Local SEO campaigns are very different from a typical SEO campaign and at times difficult to grasp due to the ever-changing local search results. This blog is going to discuss some important techniques that will help your business get great results from local SEO campaigns.
Google My Business
If not already, it would be useful to set up your Google My Business page. Google My Business is a way to allow business owners to have more control over what information from their company is shown when someone searches their business name in a search engine. It is easy to set up and once complete, these pointers will be important for making your page successful:
- A long description that’s unique to your company
- Have many photos of your business to attract attention
- Add your contact details such as phone number, address, opening times
- Get reviews from your customers
Contact details
It is extremely important to remain consistent with your contact details and that you have your business’ full name, address and phone number (NAP) on every page of your website. There are websites and tools that allow you to check if all your NAPs are consitent over different webistes. It is also necessary to have the same contact details on all other websites such as local citations.
Local reviews
It’s important to spend time on gaining local reviews as they impact your local search rankings directly. Google should be your priority however it is worth trying to get local reviews on other pages such as Yelp. It’s worth reaching out to your existing or previous customers to see if they would leave you a review and perhaps you could incentivise them by offering a discount. Another way to make local reviews easy for your customers is to create a page on your website dedicated to instructions on how to leave a review.
Local on-page SEO factors
On-page SEO is important for local business as it helps put you in a good position in the local search listings. A good way to do this would be to add your City/Region and a relevant keyword to parts of your landing page such as the URL, title tag, content, image ALT attributes etc.
Local link building and citations
Local SEO is different from standard SEO as local SEO relies heavily on links from local websites that have something to do with your company. It’s important to focus on getting links from local websites that have clear relevance to your business. Local directories are a good way to do this as they include citations which is an online reference to your company’s NAP. However, it is necessary that all your citations are consistent and that the NAPs are kept the same. There are several websites that allow you to do this such as Bright Local.
Local link building strategies
There are many ways to build your links, these are a few effective ways to do so:
· Provide a discount to local organisations for your company in exchange for them to mention you on their website with a link
· Regularly look at your competitor’s websites and learn from the opportunities that your competitors have benefited from on.
· Set up interviews with applicable online publications to gain links.
· Sign up to ‘press request services’ for the chance to get quoted in a local publication.
