Word-of-mouth and local advertising are great ways to boost your business in your area. But searching online is just as powerful, if not more. In fact, reports indicate that 97% of search engine users search for local shops and services online. And 46% of all Google searches were looking for local information.

Therefore, if your business is not ranked in local search results, you may be missing valuable traffic and customers. In other words, local SEO can be the key to staying relevant and growing your business.

If you are new to local SEO, you may have a lot of questions and you may not know where to start optimizing. This guide will introduce you to some important local SEO solutions to help you better understand the situation. Let’s dive right away.

What is local SEO and why do I need it?

To understand the definition of local SEO, let us first define what local search means. Local Search is when someone looks for businesses, products, services, or other information in a specific location. They could be looking for a “make-up artist” in their city, or they could be looking for the “best painting service in any location” to find a painting service nearby.

In other words, local search is more specific to a certain location compared to general Google searches. And Local SEO refers to the process of trying to optimize your online visibility to show up in those local search results.

Local SEO is crucial because it helps you:

• Boost your online visibility
• Bring in more foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location
• Attract more targeted traffic, which improves your chances of conversion
• Enhance your credibility and build trust

Ways to boost your business’s local SEO strategy

Now let’s move on to the most important part – how to boost your local SEO strategy and improve your local search ranking. There are numerous aspects to this, so let’s focus on the most important ones:

1. Claim and Optimize your Google My Business (GMB) listing

Google My Business is the most important component of your local SEO strategy. Google’s tool allows you to create free business listings. According to Brightlocal, it’s one of the top factors Google will take into account when ranking businesses in organic local search and snack pack results.

To start, go to the Google My Business website to claim or create your listing.

You need to provide the following details for your GMB listing:

• Your full and correct business name
• Your physical store/office address
• Your exact location on a map
• Your business category
• Your phone number and website (if applicable)

Once your listing goes live, you’ll need to verify it usually through a phone call or via postcard. Here’s how to optimize Google My Business after verification:

• Upload photos of your business. This could be photos of the inside your store/office or even around the premises.
• Provide your business hours.
• Provide additional categories that may be relevant to your business.
• Provide additional phone numbers if available.

You can further optimize your GMB profile by sharing business updates and fresh content regularly. This helps you connect with your customers on a deeper level in addition to boosting your visibility in local searches.

2. Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Since a lot of people search for local businesses on the go, it’s critical that you provide a good mobile experience on your website.

Ever since Google rolled out mobile-first indexing, optimizing a website for the mobile experience has become more important than ever. 

Some basic ways to optimize for mobile are:

• Make sure your site is responsive to mobile screens
• Having your pages load quickly 
• Ensuring the mobile site is easy to navigate 
• Offering high-quality pictures and short descriptions of your business/service

As always, you should follow Google’s guidelines for creating a mobile-friendly website.

Checking Your Mobile Site Health with Site Audit

As a result, you must cater to these searches by optimizing your website for mobile screens. Create a mobile-friendly website so that mobile visitors can easily navigate it and find the information they require.

Don’t forget to add click-to-call buttons on your site and on your GMB listing. This could make a huge difference because 60% of mobile users have contacted a business directly from search results.

3. Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are also important in local search ranking. Having a large number of genuine reviews, particularly positive ones, can do wonders for your visibility in local search as well as your reputation. That means you should work on getting more genuine customer reviews for your company.

Maintain your focus on sites where Google would expect businesses to have reviews. So in addition to your website and your GMB listing, it’ll also collect reviews from consumer directories and social media. That means you should focus on collecting reviews for Facebook, Yelp, Thumbtack, Foursquare, Angie’s List, etc. depending on which ones are relevant to your business.

4. Add Local Content Ideas and Build Links

As a local website, you can still take the same steps as any other site to increase your visibility through SEO.

Begin by identifying topics around which you can create new content or optimize existing pages, and then seek to build backlinks to this new content.

Some link building strategies that could work for a local site include:

• Reaching out to the local websites that write local news, cover local businesses, and host local blogs.
• Offering your product or service to a local blogger/review site in exchange for a backlink to your site.
• Giving to your local community by sponsoring charities or local organizations which can lead to backlinks.
• Finding your competitor’s broken backlinks.
• Find unlinked mentions of your local business.
• Offering a scholarship program for your employees to build links from educational sites.

5. Ensure Citation Consistency

In local search results, Google considers citation signals such as citation volume and NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency. This means that your information should be available on major citation websites, such as Bing Maps, Yelp, and Facebook, in addition to GMB. Concentrate on directories with higher domain authority rather than smaller listing directories.

More importantly, ensure that your company’s NAP remains consistent across all platforms and websites. Look for misspellings, address and phone number discrepancies, and duplicate listings to improve your local SEO.

6. Make the most of social listening

Social listening has primarily served as a source of marketing insights, but it has many other advantages. If you know what insights to look for and how to use them, it could even help fuel your local SEO strategy.

Use social listening to learn what people in your target location are saying about your company or in general. You could even use it to gather data on audience interests, priorities, and so on. Then, use these insights to determine how you can change your strategy or even your products and services.

What is Social Listening

Social listening, also referred to as social media listening, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the internet. Conversations on the internet produce massive amounts of unstructured data.

For instance, you might have noticed people complaining about the lack of outdoor seating at your café. Maybe it’s time to introduce it to appeal to an even bigger audience. You can then optimize your GMB SEO by sharing updates about your new seating arrangement, for instance.

Or maybe you’ve noticed people wishing your hair salon also provided manicure services. You could expand your service offering and share this update on your GMB profile.

Additionally, your social listening efforts could also help you understand what types of local content your target audience might be looking for. You could then build a robust local content strategy to fit those needs. Plus, you might even be able to uncover long-tail keywords to use in your content optimization strategy.

Read More: Factors to Consider When Ranking on Google in 2022

Conclusion

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. So don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate results. However, if you follow the steps above, you should definitely start to see your local visibility improve over time. 

These are the fundamentals for taking your local SEO efforts to the next level. Remember that your local SEO efforts may reach multiple locations. If you’re targeting more than one area, you can even use these ideas in your SEO for multiple locations. So use them to boost your online visibility in local searches and grow your business.

Feel free to reach out to us at any time if you have any questions about using our tools in your local SEO journey.