In a world where every business aims to maintain a competitive advantage and wants to be a cut above the rest, it’s vital to maintain a fool proof local SEO strategy. Going up against organisations that have auto-generated local listings or businesses that have been an experienced player of the local SEO game for years will be difficult to outdo.
Now it’s crucial to note that the nature of SEO is ever evolving. So, it’s best if you think of effective and actionable ways to improve your local SEO and secure higher rankings.
When done appropriately, local SEO allows you to generate more high-quality leads and conversions. Additionally, it can also assist you in competing with more established brands and staying relevant in this competition. Leaf through the following insights to learn more.
1. Google’s the way to go
To get started, you need to make your presence felt on Google My Business. This allows your business to show up on Google Maps. In fact, your business will appear in the local search results on all devices. And if Google authenticates your business as reliable, it could also surface in the valuable sidebar space of a Google search.
To optimize your Google My Business, ensure that you:
- Authenticate your listing
- Present accurate and up-to-date information
- Add the logo of your business, the product or service you sell, hours of operation, acceptable payment methods, and host of images.
2. Create relevant content based on local news or stories
There’s no better alternative than presenting content that speaks or connects directly to a local issue. It can definitely attract your local consumers’ attention.
The following are some techniques that you can adopt.
- Write blog posts around local activities, events or news stories
- Creating videos about causes that your business advocates
- Set up location-specific web pages on your website with high-quality local content if you cater to different parts of a region.
Let’s say you’re a local business that offers strategic assignment help to students. You can create different pages dedicated to the locations you serve, where you can feature hyper-local content. This strategy could also allow you to improve your rank for each specific location.
3. Your website has to be mobile-optimized
According to statista, nearly half of the world’s population (48.71%) have accessed websites through mobile phones, as of the first quarter of 2019.
Hence, it can be safely said that a considerable amount of your traffic accesses your website from their cell phones or tablets. This means your site needs to be fast loading and mobile-friendly.
In July 2018, Google announced that page speed on mobile devices would become a ranking factor. To check the speed of your page, Google recommends these tools;
4. Optimize for voice search
Voice search is anticipated to experience exponential growth. Hence, in terms of local SEO, it’s vital to consider how people ask questions when they speak into devices.
Essentially, consumers tend to use more long-tail keywords when carrying out voice searches compared with a regular online search. This will require you to adjust the SEO to a more conversational tone of someone speaking. For example, when typing on a search engine, you might write ‘Best Restaurant Near me’. But when placing a query on voice search, we would pose a question ‘Which is the best restaurant near me’. This is why, you’ll want to include questions that start from who, what, when, where, why and how.
5. Include location pages to your site
Search engines always crawl your site and present the most comparable matches to offer as a result in the SERPs. By adding a particular landing page for each of your business locations, search engines can easily detect your listing and present the proper location when someone searches for it.
In this case, you need to decide if you want to add more specific details like street, avenue, road, etc., how the details are presented on these pages will determine, how you’ll be updating your information everywhere else. Hence, you must consider it when writing your location information.
6. Focus on link building
As per a MOZ study conducted on local search ranking factors, link signals are said to be the most important factors for local pack results and for localized organic results. Link signals are backlinks pointing to your website.
While it’s essential to get links to improve your local SEO, but the quality of the links is important as well.
Here are some ideas on getting high-quality backlinks.
- Present high-quality content on your site, so others are willing to link to your content.
- Post guest blogs on other sites with a high domain authority
- Interact with local influencers on social media or by email and ask them to link back to you
7. Ask your satisfied consumers to write reviews
Asking your consumers to write encouraging reviews for your business doesn’t just improve your Google My Business presence, but it also allows more local consumers to buy from you.
The following are some tips to ask for reviews from your consumers.
- Feel free to ask for a review after closing a sale.
- Send a post-purchase text or email asking consumers to write a review (but only after you’ve screened them through an internal process to ensure you’re not approaching dissatisfied consumers)
- Make sure to reply to the existing reviews in a professional way, thanking reviewers and acknowledging the complaints in not-so-favorable reviews.
Parting thoughts,
Considering the ever-evolving nature of SEO practices, it’s crucial to keep tabs on it so that you develop fail-safe SEO strategies in 2019-2020. In this case, these ideas mentioned in the post will help your business thrive and prosper.
Author Bio: William Shell a Writer and Enthusiastic blogger. He is also associated with a reputed company for the past couple of years. He has produced many webinars and holds an immense knowledge of SEO practices. He is also offers law assignment help to students.
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