What is one way to improve local SEO results?
To help you improve local SEO results, we asked CEOs and SEO experts this question for their best recommendations. From supporting local charities to using localized landing pages, there are several insights that may help you improve your business’s local SEO results in the future.
Here are 13 ways to improve local SEO results:
- Support Local Charities
- Niching Down
- Become Mobile-friendly
- Claim and Customize Your Google My Business Profile
- Utilize Moz
- List Your Business on Yelp & Google Reviews
- Give Google Search Console a Try
- Focus on Radius
- Build Content Around Your Local Community
- Build Links from Local Sources
- Appear on Local Media
- Perform An Exhaustive Internal Linking Audit
- Use Localized Landing Pages for Each Locale
Support Local Charities
If you want to get your name, address, and phone number (NAP) out there to impress Google, working to improve your community is a great way to do it. Local schools, little leagues, religious groups, and nonprofits often have events, auctions, and other opportunities to sponsor a program. Whether you’re offering a discount, making a donation, or offering an in-kind service, you’ll be able to build backlinks and get your NAP published on their websites. And if you do it right, you might also impress potential customers by showing off what you do.
Elliott Brown, OnPay Payroll Services
Niching Down
Niching down is one of the best ways to improve local SEO results. Often for local businesses, it’s long-tail searches, but it also can be very specific locations. Often when people are thinking of local SEO they think of their state but depending on the competitiveness of the keywords but really approaching niching down to rank your site in cities and counties.
Gresham Harkless Jr., Blue 16 Media
Become Mobile-friendly
The best way to improve local SEO results is to be mobile-friendly. More than 70% of people looking for local searches use a mobile phone. So, you must learn the art and science of becoming a mobile-friendly business. Not only does it improve your market presence but also increases sales as around 30% of people, searching for a business via mobile, end up buying the goods/services within 24 hours.
Make your website or search-result page mobile-friendly and make it more navigation-friendly. It will certainly pay you well. Not only the text but also the pictures, videos, and other aspects should be mobile-friendly. Mobile optimization also increases the page speed making it possible to display it in search results quickly.
Caroline Lee, CocoSign
Claim and Customize Your Google My Business Profile
A straightforward way to improve local SEO results for your company’s website is to ensure that you are using Google My Business to its fullest potential. The first step is to ensure that your business has a Google My Business profile set up and verified. Once this step is complete, make sure all relevant information about your business, including logos, hours of operation, and contact information, is up to date. Once the necessary information is added, post regular updates on your profile and interact with your customers. Google My Business is a free and useful tool that can help customers learn more about your business, increase traffic to your site, and boost your local SEO efforts.
Ravi Rouvier, Markitors
Utilize Moz
Moz is a free SEO tool that provides users with 10 free website analyses, a keyword generator, a backlink builder, and more. There is the paid version that unlocks unlimited use, but as a small business, the free version works just as well. It is a great way to quickly improve local SEO without breaking the bank.
Daniel Tejada, Straight Up Growth
List Your Business on Yelp & Google Reviews
One way to improve local SEO results is to ensure that your business is listed on Yelp and Google Reviews. These directories are commonly used by customers when searching for businesses in their area, so it’s important to make sure your information is accurate and up to date.
You can also improve your local SEO results by creating location pages on your website that include keywords and phrases related to your business. For example, if you’re a pizza restaurant in Chicago, you could create a page on your website called “Chicago Pizza Restaurant.” This page could include descriptions of the pizzas you serve, photos of your restaurant, and customer reviews. By doing these things, you’ll help ensure that your business comes up as a top result.
Rick Elmore, Simply Noted
Give Google Search Console a Try
Start using Google Search Console to rank higher on Google. It is a free website that provides information such as data and click-through rates. This makes the monitoring much easier as well as solving troubleshooting. For the best use, you can search for the keyword that is doing better than the others and use those in your upcoming content. This will give your content a better reach and ultimately improves your SEO too.
Meera Watts, Siddhi Yoga International Pte. Ltd.
Focus on Radius
To improve local SEO results, try to precisely and laser target your audience by selecting an appropriate and actual radius of your business services. Be accurate and selective because your results will matter as per the areas you choose in your Google/Bing Maps listing. If you try to select a large radius, such as a whole state or county, you may saturate and disappear among thousands of other service providers.
Pireh Shaikh, Vinncorp
Build Content Around Your Local Community
One way to augment your local SEO is by creating content around your local community. Start with some blog posts on your website, where you report on what your business and other small businesses are doing to contribute to your community. Talk about local events and issues that people care about nearby. Then, reach out to local blogs and news outlets.
Position yourself as a local expert, and pitch stories about the same topics, referring to your content. If they express interest, ask them to include a link in their published articles. You’ll grow your local authority and this will translate into improved local SEO results.
Dennis Consorte, Snackable Solutions
Build Links from Local Sources
Link signals such as linking domain authority and quantity are among the top factors that influence your ranking in local searches and snack pack results. So just like with regular SEO, local SEO also requires link building to boost your link profile. However, the linking domains should be highly relevant to your target location.
That means you should target authority websites in your target region. This could be anything from licensing bureaus and trade associations to the Chamber of Commerce or even .edu sites.
Partnerships, scholarships, guest posting, etc. could be excellent ways to gain valuable backlinks from local sites. For example, link building for a holiday rental property in Loch Lomond, should have links from local attractions in Loch Lomond.
Nick Robb, Design Hero
Appear on Local Media
One way to improve local SEO is to boost your site’s backlink profile. An easy way to gain quality external links is to appear in local media. Pitch the editor of a popular media website in your area. It can be anything like sharing tips as a subject-matter expert in your niche or discussing the main challenges to starting a business in your city.
Oftentimes local media websites source the news from other media websites in the area. So your story can easily get amplified by several outlets.
Georgi Todorov, ThriveMyWay
Perform An Exhaustive Internal Linking Audit
Audit your site’s current internal linking situation. To do this, take a look at the pages that are ranking for local SEO results. Once you’ve audited your site’s internal linking structure, it’s time to make improvements where necessary. Some areas to focus on include those that have broken links, links that redirect users elsewhere, and links that weren’t set up properly in the first place.
By making sure your internal links are consistent and work well with local search engines, you can make sure that your content appears in a relevant context and helps users find other relevant content, which will help you boost your local SEO efforts.
Sam Speller, Kenko Matcha
Use Localized Landing Pages for Each Locale
If you have brick-and-mortar stores, you can tailor content around ‘keyword + locale’ by creating individual store pages for each location. From here, you can highlight keywords with the copy such as ‘best cakes in Leicester’ and link it to a relevant article, landing page or the homepage.
If you create topic clusters around all of your products/services and are careful not to duplicate anything, you could build up a ‘version’ of each core service that is specifically tailored to that location. Eg. taking your /bespoke-cakes/ page and creating a /bespoke-cakes-leicester/ page but detailing some of the businesses you’ve provided for, areas you deliver to, or some of the local suppliers you use.
Make it relevant to the area, link to it from your homepage/nav, and remember to link to it from any articles on your site that can offer you a suitable anchor tag eg. whenever you mention ‘cakes in leicester’ you can link it to your bespoke landing page instead of the homepage.
Nik Hudson, Rutland Cycling
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