It’s more crucial than ever for a business to rank well on SERP. For brick-and-mortar businesses, it’s essential. Businesses looking for local and nearby buyers should tap the potential of local SEO. Pandemic hit the business operations globally. To gain new customers and grow sales further, businesses need to optimize their local presence.
Local SEO Strategies For Your Online Business
Local search optimization is a time-consuming process and should be applied with a strategy. The article covers some proven local SEO tips to improve your local search presence.
Create Profiles on Local Search Directories
Creating your presence on local search directories is the first step to local search optimization. Moz, Yext, RIO, and Yelp are some local search platforms available where you can create your business profile and list your business.
For listing you have to fill in details like name, address, and phone number (NAP) across hundreds of local search engines and directories. Before submitting the details, ensure accuracy and consistency of the information provided.
Utilize Structured Data
Like standard search, structured data is helpful in local search too. It helps Google to better understand the content further improving clicks, impressions, and conversions. It’s therefore necessary to apply structured data types like local business, postal address, and reviews to help scale performance.
Optimize My Google Business
If you haven’t yet claimed and optimized your My Business profile, you’re losing an awesome opportunity. This is the finest way to get your products and services visible to your potential customers in the neighborhood. While optimizing for Google my Business provides photos, menu items, descriptions, and service lines accurately.
Furthermore, take time to update Q&A within your GMB business profile. Stay your customers updated about canceled events and ticket refunds, the volume of calls/emails expected delays and changes to procedures for appointments, etc.
Audit Your Listings
Take enough time to audit your local listings. It will help in finding and fixing obsolete information. During the audit, take care of the following:
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- Suggested changes to operating status
- Suggested changes to operating hours
- Suggested changes to attributes
- Suggested changes to business details
- Suggested changes to enable/disable listings
Use Hyper-Local Content
Optimized content plays a significant role in local SEO. Brands that manage to provide a positive content experience across devices get more satisfied and contented customers. Your focus should be on providing unique, exceptional, and quality content designed for location-specific customers. Add hyper-local terms to enhance your on-page optimization strategy. The keyword should be there in headings, titles, metadata, image alt text, and text.
Connect With Customers
Customers always want personalized attention. Thus, you must be there when they need you the most. You won’t be available there round the clock, thus download the Google Me Business app and turn on messaging feature. It will be the best way to get in touch with your customers in your absence. Turn on the messaging feature to let your customers contact you after business hours. Create an automated welcome greeting to let customers know your business status.
Optimize Your Listing for Voice Search
As more searches are now made through mobile phones, people tend to make voice searches that are mostly in the form of questions. Therefore, brands need to optimize their local listings for voice searches. Websites optimized for voice search can successfully answer to common questions about the products and/or services a user asks.
To find the frequently asked questions about your products and services you can use third-party tools and Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) feature and SEMrush. In addition to it your website should also be optimized for mobile devices with high-quality images, user-friendly content, and fast loading web pages.
Local Landing Pages
Optimizing for local search doesn’t undermine the significance of local landing pages. They add value to your website and enhance the user experience. Create local landing pages that are mobile, responsive, load quickly, built with the latest schema code base, and include a call-to-action button. Effective landing pages help you improve website conversions.
Fortunately, major local platforms do offer optimized landing page templates that can be used to create a custom landing page as per the needs. It requires no coding experience or additional resources. Some platforms, even allow to host these landing pages for you.
Focus on Link Acquisition
Acquiring quality backlinks from authority sources is essential for local search optimization. Sourcing links from authority websites and blogs with good content and brand value can help you build trust and credibility for your brand. Focus on getting links from similar local listings and blogs, too. It can also help in boosting your brand visibility.
Gain Positive Reviews
Two things matter the most for local search rankings and local map pack. They are positive user reviews and good user experience. People scan through these reviews before buying any product or service. Both are equally important for the brand. Good reviews encourage brands to scale the quality of service further, whereas bad links indicate that brands need to improve their services as per expectations.
Respond to both negative and positive reviews to show that you care. Ignoring or not responding to bad reviews may backfire in the long run. Take time to respond to these reviews. It builds up more trust and generates more business.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.