11 Steps to Improve Your Local SEO
You are shopping with a friend on Sunday morning and the clock hits 1. All of sudden, you feel the urge to have lunch. But you do not know where to go for lunch. What will you do? I was in this situation, I would have typed restaurants near me on Google. Of course, there are different other ways to find restaurants but let’s focus on this popular method of finding local businesses. There are many cases when people have to find a local business that provides products or services in a particular area.
Local SEO is a branch of SEO (search engine optimization) that helps businesses appear in front of their potential buyers through search engine results page (SERP). What are the most effective methods to improve your local SEO? This article discusses 11 steps to improving their search engine appearance for local keyword. Continue reading if you are a business and you want to grow your business.
11 Steps to Improve Your Local SEO
Here are 11 tips to improve your local SEO according to Mainstreetroi.com:
- Create & Verify Your Google My Business Profile
Your journey to optimizing your website for local search phrases starts from creating and optimizing your business’ Google My Business (GMB) account. It is a great tool from Google that can help you. Doing so is quite simple and you just need 20 minutes to finish this task.
- Check For & Remove Any Duplicate Google Profiles
Businesses do SEO off and on and they often make multiple profiles on Facebook, Google, or another platform. This is not a good thing for the reputation of your business. Once you make an account of your business, you need to keep a track record to refer to in the future.
- Add Categories, Description, Hours, Products/Services, Photos
After setting up your GMB account, you need to fill all fields such as the space for categories, description, hours, products/services, and photos. You can add your products or services to let people know about your products or services. Your office’s or outlet’s pictures give your audience a personalized experience.
- Ask For Google Reviews
You should encourage your customers to review your Google listing. Make sure you only ask this to your happy customers. If someone posts bad reviews, reach out to that person and try to convince that person in changing the bad review to good review.
- Publish Regular Posts to Your Google My Business Profile
Only a small number of businesses know this feature that a business can add updates to its GMB account. The updates can be anything from discount offers to change of address to the new service offering. You can even post educational material to grab the attention of your potential buyers.
- Make Sure Your NAP Information Is Consistent
You may change your business address or contact details or even your business name. You should also update your name or address, or phone number on your own website and other websites where you have mentioned your name, address, and phone number.
- Build More Citations
Citations refer to mentions of your websites NAP (Name, Address, and Phone) on reputed business listing sites or business directories or any website. This particular type of mention boosts your local SEO. Countless websites allow you to add citations.
- Add Relevant Keyword-Based Content On Your Website
Content is king and you should create top-quality content to beat your competition. Before you start creating content, make sure you have a robust content strategy in place that will guide your writers. The appropriate usage of keywords in content is important.
- Get High-Quality and Relevant Links
The importance of backlinks is well established and you can raise your search engine rankings by getting high-quality backlinks from different websites. Do not link to websites that have a high spam score.
- Get Active On Social Media
Social media popularity does not directly affect search engine rankings of a business. However, there can be some indirect benefits such as increased traffic and trust due to a strong social media presence.
- Optimize Your Website For Mobile
Approximately 60% of total search engine queries come from a mobile device. According to HubSpot, more than 61% of people that search through a mobile device are likely to contact a local business.
