Local SEO is a powerful tool especially if you’re running a small business and targeting your local customers. It helps to bring in more organic traffic to your business website and attract local buyers to your physical location. At times when local searches contribute to over 80% of the conversion happened, local businesses must focus on local business SEO for more leads and revenue.
Local SEO Strategies for Beginners
If you have just started your business and want to start with Local SEO, Here are some beginner tips that will do well and help secure your spot at the top of the SERPs:
Create Your Google My Business account:
This is the first step to local search optimization. Before start optimizing your website for the local audience, claim your Google My Business account. With a Google My Business Account, you can show up your business in Google local search results, Google Maps, and Google Search Knowledge Panel.
You have to fill in certain details to verify your business ownership with Google. The information includes details about your products and services, business location, hours of operation, and used payment methods, etc, Also, a high-quality logo and supportive product images should also be there to make your complement your brand.
Build Local Citations:
In addition to creating and claiming Google My Business listings, you should also prioritize building local citations. There are plenty of sites offering this opportunity such as Bing Places, Yext, Manta and more. To optimize your citation include your business name, address, and phone number (NAP), links to your website, and website description.
Get Positive Google reviews from local customers:
Positive customer reviews are crucial for a sustainable and long-lasting local search presence. Getting more positive reviews from your loyal and local customers can help you optimize your Google My Business listing. Positive reviews are strong social proof. It strongly motivates people to buy your products.
There are multiple ways to gain more positive reviews. Provide your customers a link to your review page so that they can visit and place their reviews. Request customers to review your local business and share their good and bad experiences. Asking people to review your business on your website, social media, and third-party review sites is also a great way to enhance brand trust.
Conduct Extensive keyword research for your local business:
Keyword research is an eminent part of any SEO campaign. Local SEO is no exception at all. With the help of extensive keyword research, you can discover keywords that your users and immediate customers are using to find your products and services.
There are several paid and free keyword research tools available that can help you find monthly search volume, cost per click, and competition for your targeted keywords. While doing so, the focus should be on long-tail, local keywords, and long-tail keywords.
Here Long-tail keywords can be your choice. These keywords more often have lower competition, so they are easy to rank. Such tools help to ascertain user intent too so that you can successfully build user-focused content for top rankings.
Build location-based content:
Once done with keyword research you can start building content aligned with your local audience. Local audience-focused content can help brands in many ways. It offers a way to target your local keywords and establish authority in your local area. Quality content can rank you at top of local search results as well, using niche local content you can engage and encourage local customers to purchase your products or services.
In case your business is available at multiple locations it’s important to create unique content exclusive to your local customers. High-quality content is very important for your local search rankings.
Optimize for voice search:
At times when voice searches contribute to nearly half of all online searches, mission voice search optimization can hit your business goals hard. Voice-optimized websites have an edge in terms of local leads and revenue as compared to their nearest competitions.
For optimizing your website for voice search you can do several things. As we have stated at the beginning of the doc, start focusing on long-tail, local keywords. You can also target to achieve Position Zero rankings that appear on top of organic listings.
Voice search algorithms are designed to pull information directly from Position Zero results and featured snippets. This is why it becomes important for brands to optimize content for position zero. This is how you can rank in more voice search results.
Create short content into 2-3 sentence paragraphs that directly answer searchers’ questions. A recommended strategy is to use bullet points in content and keep it short and crisp.
Grab High-Quality Backlinks:
By creating high-quality content for your local customers you can easily earn high authority backlinks from reputed online websites, directories, and forums. While checking for a website’s rankability for the given content, it looks for the number of authority backlinks pointing to your website.
To improve the authority and relevance of your content it’s important to expand your link portfolio. To do so keep adding links from other high-authority sources. Contact industry leaders and industry bloggers in your niche and request if they can link to and share your content further for better outreach.
Earning reputable backlinks will help your site appear higher in local search results, and it also increases awareness of your brand.
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.
