What are the 5 Steps to Improve Local SEO? Strengthening your local SEO presence is no doubt important if you want to reach more potential customers in the area you serve.
In today’s digital age, getting foot traffic requires that you get in with the times or get left behind.
Boosting your local SEO efforts will no doubt allow you to connect with more customers. Below are the five steps you should take to improve your site’s local SEO strength.
What are the 5 Steps to Improve Local SEO?
1. Have a Consistent NAP on All Your Listings
To have a strong local SEO profile, your business info needs to be consistent across any sites where you’ve listed your business.
Aside from Google valuing information accuracy, it also benefits you because you’ll never know where a customer might find you. It might be Google, Facebook, or a niche directory so you want to be sure that any potential customers will see the correct business details.
For the uninitiated, NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. These three things need to be the same across all your listings.
In order to make sure everything’s consistent, you have to list down all the directories you registered your business on. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of all of the sites so you can easily go back should you need to update or change anything.
If any part of your NAP changes, go back to your spreadsheet to change every listing, so it’s consistent.
To check the current status of your NAP, you can use tools like Moz Local, Bright Local, and Geo Ranker.
2. Utilize Google My Business
Getting your business listed on Google My Business (GMB) is one of the most vital things you can do to boost your local search engine visibility.
Having your business listed on GMB can give your site an enormous increase on top of being discovered by people who found you on Google. But before that happens, you must claim your listing on Google My Business first.
Signing up for Google My Business gives you more control over how your business shows up locally. A claimed business listing on GMB will allow you to post photos, add a description, manage reviews, and so much more!
Below are other things that you can do with your profile once claimed.
Update Your Operating Hours
A claimed listing allows you to update your operating hours, especially on holidays when most businesses might be closed.
Add Photos
More than just being able to list your hours, you can also add images to your GMB profile. This way, you can upload pictures of your store or restaurant as well as your menu, food items, and other products if you’re selling one.
Manage and Respond to Reviews
You can also use your Google My Business listing to manage and respond to reviews. Don’t be afraid of bad reviews and respond to those as Google prefers that business listings interact with their customers.
Set Booking Appointments
If your business books appointments, you can use your Google My Business listing to set this up. All you have to do is add a booking button so that people can see that you’re accepting appointments and that they can do so through your GMB profile.
Post on Your GMB Listing
Claimed listings also allow you to post. This is a great way to introduce new items, share updates, and offers, as well as any other info that might be helpful to your prospects and customers.
3. Invite Customers to Review Your Business
Improving your local SEO also means encouraging reviews of your business. Having reviews on your listing is a great way to recruit potential customers.
Although some business owners feel that they should do away with reviews altogether, Google prefers those that have reviews. It shows them that the business is still active and values customer feedback. Moreover, businesses with no reviews can look suspicious to some.
When it comes to reviews, take the approach of responding when necessary and work to address any concerns that negative reviews might mention.
4. Target the Right Keywords
In local SEO, keywords still matter so you need to target the right keywords. Add it on key pages on your website as well as page titles, meta descriptions, and others. Your chosen keywords should be able to reflect where your business is located.
Even large companies do this by having individual landing pages for every store or branch they have across the country.
Take Walmart, for instance. We know that they have various locations across the country. What they did is build a landing page with each specific store’s data.
Moreover, they have created Google listings for all of their store locations as well. This combination allows users to find their nearest Walmart online wherever they are.
What we can deduce from here is that Walmart has built both its local presence in each city it’s located in as well as a national presence. This just shows us that huge companies are using these local SEO techniques because they’re already proven to work.
5. Be Locally Relevant
Another amazing way to beef up your local SEO profile is to get mentioned in your local press.
Blogs and news sites in your city are definitely great for SEO. You’ll be able to get more visitors from the resulting coverage and get relevant backlinks that will make your business credible in Google’s eyes.
To be featured on your local news press or blog circuit, reach out directly to your local news outlets with a pitch or press release about your business.
Increase your chances of being featured by analyzing what type of content your blogs and news sites publish. You can then use that information when reaching out to your area’s local outlets so you can position your business in such a way that they can feature you in a similar light.
Key Takeaway: Build Up Your Local SEO to Reap the Benefits
Local SEO has proven to be a cost-effective way to increase online visibility. If you want to make a massive difference in how your business attracts customers, it’s time to get on board. The steps above will allow you to harness the power of local search engines in order to bring more traffic to your business website.
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