is to garner backlinks. Backlinks are when other websites link your website in their own content.
Other sites directing users to your website is a huge SEO win. But, be careful about what you read. Some SEO experts will tell you that the more backlinks you have, the better. Not true! It’s the quality of your backlinks, not the quantity that matters.
It creates a backlink anytime you or someone else puts a URL on the web that links back to your site. For example, your profile on an influence engine or social media sites like Twitter or Facebook gives you a backlink.
Press releases that you submit to the media and to PR websites give you a backlink. When trying to boost your local SEO, try to get your website’s URL out there as much as possible to high-quality local directories.
Submitting your site to search engines and building backlinks are just two basic methods you can use to get your site onto the search engine results pages. Here’s a great tool you can use to see how many backlinks you or a competitor has and the overall quality of those backlinks.
Your Local SEO Marketing Company and SEO Reports
Small business owners are busy, but that is no excuse for not knowing what the website is doing. It’s important to digest the monthly reports for a couple of reasons:
Use Google Analytics to monitor, and remember, you cannot improve what you do not measure.
Embed a Video on Your Homepage
Post a video on your website. One thing Google ranks the highest is video content. The video need not be your own, it has to be one that makes sense for your industry.
Think about what the video will do for your visitors. One of the best types of videos you could post is something that is informative and will not lead visitors to seek a competitor.
Posting a URL to a video will not be as successful as embedding a video on the site. Embedding the video almost guarantees that the visitor will stay on your site instead of navigating away to a host site like YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
Optimize for Voice Search
Your Local SEO Marketing Company should understand search SEO and how to tune your webpages for it.
“Siri, where is the best pizza in New York City?” “Alexa, what time does Starbucks open?” “Okay Google, take me to Elizabeth’s Bagels” What ‘voice search’ mean for your business?
You need a for solid local SEO strategy to optimize for voice search, Siri and Alexa are waiting.
It means you need to rank for longtail, conversational keywords. Your keyword strategy must mimic what people ask when they are searching for your business, whether they are asking their friend or a digital personal assistant like Alexa.
Pay attention to the way people interact with your customer service department or in your store and keep notes to craft content around those questions.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages are a great way to create content around your customers’ questions. If one person has that question, others are likely to ask the same thing. Make sure your answers are succinct so search engines can find it.
You can Outrank the Competition!
Search engines are asking a lot to get you to rank higher, but even by doing simple one-time fixes you’ll be in a much better position than others are unaware of the benefits of SEO.
Your local SEO strategy can put you to the top of Google search.
Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all programmed to balance authority with relevance.
What this means for you is that if you’re doing a good job targeting the right people with the right information you can rank higher than multimillion-dollar companies by being the best fit for the searcher.
For example, Petco is one of the largest pet supply store chain in the United States.
They have 1,400 locations worldwide and were recently sold for over four billion dollars, but they rank lower than a locally-owned Colorado pet supply chain called Pet Food Warehouse for the search “Denver, Colorado pet store.” Always remember, you can do it!
Wrap Up on Local SEO Marketing Company
Be consistent across all channels. This means using the same name, address, and phone number on every site you have an online presence tying back to your business.
Try to post things relevant to your audience and when online make use of the 80/20 Rule. This means 20% of what you post can be self-promotion but 80% of the time the content you post benefits your customers or visitors.
This will help build trust with your target audience and will help prove to Google you are a high-quality website. Measure! Little wins. You cannot improve what you do not measure.
Are you not getting the results you had hoped for with your SEO firm? Let the experts at this digital SEO marketing company help you with marketing through SEO. Our team knows just what it takes to build and maintain a flourishing website that drives high-quality leads. For more information, check out our SEO marketing services or contact us to schedule a free consultation to discuss your needs and our services.
Do you have any tips or best practices for local SEO strategy? Leave us a comment! Thanks for reading.
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General FAQ’s
Local search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy that is hand-crafted for local businesses looking to increase their visibility in search engines, reach more customers, and of course — earn revenue. Similar to traditional SEO, local SEO services focus on boosting your business listings in online search results.
What is a local SEO strategy?
What is Local SEO? Local SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to local prospects and customers. To gather information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.
How can local SEO help?
7 Ways to Optimize Your Website for Local SEO1. Optimize Your Homepage.2. Optimize Your Metadata.3. Create a Page for Every Product, Service, and Location. 4. Use Local Business, Organization, Product & Service Schema. 5. Claim Your Google My Business Page. 6. Update NAP Citations on Your Website. 7. Add Your Business To Local Directories.
Why is local SEO important?
Local SEO provides potential customers with the information that they want when they want it. Even if your business does not have a website, local SEO helps your business stand out in local searches and helps drive more traffic through online leads.
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